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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- Some people can identify a pitch without even looking at sheet music. Is it something they're born with or can it be learned?
Hosted by: Hank Green
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I started playing piano at 4 years old..
I’m 14 now- where’s my perfect pitch 🤣🤣
well you probably weren't trained how the notes sounded
u suck git good
I started practicing piano at 8, and I somehow got perfect pitch
@@Kettvnen lol i figured out i can identify the note names by ear but thats about it- maybe chords but piano key mashing and too many notes at once- nope can't tell the note
@@lawsne0nx-dg4mingletspl4y2 k:) based on the pieces i play i think im really good :))
it is so depressing to watch this when you are 22 years old. I will never be 6 again goddamn
mert gökgöz ha you don't have to be six just play instruments a lot tbh I started playing guitar at 12 sax and trumpet at 13 I'm 16 rn and idk if I have perfect pitch but I always guess notes right
Luis Uribe İ will practice violin this summer. I hope ı can make it. thanks for the encouragement :)
mert gökgöz even if you can't learn perfect pitch, you can get pretty damn close. You might need to use a tone generator for context, but that's about it. Pretty sure certain colleges have classes in "perfect pitch" but again, you may need context.
Perfect pitch is impossible, but you can at least learn relative pitch which is still very helpful if you're a musician.
I'm a piano performance major and I didn't start playing piano until I was 16, and I'm 20 now. I don't have perfect pitch, and I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't help me at all if I did.
That wasn't a half step at the end lol
no, it was a full step
It was an A to a B, which is a full step. B-C, E-F are half steps
Not So Much b-flat
ah man I wanted to get it first
About to comment this too 😂
That was a whole step...
quevainaquevaina But to be honest, the art department is the one to blame and not Hank. Nevertheless, still a mistake
was looking for this..
yea it was. ah he had so much potential to make a good pun but it didn't happen haha
Could you explain ? Looks like a half step to me :/
CH I A to B is a whole step
A to B is a full step. had you done B to C, your graphic would work.
Or had it been alto clef
that too
tomatoflight yeah but there was a treble clef on the staff, also thanks for acknowledging alto clef
A person who doesn't know anything about notes: What?... I don't get it
The animation at 2:23 is wrong because they moved the note where there's a full step, not a half. If you look at a piano you can see that there's a black key between A and B. Between B and C however there's no black key.
I learned to identify absolute pitches in high school after seeing my music teacher do it. He said he learned it, and I could too. So I did. It basically came down to just memorizing each pitch by associating it with a song I knew or an open note on an instrument I was familiar with. With enough practice, I got faster at it.
Yeah that’s relative pitch. I have like sort of a mix between untrained perfect pitch and relative pitch
@@jaadenmillen7958 no, relative pitch is the way, you can identify a notr by another note. Like you got a C, and you can identify a G, by just hearing the interval between these notes
@@sunburnedasian2979 isn’t that basically the same thing tho? Like if you match one to a song and then you can find other ones based on that or am I confused?
@@jaadenmillen7958 no the perfect pitch is like seeing a color. Like we can directly say its red without even thinking, It’s like sb plays an accord, and I can hear all notes without even trying. Relative pitch is nit like that
Since absolute pitch is perfect pitch, are you stating that you learned perfect pitch in high school?
It kinda bothers me that you showed the note going up a whole step when you said half step. Getting your puns right is like the most important thing!
i would have liked but the comment was at 69 likes.
indianjit singh it's at 74 no you can like it
ehhh its at 96 now. I count that as good enough.
I guess you could say that that was an accidental.
It should have been in the key of F.
I've heard many horror stories about perfect pitch. Someone I've heard of was a choral student and she has rough times singing in ensembles sometimes because occasionally the rest of the ensemble will start out in a slightly different key and it is very difficult for her to match that key while still reading different notes on the staff
Yep, it's why I dislike listening to live music. Almost anyone you ask that has perfect pitch will tell you it's both a blessing and a curse, 'tis the way of the world!
tstthomason There's a kid in my choir who has this problem
Yeah it sucks i have perfect pitch and people don't believe me when they are singing on the wrong key or are out out of tune
josh swavely That's why it's better to play piano. Perfect pitch is no problem in the case.
