Perfect Pitch and relative Pitch

[Le-ackt]

Hello , as most of you might know , not many people are Perfect Pitch , the Natural Born one . But I wonder is there any people who doesnt born with Perfect Pitch but it graduately develop since they play that much and they aleady very fimiliar with the Pitches .
as I know , There is people who doesnt have the ability like those Natural Born Perfect Pitch has, but obtain the same ability but just different , they can identify Pitches by replying their relatively pitch ability , kinda like if I can see letter C , i automaticly know D is after that.
so I wonder what is You guy's Development of your Hearing Actualization ability is , (specially you are not a Natural Born Perfect pitch ). Please share some Ideas and Experience for Developing a Powering Hearing .
Hearing is always a major part of playing , the invisible part of Musical Playing .

[xenia]

Hey !
What is Pitch ? Explain to me,please(I don't know english so good).

[Le-ackt]

The ability to hear the sound and able to know what Key it is , without any help by instrument .

[princess]

i hope this link works:

https://saxontheweb.myforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=795

[Le-ackt]

I want to trade my soul for perfect pitch .
I want to trade my house for perfect pitch
I want to trade my guitar for Perfect pitch
I want to trade my violin for Perfect pitch
I want to trade my Piano for Perfect pitch
......... then I already started developing ........
so , no quick way , need to use ear more and it will come naturally .

[ludwig]

  I believe that perfect pitch is a very good musical tool if we're lucky enough to have it, but relative pitch is more important and a more useful skill. Relative pitch can be trained through aural practices, listening activities and hard work. There are several sol-fa and solfege systems that guides musicians to intepretate musical meanings through pitch systems. Developing a good aural reponse to music is crucial and thus a relative pitch ability should be encouraged.

 Good aural skills includes the ability to distinguish between "notes" and "intervals," relative pitch will aid in

-sight reading
-musicianship skills
-intepretating and appreciating different tonal and scale systems from different countries, cultures, and periods. eg.renaissance tuning etc...

I'm curious to know how many people on the board have perfect pitch or ability in identifying relative pitch, and do you think that it IS important to develop this skill?

[willcowskitz]

How does one test his pitch?

[rachfan]

I happen to have perfect pitch, but as suggested in this thread it is not really essential to the pianist.  Relative pitch is the more practical ability.   Testing perfect pitch is simple if a piano is in tune at A440.  If the pianist stands with his/her back to the piano and if someone stikes random single notes in different octaves, the person with perfect pitch ought to be able to call out the notes without any error.  

P.S.  One thing I don't recommend as a test is correcting the piano tuner if you want to maintain a harmonious relationship!

[MzrtMusic]

Your post script was most interesting... This really doesn't relate to the topic, but I was just wondering if you had ever tried to correct a piano tuner, and it so, what happened... I'm sure things like that are hiilarious!

Love,

Sarah

[Le-ackt]

Dude , that's the basic level of Perfect pitch
If you get down to the business , Perfect Pitch is actually refering to the Very Sophisticated Hearing perception . Is not only Absolute Pitch hearing ( perfect ) , but also relative perfect hearing . And the extension of that would actually very essential to Composer . If you have only a pen and paper , without any instrument , you have to write an orchestra , complex counterpoint and doing with many texture of sounds . YOU CANT NOT HAVE PERFECT PITCH or RELATIVE PITCH WELL enough to make you do that .

if you are a sight read only person , i dont think you have to concern about that . But you get to a more accomplishing level , you will start understanding the importance of reading notes in sound .

One thing , Even a perfect pitch person , has weakpoints . One has an ability to identify pitch , not necessary mean he is able to identify interval , or simplily say , a perfect pitch person could not identify pitches in a relatively way , mean a perfect pitch could be relative pitch blinded .

but If you want to train your ear , Here is some experience I have how to use your ear more in a intelligent way .