I do play piano and violin but its other ppl who are the problem
Channel talks about the most difficult math equations in history... don't know where is a half step in a music pentagram. 2:22 Love your channel :)
"music pentagram"
*on the staff
though pentagram does sound way cooler
WessRocket do people actually call it a music pentagram? That's awesome where did you learn that?
in spanish, we name it 'pentagrama musical' or just 'pentagrama'
I have perfect pitch; my choirmaster discovered it when I was about 7. When I went to music college, I met about a half dozen classmates who also had perfect pitch, and we would test each other by having two people play four notes on the piano simultaneously with our backs turned. I am now 72 and can still hear any piece and know what key it is being played in.
Honestly, relative pitch tends to be more useful than perfect pitch. Especially if you are dealing with a different tuning system from 12tet. I'm not saying perfect pitch is useless, but you shouldn't feel bad if you don't have it.
Generally speaking, those with perfect pitch tend to also have strong relative pitch. If one can identify an F# from out of the blue, that person can likely also identify the F#'s relationship with any other note.
Daen Yes, but if you have perfect pitch, trying to do ear training in something like 19 tone would be more difficult.
That's definitely true, though fortunately that kind of music is very uncommon in the western world. I think a way to think about it would be like knowing that green is green and blue is blue, but what is it called when it's between green and blue? Some might call it teal, others cyan, it really depends on the culture and background.
Daen I wouldn't say the fact that that kind of music isn't common is fortunate. That's like saying "fortunately, we only have salt and pepper to season our food with."
thestupidfreakingcow yeah see that what I have, if you tell me a song stars on a b flat, I can play the rest but i have to go through a whole chromatic scale to find the first note
There's also something amongst singers called pitch memory. This is an ability to hear a note or a song and several hours, days or weeks later be able to start singing that same song in the right key. From my experience as someone who does have pitch memory I think this comes largely from knowing where the song ought to sit in your voice and thus being able to sing it from memory knowing how the notes should physically resonate in your throat or chest.
Oh, it’s me!
I can sing along literally on the *exact* notes and pitches, accounting for minor throat fluctuations, and how hydrated I am, of so many songs.
I can also match the exact progression in a higher or lower register from the source material.
I learned this by listening to Florence and the Machine, and my sibling telling me that they could see I was singing loud, but couldn’t hear/distinguish my voice from hers.
I have ... limited pitch. I can easily recognize and reproduce a C note, but not really the other ones without comparing them with the C.
gigaherz that's called relative pitch which is what most of us have
Relative pitch is only being able to name pitches when GIVEN a reference note. Producing your own reference note is definitely a level between. I can do that too, but mine's a D.
So what's it called where you can hear a note, know the general area of what octave it's in, and in a few key presses be able to match the note properly even if you heard it a while ago. I don't have perfect pitch but I don't need a reference note to match heard notes to piano notes. Or am I just confused by what you mean since I'm kind of looking at this as a singer?
Same here boiii
Pretty sure that's normal. You don't know what the note is called, but you can hear it in your head-and most people are able to sing songs they know in the correct key.
Wait a minute... A natural to B natural? That's a whole step. Do you even music?
Part of me just wants to say it's because he's a guitarist. But Hank is a damn good musician so I can't really make too much fun of him.
I music... :)
Idk if I music
Started piano lessons at 6 and Mandarin was my first language. I basically have the opposite of perfect pitch :(
what's the opposite?
chilled tone deaf
Michael Wang same
Lol no one’s really tone deaf. If you can speak a tonal language like Chinese, you can definitely tell the pitch, otherwise ma1 (mom) and ma3 (horse) would sound the same to you😂
It's also nice to know that it's easy to manipulate. If you play a piece for someone with "perfect pitch" and it goes down a quarter step during the piece, their hearing is fucked for the rest of the day.
my aural perception teacher always does that. he would give us a reference note and then play a chord and we'd have to say what it is, but he always plays a different note to the perfect-hearers, so they'd be confused.
I'm suprised that they didn't mention the Valporate study where in they found that drug induced perfect pitch learning is possible in adults. Perhaps they didn't want to encourage the use of this dangerous anticonvulsant drug.
IndigoXYZ18 Weed?
Quin Skew Valproate...
IndigoXYZ18
Not just that, but also electricity. There was a guy who got struck by lightning who became a world class pianists in just a few years. The theory is that the electrical shock "loosened" the neural connections and were able to change shortly after the shock. They, however, do not recommend shocking yourself to become a master pianist.
Wade Schipprack Oh that's right! I forgot all about him!
Wade Schipprack Wow what a shocker
I don't have perfect pitch, but since I have three guitars, one tuned in E, another one in D and another one C, and I play all of them frequently, I can easily tell if a guitar is tuned in the E, D or C.
that is relative pitch, your can train it as adult
I use known keys of songs to mentally identify notes.
Eg, Cat Scratch Fever is easy to "mentalize" and I know it is in A
GuitarZombie I do exactly that using a nirvana song. drain you is a. smells like...f
in bloom n flat...etc. every note I can do
I have no pitch. When I hear a note, I can immediately recognize that it is indeed a note, and I can also sing songs with notes.
I have perfect pitch but I didn't have much musical training as a child, I sang in choir and learned recorder like most of the other children in school. I also think there is a genetic component, as my father has perfect pitch too but has even less musical training. I knew I had perfect pitch before I even learned music theory, I could think of a song and automatically sing it in the correct key. It didn't take very long to associate that skill with specific pitches once I started considering music as a career and learned how to read it.
Montenor yeah, I've known kids who picked up the violin in third grade, learned the names of the notes and could immediately pick them out from thin air
i thought you were going to teach us how to sell lol
A to B is a whole step... T_T
That "half step" at the end was a whole step from A to B
i can recall songs from memory in perfect pitch, so i have to root notes from a couple of songs programmed into my mind. so when i hear a note, i image the song and weigh the note i hear against the not i'm imagining. never fails me.
I've had perfect pitch my whole life. My choir teacher in 9th grade was shocked.
Lucky 😔
Whenever I hear the pitch of other sorts of music I always recall music that's also on that exact pitch, would that also be considered perfect pitch?
Hello, SciShow! I have a humble request for a video on the topic of cerebral aneurysms! I experienced a rupture when I 19 and the suddenness and severity of them would make for a good informative video for the public! Thank you!
Thanks for your perseverance! I would also like to see them do an episode on that.
My band instructor in my senior year in high school was spot on with this. He told me to play any complex chord on a piano. I played something like an F#dim7 and he nailed it. He was young at 24 at the time. I am now 27 and still need reference. Fuckin insane now that I think about it.
everytime i look for knowledge, this man shows up
I definitely don't have perfect pitch but I've been told I have pretty good relative pitch, which seems more useful to me because it helps with transposing music (which is useful for adapting a song to something like a block flute where the note range is very limited) and with playing semi-tuned instruments (e.g. a guitar where the strings are tuned relative to each other, but the first string isn't tuned with a tuning fork).
Absolute pitch would help you find a specific starting note on the first try, I guess, but otherwise I don't see why musicians prize it so highly, can someone explain?
I don't have perfect pitch but naming those notes (0:11) and any other on piano - easy! I played violin from age 7 and piano by ear A LOT from the same age up till now. I remember when I was 11 or 12 I suddenly realized I can do it. Nice surprise.
btw, I only have 1 real video so far, but please check it out.
Casual Piano I don't really understand what you mean, like you can name the note listening to it or watching it?
YESSS
It's been 3 years mate. So how are you now? Everything good? Did you achieve your dream?
I fear one day I'll wake up having learnt so much yet having accomplished nothing because I'm always waiting for the next scishow video
I may not be able to name the notes but I can clearly tell which notes are higher or lower in pitch. I took a test for Tone Deafness and I got every note correct.
princessbinas Finally a comment I can relate with my self.
"Can you learn Perfect Pitch" is an odd sentence. It just reminds me of cricket or some other sports. It also confuses me with Pitch Perfect. So many things to confuse me .-.
Now you have confused me too
jamadan d How it should be called if you can tell only 1-2 notes (my case)? Not-so-perfect pitch?
Nes Dodov That would be relative pitch, what all us normie, non-perfect pitch people have.
Can you learn perfect bat?
I didn't know this was a thing til maybe a few months ago when I accidentally helped some person w their music homework or something like that. That got me interested, and now I'm trying to make associations between frequencies, in Hz, to sounds to notes. wish me luck
too late
Delcroze (one of the major innovators in music education) used fixed do in his teaching with the goal of establishing perfect pitch in his students. Kodaly used moveable do system, but his method includes beginning each music class by asking a student to sing A 440 and by the third grade students are able to sing perfectly and A and find all notes from that. That's assuming proper learning conditions such as sufficient music class time and whatnot. Many students in Europe have very excellent musical training models and usually develop these skills in greater proportion than many American students (mostly because Europe is the birthplace of many of these famous music educators such as kodaly and delcroze.)
all good YTPMV creators have this
I WANNA MAKE YTPMVs BUT IDK HOW TO GET THIS SKILL
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Darn >:( I'm 15...way past 6
Jimin who? Same and I started when I was in third grade, you'd think I'd at least get better but nope
Jimin who? Dang me too
I wish I learnt instruments when I was younger. :/
I started at 4
But you can still train "harmonic" perfect pitch by guessing a few time a day, for example, a C note, or try to remember beginnings of some songs, which you know on which note they start. I did this for about 2 years and now i have it ;)
gotta love the half step joke at the end.