First , Start fomr your favorite Melody , your fimiliar tune . Which you know the key for sure .
Second , Recall keys Melody from memory often , Try not to Alter the key in any circumstances , this sound easiler than it said, but is hard .
Thrid , Extend it to a larger scale , pick an easy song
with the keys that you already comfortable to recall with .And try to do dictation , from your mind or even do it on paper , this process take months or maybe even years .
Hearing is not a test , it doesnt have a score , the more you concious about the texture from what you hear . The better your hearing would be . even You thought you have perfect pitch , It doesnt necessary mean he/she has a better hearing than you are . There is 2 area indeed , the relative pitch and perfect pitch
The most sophisticated hearing power actually could identify relation between root note to any notes like , 2th , 3rd ,4th , 5th , 6th 7th , regardless minor or major .
even able to indentify what octave , Middle C = C5
and Chord Progression , and tonal tructure analysis .
Perfect pitch and relative pitch are indeed a part very essential to musician , if you think you are just a Performing Artist , no need to be aware of this ability, You are wrong , and proved to me you are still a beginner of Music .

[ludwig]

  Le-ackt, how can you not tell what interval is been played if you have note recognisation ability? Say if I played a C and then a F# on the piano, I'd immediately work out how many intervals or semitones in between. To my knowledge, perfect pitch means exactly that, if I can recognise what notes are played. However, perfect pitch can be worked on, that is another issue about musicianship skills. This means that by using perfect pitch we can "audiate" what we are trying to write and hear it in our heads before we compose, such as complex counterpoints, strettos, textures, harmonic movements etc... This is audiating, by perfect or relative pitch. But yeah, as I have agreed before, that developing a good sense of hearing could lead to fast and effective musicianship and musical analysis.

[willcowskitz]

Le-Ackt, no offence or anything but try not to use Capital Letters in Irrational Places, it makes reading more difficult and unfocused.  

[rachfan]

Hi Sarah,

I was just joking about correcting the piano tuner.  But...  I have to confess that when I was a teenager, I thought nothing of doing that on occasion.  That tuner was really good natured and patiently indulged me and my suggestions.  The one before him was super uptight, and  I think I gave him a nervous breakdown, as he abruptly retired.  

Also, I usually have tuners make the top half-a-dozen notes in the uppermost octave slightly sharp to add brilliance there.  A few have gritted their teeth complying with that request.  Oh, a story about this.  One excellent tuner was sligtly deaf and couldn't hear the uppermost three notes or so, no matter how long he pounded on them.  Being more kindly in my mature years, I'd thank him profusely, then take out my own tuning hammer after he left and fix those notes myself.

For the last several years, I've had an excellent tuner.  His sense of tempering the scale is a bit different from mine, but his other expertise, in regualtion, for example, makes up for that.  Anyway, I was sitting and reading a book while he was doing the most recent tuning.  He was struggling with one high note seemingly forever, which I instantly recognized.  So finally I got up, went in, and said, "Um, that string has a false beat in it.  It's impossible to tune precisely."  He was most relieved, knowing that I too knew.  So once in a while, those interventions can be helpful.

You have to have a tuner with a personality that meshes with yours so that you can be collaborative partners in maintaining your piano.

[e60m5]

I'm also similarly lucky enough to have perfect pitch.

On another note, though, many people think that having perfect pitch is helpful for a piano tuner.

However, in my studies (I'm an apprentice to my piano tuner) I've found that perfect pitch is kind of a hindrance in tuning pianos... lol... and I must say I didn't expect that when I first embarked upon my apprenticeship.

It's a neat trick to have - although hardly necessary to succeed as a musician.

[SteveK]

I'm not alone! I was born with perfect pitch as well! I can hear chords with up to five notes and name all of the notes. My dad likes to get tones out of glasses, horns from a car, and ask me, "What note is this?" and I usually tell him it's this note or that note or combination of notes. My piano tuner knows that I have it & he always asks me to see if I'm comfortable with how the piano sounds. He also attends most of my concerts.
In fact, I'm going to see him Saturday because I just broke a bass string.

[10Fingers]

Hello everyone,

well, my pitch is very well comparing to some of my friend's. But whether you can exactly say what note you've heard, you always need practise, don't you?
I don't know the exact definition of a perfect pitch. Those of you who have one, how did you noticed you have that quality?

regards.

[ted]

I do not have absolute pitch but I have become quite good at knowing what figurations, chord types and positions are being played. That is to say I can pick how a certain group of notes relate to one another in a chord or sequence; I just don't know their exact position (key). I was forced to develop this when I wanted to recall improvisations I had recorded. The mind and ear must have means of their own because at the start I had to wear out the tape to get it right but after a while I became much quicker. If you don't use it you lose it though.

[amy]

hey.. i have perfect pitch.. it's great..
so when im guessing intervals.. im not guessing.. i know which 2 notes are being played..and then i can figure it out... its sometimes a tad off when its being played on a different piano...that's either tuned..untuned.. or simply a different quality of sound..
but 98% of the time.. my pitch is perfecT

[amp]

Correct my if I'm wrong, I thought perfect pitch is also the abilty to sing, i.e., a G on command. Also, I have a friend who studies choral conducting, she has perfect pitch and to her it is a problem. Not with her singing, but with her listening. She has a hard time enjoying a choral or voice concert if the chorus sings out of tune. And as good as a chorus is, if they sing unaccompanied they will lose pitch eventually. Because of her perfect pitch she is extra sensative to it. It's interesting. What about some of the others on the board? Any experiences like this?

[willcowskitz]

When I'm playing the piano, I make a lot of errors. I still hear the music right because I'm too concentrated on the piece itself rather than what the piano is actually saying LOL. When I hear others play, though, I can tell when they're making errors, but with my own playing its a bit too difficult. Well I guess I'm just a newbie still anyway. I tried my friend's violin and I found D# by ear because I remember how it sounds cause one piece has it continuously. If I think of a note, say C# that comes up continuously in another piece, I can sing it, but if somebody presses that key on piano and asks me which one is it, I go all confused for some reason. My sister I suppose has a good ear though, she tells me how annoying it is to listen to someone who sings wrong, and she is pretty musical. I myself am more technically oriented without real musicality, my teacher says she doesn't understand how I can do all that fancy stuff at the piano "already" and learning by my own. To me it only seems I'm more of a mathematician than a musician, and personally I'm frustrated by this, for I love emotions, not numbers.

[amee]

If somebody presses a key on the piano and asks me what it is, I can usually name it correctly.  But I'm horrible with intervals!  And also naming how many voices/parts in a recording.  Is there any remedies for this?

[amee]

Perfect pitch is a great help but not absolutely essential.  If I recall correctly, neither Schumann nor Wagner had it.

[teacher]

I'm a piano teacher and have perfect pitch.   It's useful if I want to play something I heard on a radio or recording by ear.

However,  not all my students have perfect pitch, so I find the best way for me to teach students how to identify intervals is to have them sing them.

**If a person can sing it, they can hear it.  

That helps a great deal when students go for ear training tests and have to play back a melody or identify intervals.

[Chiyo]

Wow, we have LOTS of perfect pitches here!
I'm also natural born perfect pitch

I don't have problems with intervals; I think I also gained the knowledge of chord progressions during my childhood.
One other advantage would be the ability to transpose any music without thinking.
Or, I find it very easy to memorize piano pieces - as I can sing them, then I can play them....

Btw - I've had similar experience told by amp.
My schools acapella (sp?) group always drops their pitch; then I become sensitive that it's kinda annoying,,,,,

[Jo]

I know people who have perfect pitch and have had awful troubles learning instruments because when they play a note that's "not in tune" it creates an awful vibration through their body. I'm sure it's not the case with all, but I know of at least one who had to give up the violin for this reason.

Although I'm a piano teacher, I have studied classical singing and those with perfect pitch can feel the exact spot where the sound hits the palate for certain notes. I'm pretty sure this is how they do it.