How the hell did this mad scientist also become a music guy just goddamn you are a genius
To achieve perfect pitch, one must be in tune with their inner musician.
Carlos *The More You Know*
Indeed. And be between 3 and 7 years of age.
That was a whole step you dummies :D
I started piano lessons when I was five, but never acquired perfect pitch. I did develop relative pitch in my twenties, though, by learning how to identify various intervals.
Never knew what it was called, now I can actually explain myself.
Ugh every single musician got triggered at the end there. You could've used the alto clef. You could have moved it one step higher. Or just call it a full step. Jeez it's not that hard.
Kim Philipp Möllgaard alto clef for the win!
Michelle Ziems I always use alto clef in my piano class when they have us do simple notational exercises and say "Now write your clef!" ...Which one? ;)
I have perfect pitch:
The short answer: no.
The long answer: fiendishly complicated.
I did my final project in my university English class on absolute pitch. If you want to read it I'd be more than happy to send it to you.
were you trained at the age of 6??
Perfect pitch can be a double-edged sword for musicians. Especially if you need to transpose songs into other keys. For those of us with just relative pitch, transposed songs sound basically the same as in their original keys. But to a perfect pitcher, a song might sound wrong in a different key depending on how strong the association is.
Notes:
; perfect pitch | absolute pitch: ability to identify musical notes without context
; pitch acquisition: ear training with the aim of developing perfect pitch
; one paper suggests that pitch acquisition has greater success when begun at 6 years old as opposed to adulthood
; one paper suggests pitch acquisition success in adults, even lasting up to 6 months after a single training session
2:24 sry to be picky but thats not a half step. shouldve been one further up xD
MrLikon7 It should've started in the final position though with a flat symbol "b"
Or just change it to alto clef.
I'm a violist and I thought the same thing.
Viola master race.
MrLikon7 No it should have been the same place but with a flat symbol
That would be a minor third, not a minor second.
That moment when you have perfect pitch and someone you're subscribed to uploads a video about perfect pitch.
Despite never having music training (apart from piano lessons that were abandoned after 2 months at the age of ~8 years), I can easily identify C5. From there it's just a matter of transposing it in my head to match what I heard. Not efficient, but also not training from a young age. I should mention that I've been composing and producing since my teens.
I didn't start formal music lessons until I was nine. When I was 15 I was in a choir in which we performed an a capella song that began on 'high C," that is, the C above middle C on the piano. It's 40 years later now and I can still hit that note, any time, any place, all the time. Years later when I was learning guitar I used that high C to tune my guitar. It was pretty handy!
Pitch changes in tonal languages are relative, not absolute.
CNVideos they still have higher rates of perfect pitch. its a pretty significant difference too of i recall.
If I start singing "doo doo doo doo" going as low as I can go or as high as I can go before my voice starts to crack and then memorize what that note is, then wouldn't you be able to tell what any note is by comparing it to the one note you know?
Calculicious That is relative pitch.
But my pitch changes :(
By tuning my Cello enough times, I knew and could verbally reproduce A, D, G, and C. I can't do G and C anymore, since I haven't played in many years, but I can still do A and D.
It is theoretically possible to remember the absolute pitch of a tone by using mnemonics, i.e: the very first note in Tchaikovsky's Violin concerto is an F#, you can try to recall how the introduction begins which is easier to remember than a lone pitch.
short answer: *NO*
You CAN be relative pitch. *THEY ARE NOT THE SAME*
I have perfect pitch, but I also grew up with music and became a professional musician. and I can easily identify Western tuning, even the small differences between A442, A440, A446, etc. but you gotta be careful: you may have perfect pitch but if you hear ethnic music of a different country you better not cringe or freak. better not cringe on Western atonal (yes! tritones can be in tune! listen to jazz if you doubt) or experimental music either, with frequency differences.