Alas, I only have relative pitch.

[Le-ackt]

I date myself doing the hardest thing of music :
change one's own percpetion

[princess]

just wondering.......is perfect pitch genetically inherited? i read an article in the newspaper near the end of april and it said it was, only the article didn't back it up, it just went on explaining what perfect pitch was....my boyfriend says it has nothing to do w/ genetics and that there's a part in the brain that hears/analyzes the tones differently than others who don't have perfect pitch....just wondering if that's correct or not.

[Chiyo]

I don't think it is inherited.
My parents doesn't have one and my father is a bad singer too.

But I do think it has to do with something with early music education. My mom played piano when she was pregnant, and I got to to play around Piano since I was born. Then I started learning piano around 4-5 y/o, and later I knew I have a perfect pitch.

BTW, I'm Korean, and most of my family/friends who learned piano more than 2 years have partial perfect pitch.  And here in the US, I'm the only one in the school who has one :-/. Piano education is so common there that many people start learning when they're 1st grade. So that's why I concluded it's on early education.

[amee]

I don't think its inherited either.  I agree with Chiyo; an early music education probably  has something to do with it.

[ericnolte]

Hello all,

  Paul Hindemith wrote in his book, _Elementary Training for Musicians_, that perfect pitch was merely a matter of memory.  In his teaching, he repeatedly found that anyone could acquire perfect pitch, if only they would pay attention in the right way.  

  Now, I found this idea electrifying, since I, at twenty-something years old, knew that I had never possessed anything like perfect pitch, and attributed to the possibility of winning such a marvellous power, the  combination of all the mystique of the Holy Grail and the imagined joy of winning the perfect love of my life!  Thus, at Hindemith's recommendation, I started carrying around a tuning fork, and listening to it many times a day.  Fifty times a day: BING!  There's an A 440!  And, lo and behold, I can now produce an A, anytime, anyplace, with great, but alas, not absolute reliability.  I'm sometimes off a little bit, especially if I haven't tested myself in a few weeks.  Naturally, now that I have some formal ear training, I can use my remembered A to find any other tone from my knowledge of interval recognition.  

  Perhaps there are others here who have experience of David Burge's course on perfect pitch?  I bought the course some time ago, and found some value in it.  He would seem to marshal some academic research that validates his claim that one can acquire perfect pitch with appropriate training.  I swear that my accuracy has improved in what I must confess to be my half-hearted efforts at following his course.  Having called my efforts half-hearted, I should add that I find his tapes hard to use because he goes on endlessly in flabby, self-indulgent banter.  He could have presented the essential material in a quarter of the time he takes!  But the course is certainly not a waste of time.

  The essence of Burge's argument is this: each tone arouses a different sensation in our experience  This is very much like our perception of color, and for the same reason: that we are endowed by our nature with a sensory apparatus that can grasp these different wavelengths of physics, in the spectrums of both sound and color.  This formulation makes sense to me,  but it's something else again to try to put a name to our experience of all these different tones, in all their different octaves or registers, and in all their different timbres, as they arrive at our ears produced by so many different instruments.  I think the problem of tone perception is vastly harder than color perception!  

  This difference in the complexity of perceiving sound and light is also compounded by the normal childhood experience of parents and teachers who always pointed out colors to us, but almost never drew our attention to the different tones.  Imagine growing up in a world where nobody ever drew your attention to red, blue, and yellow.  You would arrive in adulthood with an ability, a physical apparatus, to discriminate different colors, but with no vocabulary to name these differences.  If nobody ever told you that something is "yellow," how on earth would you ever begin to discuss that sensation with someone else?  It is not the whole story to say, with the Medievals, that "nomen est numen" (that "to name is to know"), but how on earth can you say you truly know something if you can't even begin to say what it is?  

  Well, I think that there is an epistemelogical dimension to why most of us are can't name the tones we hear.  In other words, there is a branch of knowledge that deals with how we know something to be true or false, or real or unreal, and here, with respect to this matter of how we know one tone to be an A and another to be an F-sharp, I suspect that we are like people who are "blind" to colors in the same way as the example I just gave above.  When we were children, nobody ever drew our attention to the aspects of reality that give rise to the idea of middle C, or A or E-flat, and now our musical imagination, our inner ear is almost a vestigial organ, entirely untested by any requirement to put a name to these particular sensations.

  Does anybody else have an experience like the following story?  Some time ago, I sat down at a friend's house and started to play the B minor Scherzo of Chopin, and found myself totally collapsing in a complete mental meltdown.  I had to stop playing.  I was in a state of total confusion, and it had nothing to do with a memory lapse.  I knew exactly where I was in the piece, knew precisely where I was trying to go, but something was horribly wrong!  It was like the colors of the world were slightly off, as if somebody had flipped a switch that caused the reds to be substituted for greens.   What was going on?

   My friend explained that she'd gotten a great price on this old piano of hers, but there was just a little problem....  The the tuning block had some little challenges... and so the piano tuner had been forced to tune the instrument... a whole tone flat!  The piece I was playing zipped along so fast that I had learned to play it only by virtue of having slowly acquired it in habit patterns, propelled by a certain inertia of muscle memory, and I couldn't really think about what I was doing in the light of the awful, wrenching confusion of a piano so far off correct pitch.

  So here I am, without absolute pitch, the ability to name the tones I hear, but endowed absolutely with the ability to remember music in the actual key in which in is written.  What's going on here?

  Is this clear?  Does anybody else go through this?  As I say, I don't have absolute pitch, and yet I remember pieces of music, and hear them playing themselves out in my inner ear, as if listening to a recording, in the right key.  I can think of a piece I know well, hear it in my mind, go to the piano, and test that memory at the keyboard, and, more often than not, find that my memory is in synch with the actual key in which the piece was written.  I can produce an A on command.  I can find the pitch of any sound by comparing my remembered A with with the sound in question, but I can't stand with my back to the piano, and tell you with any confidence, and without deliberation, what any given tone is.  Does this happen to anybody else in this way?

  My fantasy is that I will eventually arrive at a point where I can listen to anything, either out there in the world, or to the stream of music that runs constantly through the inner ear of my musical imagination, and be able to hear it with such clarity that I can see the tones unfolding before me on a page of manuscript paper.  I would then be able to write down this stream of music as it passes by.  This is why I want to acquire truly perfect pitch!

  Is there anyone here who knows of David Burge's work?  Used it yourself?  Or Hindemith's argument?  

  Is there anyone here who has acquired perfect pitch as the mindful and conscious act of discovery of an adult (or teenager), as opposed to the mere recognition of a faculty you realized you had, like the day in early childhood you realized you knew the difference between red, blue, and yellow, with no possibility of confusing the different tones?

  How about anybody here who has the experience of someone like Alicia de la Rocha, who says had unfailing perfect pitch in her youth, and then found it untrustworthy in her later years?  (I've read in a book on music and the brain, that the inner ear's cochlea shrinks a bit as we age, and this has the unfortunate effect of distorting our perception of sound, in much the same way that a fun-house mirror distorts the waves of light reaching our eyes.

  Sorry for the long, chatty post.  Enough for now.

Best regards,
Eric Nolte

[ThEmUsIcMaNBJ]

Before I got so into the classical and techinical aspect of the piano I was completely obsessed with perfect pitch.  One of my closest friends had an amazing ear an ear you don't find just every day.  At my highschool there are mostly korean people (even though it's in southern california).  As Chiyo said quite a lot of korean people learn the piano young.  I'm white just to get it out of the way    but anyways I would say probably about 50 kids or so have perfect pitch at my school (no joke).  I read somewhere that 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch and are born with it, in my school that statistic is certainly WAY off base.