I never got why you perfect pitch dudes freak over atonal music and quarter notes more than the average listener. That's like someone with ' perfect taste' freaking over spicy foods.
If anything you should be able to appreciate these notes more.
Οh, and for the record I have a perfect C#, sort of. I can sing it out of reference at any time, and sometimes I'm able to identify it as well, usually if it's the first note of a song. 11 more notes to go and I'll reach your level!! :D :D
Personally, I find atonal or dissonant music (when it's written well) to be *more* satisfying than tonal music. For me, at least, you're right on the money RevonFyll.
RevonFyll dude, I listen to jazz, rock, experimental music, movie music. I played in others. I'm not like some classical cat who gonna freak for playing minor 2nds consecutively or playing Reb quarter tone lower. so for me, I'm cool. you tell others, not me.
Daen I agree too. some great stuff from modern composers writing atonal and dissonance without resolution.
I also grew up on music. I listened to my father play the organ ever since I was 3 years old and started practicing the piano when I was around 6 years old and I have played in numerous orchestras. Perfect pitch is something I have since I have been around music and I am going to further the education of my music next semester and hopefully perfect hearing little differences in tuning and temperaments.
i love being born with perfect pitch. but it is terrifying when singing with a choir and someone is not able to read music and not being able to know what note they're singing
You don't need perfect pitch to understand that others are out of tune. As a musician you can hear it. Perfect pitch is very useful for other things, like remembering music. All you need to do is to remember how the song goes, and the notes gonna come with it. Also for creating music. As a writer you need a lot of trying the music while you write it (does it sound good , etc.) unless of course you are master at it, but when you have perfect pitch you pretty much always gonna guess right and only thinking about those notes gonna be quite easy to say if its gonna sound good.
Beware of roughly "Half" of the comments below!
Hi Sci show, can you tell me why my brain plays "music" whenever I want to? Am I going insane?
Do you mean that you can generate music on command?
Read musicophilia by oliver sacks, he documented lots of curiosities around music and neurology. He wrote about auto evocated music
that is what i think happened to me when i was a small kid .. at the age of 3 or 4 (or even 2?) i had a toy which was some sort of a robot with i think 16 keys on it which were labeled with the note names (of a c major scale) and played the corresponding sound when you pressed a key. thank god this thing was correctly tuned!! :D .. i still know how i remembered the pitches more or less from the first day when i played with this toy. (and obviously it also might have helped me to learn reading long before elementary school..) .. and so it got hardwired forever (at least i hope so! ;) ).
One of my best mates from college has absolute perfect pitch. We tested him on this multiple times from several angles and couldn't fault him. He could identify the pitch of the humming engine of a bus, he could tune to any guitar tuning in a matter of seconds and he could even identify the cents between semitones and tones!
After that terrible pun... I won't subscribe. Wait I already am, oh well I'll stay subscribed.
Nooooo Hank an A to a B isn't a half step D:
A to B. Full step.. I think Hank supports learning perfect pitch as an adult!!!
When I'm singing a song I can automatically come up with a harmony and I can tell when something is off pitch it's very pungent ... is that sorta perfect pitch
OnlySincere I used to have that only before I taught myself perfect pitch (in my teenage years) so I’d venture out and say that you have a very good ear and that learning perfect pitch would come easily for you if you worked at it. Because yes, it’s indeed possible.
Hey
hello there
+CarthagoMike
Is that you in disguise, Obi-Wan?
ssst, they don't have to know
That's not a half step, re-upload.
I am 17 yrs old and I just learned a relatively perfect pitch about 2 yrs ago... However, I'm still used to recognizing notes either by singing C as a reference point or by singing it in my head then comparing it to the note I heard.
Dammit SciShow that was a whole step
Being a musician I used to be bummed that I don't have perfect pitch, now however I'm glad - having gotten into the performance of early music, where the pitch for A can be anywhere from 390-490, which is a difference of about a major third, not having perfect pitch means less of a hassle when playing at changing pitches
I developed perfect pitch, more like tonal memory, once I started composing and teaching band, chorus, and orchestra. Composing forces you to think of ideas, melodies and hear harmonies in your head. Teaching large group performance ensembles forces you to not only learn piano, but pull pitches out of thin air and sing them on command when rehearsing. Over time, my tonal memory bank was solid, simply because my job reinforced those areas.
I love this channel.
I can definitely attest to the musical training aspect. Both my brother and I have perfect pitch, which seems to be correlated to the fact that we were musically trained from around the age of 6 and were forced to sing the note names while playing the notes (thanks, mom and dad). We do have limitations - dissonant chords can be hard to parse, and I struggle with humming a note out of thin air, potentially because I also play B flat trumpet, which is tuned a whole step down. But one thing is for sure - we are both atomically accurate when it comes to identifying piano notes, even the extreme high and low registers. This must be because the majority of our training has been on the piano.
"Sort-of-perfect-pitch" is also commonly known as relative pitch. This is when one is able so find any note when given a fundamental note. For example, when given an A, they can find other pitches by way of audiation to find others relative to its position, this also can depend on how long that can keep a tonal center in their prolonged memory. Great video, thanks!
Well said. Perfect means exactly what it implies -- infallible and without any flaws. If I test a person's ear by blindly playing 95 notes for them to name, and they correctly name 90 of those notes, that person has relative pitch, not perfect pitch. One with perfect pitch can correctly guess 10,000 out of 10,000 notes with no errors. Otherwise, it's relative pitch as you correctly noted.
I don't have perfect pitch and didn't learn anything much about music until I was 15 and picked up guitar, but I can often figure out what a single note is by ear just by thinking of a song that is played in a tuning with the lowest strings open not being the same. For example if someone played the note B on a piano I could tell by ear that it is a B because I think about the riff to Slipknot's song sic, which has an open B note on the low string that is used very often in the opening riff.
In most theory classes, learning pitches by ear is a part of the class. There are apps you can download that help you practice. Anyone with an ear for music can learn how to do this. Singing in the perfect pitch is another thing entirely.
I thought you would teach me baseball...
Both my mom and I both have perfect pitch. She's a pianist/organist, and I grew up playing the violin and singing, but didn't keep up with either after high school. I can still tell when I hear a note what the pitch is, but people don't believe me. A co-worker didn't believe me when I said our elevators dinging at work weren't dissonant pitches, but was a false note. And then the jealousy in high school choir...Oh lord, I don't miss that at all.
You and me both on the jealousy front! I'm a violinist with perfect pitch, and it got me into a bit of trouble when I became concertmistress of our school's 10th-12th grade orchestra as a junior... a few particularly jealous seniors were pretty unkind to me that year. I actually got an apology from one of them a few years after we both left high school via Facebook message, though, so... maybe your fellow choir kids have since changed their tune? (Pun fully intended?)
1:03 This might explain why Chinese people are such good singers.
As a musician, I can't think of a worse curse for a musician than perfect pitch. This is especially true for those who need to navigate unequal temperaments.
Paul Foster I don't understand, why have a perfect pitch is a curse for a musician. Can you please explain it to me?
I only learned perfect pitch by watching "the highest voice in the world" (either that, or "O Holy Night- Serena Sang Higher Note than Mariah Carey's version", but they're basically the same video), looking at the notes showing on the screen in correspondence to what she was singing, and applying it to myself by mathematically figuring out that middle C was C4. I now know the pitch and octave number of the note, and that I can be a little flat in my singing sometimes in other people's ears.
Now if only there was such thing as "perfect dynamic". I could really use that in my singing.
I know two people that are majoring in music theory and when we would sit down and listen to marching bands they can easily tell you not only notes but even whole chords, even the more complex sounding ones. And they did not at all have music training since age 6, more like around 6th grade like the rest of us lol.
I once had a band instructor who had perfect pitch. It was insane
I have perfect pitch. I practiced it on my piano when I was younger. I thought everyone could do it, so I never told anyone. I never knew it was a special, rare skill until 7th grade band when my band teacher told us about it! It's pretty awesome!!
I like how I started being serious about music at the age of about 18 and quickly were able to make connections like "that car horn totally had the same pitch as the second note in that song I heard like a week ago" - it didn't take long that after learning a few pieces I was able to make connections for a lot of notes to where they occur in songs I knew so I could reason backwards by where that note is on the sheet music and what that represents, however I never learned the thing completely and by now my head isn't really able to learn this anymore sadly and most of these connections got lost. :/
In my opinion as a brass player, relative pitch can be a massive win. See, orchestral brass parts very often require transposing (unless you just happen to have an E trumpet or an A horn in the trunk), and even when they're written for the instrument's usual pitch, that's often not concert pitch (e.g. trumpets and cornets are typically in B♭, while horns are in F). (A placatory side-note to all the woodwind players: yes, I know about the B♭ clarinets and the E♭ saxophones and the F cors anglaises. But woodwind players don't usually have to transpose their parts like we do, so shut up.)