Anyways back to this close friend of mine.  I've seen quite a few people obviously with perfect pitch and since I was so obsessed with it I would constantly test them.  And found there were different levels or the skill.  This close friend of mine could hear and identify anywhere from 10-15 very dissonantnotes  played at the same time and identify 90% of them without fail.  Obviously with less notes she would never or very very rarely make a mistake.  She totally blew me away.  With this uncanny ability she is able to literally play anything off the radio or anything besides very techincally demanding classical pieces without mistakes.  I know there are a lot of people that can do such things but among the people in my school with perfect pitch she is one of a kind with her ear.  While the other absolute pitch possesors could identify 1 note at a time without thinking or 2 or 3 it was nothing compared to the 10 that she could do.  

Anyways I just had to wine a bit about her it still bugs me even know she graduated...  haha

But I've read article after article on perfect pitch spent hours, weeks, months researching obssessing over it trying to memorize tones etc. etc...  Then I did actually come across David Lucas Burge's eartraining course.  Sadly I found a teacher at about the same time and got into classical a lot more and now I don't have such an obsession over absolute pitch.  Although I did finish the first half of his course...  I did find my ear became leaps and bounds better.  Amazing what it did for me...  But nothing even close to the absolute pitch I wanted.  To tell you the truth...  Without using any kind of interval recognition I can successfully identify any white keys played on piano at proablly a 95% success rate...  But what does this do for me?  I can identify one tone play at one time if it's going by in music there would be no way and trying to bring it out of my head doesn't work either...  But I'm pretty confident if I finished the course that it would fill this gaping hole in my ear.  But alas it is the most ridiculously boring thing to do!  I hate the excercises!  If I didn't have the amazing piano teacher I had now and wasn't so obsessed with the classical side of the piano I most likely would have finished it but right now I just don't have the motivation anymore.

Some things I read...  One was that everyone is born with perfect pitch which helps babies with speach...  However because we don't use it we don't need it anymore we lose it.  That's why people trained in music at a young age still use it and learn to give names to these pitches.  Some things in Burge's course kind of hold this to be true but some things are against it as well.

Anyways thats just my very shallow ramblings if anyone cares!  

[julibug]

I teach piano, but I also work part time at a recording studio.  The owner and the engineer both have perfect pitch.  Sometimes I have to figure out what key a song is in for someone.  If it's up to me, I go grab a small keyboard that we keep laying around, and I can figure out the key quite easily.  But if one of those guys is around, they can tell you immediately what key the song is in, without use of a pitch pipe or keyboard.  Or you can simply say, please sing this song for me in the key of "G", and they will do it perfectly.  I had taken lessons myself for about 3 years before I developed enough ear to begin to pick songs out on my own.  After 9 years of lessons, I developed a much better ear, but I still don't have "perfect pitch".  It really amazes me when I'm around those who do.

[NetherMagic]

hey just have a question about those tuning forks, wut's A 440?  is that a sorta way to measure the pitch of an A?  This sounds pretty neat, maybe I should get one of these to train myself too =]

[amee]

I think 440 is the number of times the string vibrates to produce that note.

[NetherMagic]

ooic so is it possible to get C 440 or would there need to be more/less vibrations to get C?

[amee]

No - it would be a different amount of vibrations to get the note C.  440 is the exact number you need to get middle A.

[NetherMagic]

aaah aight
so if i wanna practice, should I get just one tuning fork or should I get like 8 tuning forks from one C to the next octave?  

[ericnolte]

For what it's worth (coming from somebody who does not have perfect pitch, but who can now, after much work, produce an A on command, and thereby find any other note by reference to this remembered standard)... I say get one tuning fork, an A-440, and use this many times a day until you can remember it in your sleep.  That's how I came to be able to remember an A.

Best,
Eric Nolte

[Hmoll]

440 means four hundred and forty cycles per second - or 440 Hertz.
The frequency of A above middle C happens to be 440. Other pitches have other frequencies.
To develop your ear you should learn to be able to sing and name all the intervals above and below a note. Then think about getting a tuning fork, and drilling A 440 into your head.