This means, firstly, that someone with absolute pitch will have to deal with their instrument playing the "wrong" pitch, and secondly, that if given a part in a different pitch, transposing it will be a total mindfsck.
Whereas since my musical understanding is built entirely around _relative_ pitch, I have been able to learn to _sight-transpose_ (i.e. to play a part I've never seen before ('sight-read') and transpose it on the fly). I think what's going on in my brain when I do this is that I 'forget' the clef, internalise the key signature at the target pitch, and then work with scale degrees and intervals. The upshot is that if I'm transposing (say) down a fourth, I actually read (say) a D _as an A_, and if asked what note I just read, I'd have to stop and think to tell you it was a written D, despite being able to instantly tell you that I played an A.
I also find I'm able to use this facility in other ways. For instance, I originally only learned treble clef, and it was many years before I had to deal with the others. So when I have to read bass, alto or tenor clef, I effectively pretend it's a transposing part in treble clef, fix up the key signature and the octave, and it all just works - I don't have to 'learn' a new clef, because I can just re-use existing neural pathways (probably. IANAN). Similarly, most recorder players learn two sets of fingerings, F and C, for the {sopranino, alto, bass, contrabass} and {garklein, soprano, tenor, greatbass} recorders respectively. But to me, an alto recorder is just a transposing instrument in F, so I 'switch on' my brain's transposition circuitry, and start reading Ds as As.
In summary: don't feel sad if you missed the 6-year-old perfect-pitch boat. Relative pitch is just as good, only for different jobs.
It's not automatically superior to have perfect pitch. It's a disadvantage compared to relative pitch, when working with transposition and transposing instruments. I play instruments in C, Bb and Eb. A moving do or moving tonic, and being adept at distances between notes is more flexible for practical music playing.
There is this old saying "practice makes perfect". You can learn to bake a cake, paint a picture, etc. at an older age. So many older people are getting into playing music like never before. Some who took music lessons years ago are starting lessons again at an older age. If you assume regular practice makes all the difference, does practice apply to achieving perfect pitch as well?
Many of us learned to play by reading music (following a piece of paper) like someone reading a speech. In other words, we learned to recognize an A on a piano visually that it is the key between the last 2 black keys that are in a group of 3 with no preconceived notion what the note would sound like. A person with the condition call Amusia cannot distinguish between sound pitches at all (absolutely 0). The majority of us who learned to play music regardless of age can distinguish between sound pitches with some degree of accuracy although some are better than others.
I feel it's like a language you need to think in it to truly understand it. Except thinking in notes Is quite challenging as an adult.
I don't really have perfect pitch, but I work around it because I just know what that first note on Chopin's fantasie impromptu is supposed to sound like. It's a G sharp. From there I just listen to a given pitch and compare the interval to that g sharp. Then I can identify that if it's a major third above then the note is a C, if it's a fourth above then it's a C sharp, etc
as a child I heard the sound of middle C so often that I just know that it's C, and that's literally all I learned.
noice lol
this makes me want to die, i have been pouring everything i have into learning proper music theory and guitar and now i know that the reason i have plateaued and stopped improving is probably because this is as good as i can ever get...
ok hank you get total bonus points for the half step pun! or well whoever wrote it in the script ;)
I started learning piano when I was 4 and continued with music (i.e. Learning sheet music, singing in choir, learning instruments) until...well now. I could pick out the notes you named in the video but I've never considered myself to have perfect pitch, I guess because the friends I knew that made that claim could actually compose original pieces.
I don't have perfect pitch, but for some reason, I will always be able to name A, C, D, E, and G. I guess learning to tune a violin has its perks (the strings are tuned to G, D, A, and E). As for the C, that's thanks to the ocarina. So yes, you can learn good pitch, but it takes a while and isn't truly "perfect" unless you really work for it.
That is a whole step! TRIGGERED
You didn't discuss the possibilities of relative pitch, unless that was how the adults at the end developed their pseudo-perfect pitch. Relative pitch is when you know for sure the identity of one pitch, and can then compare another note you hear to it to figure out the new note's identity. It's not uncommon for musicians, since tuning notes and first notes of pieces you've worked on extensively are pretty easy to cement in your mind, and it helps you get the benefits of perfect pitch (identifying a note) without the downsides (dying inside during elementary school band concerts).