Inspired by this thread. I’m not entirely sure what perfect pitch is, but I think I have it - if someone plays a note on a piano, say, I can tell what it is.
But, I have never been able to sing. It sounds awful to me - I can tell I am way out of key, but my voice just won’t hit the right notes. So I only sing if I am alone in the car, say, and the music pretty much drowns me out
People I have mentioned this to say that’s nonsense, if you have perfect pitch you can sing - “Just sing the note you hear in your head!”. Well I can’t. Tell me I’m not alone…
I don’t have perfect pitch, but I do have excellent relative pitch. But when I’m tired I tend to sing flat. With effort I can correct it, but the effort has to be sustained . . . which doesn’t happen easily when I’m tired. My guess is that you just need more concentration or perhaps training.
I also have great relative pitch, but I can’t sing worth crap. It’s not just a matter of being able to find the right note, it’s a matter of having an instrument that can produce sounds that aren’t horrible.
The answer is yes, it is totally possible to have perfect pitch and not be able to sing. Singing well is like learning to play any other instrument, it takes practice and training in order to control your voice. Just because you know what the note is supposed to be doesn’t mean you can make your voice do what you want it to. If you have perfect pitch you probably do better than most people out of the gate (getting close to the note), but you also are probably more aware of being off than most people would be. It’s a blessing and a curse I guess.
And since people are sharing, I don’t have perfect pitch, but did have a piano teacher who did have perfect pitch and spent a lot of time talking to him about it. He always said it was less fun than it sounds. He was hardly ever able to see live performances of concert music and enojoy them because without fail there would be someone who was just a little bit out of tune and it would ruin the whole show for him because he couldn’t hear anything but the out of tune instrument.
ETA: also what tdn said. You have to have a good sounding voice even if you can find the note, but that doesn’t sound like it’s your problem.
And, there are different voice qualities. You can have someone with an excellent voice and very little musical talent, and you can have someone with enormous musical skills and a horrible sounding voice.
The male voice, in particular, is a total crapshoot. A pre-pubescent boy can have a lovely voice, and he might work hard to develop his musical skills on that account - but when his voice changes, there is no telling what it will be like after the change. A golden-voice boy soprano might easily become a croaking horror. And, a child with no voice at all can turn into Pavarotti.
It just isn’t fair!
Of course, it can come out OK - the golden-voiced boy soprano becomes an adequate tenor; the kid with no voice becomes an excellent baritone, etc. I was OK beforehand, and quite good now - in fact, my instrument is better than my musicianship - so I’m happy. But it is sad for those who wind up on the short end of the musical stick.
This describes me exactly. When I was studying music, I always aced the ear-training exercises because I had excellent relative pitch. But I could not make my voice do what it was supposed to no matter what. Often I could hear that I was wrong, but I required external prompting to know whether I had to go up or down.
While I dont have perfect pitch, I have a good ear for picking up pitching mistakes in other singers, but have trouble hearing my own always.
Even assuming you can hear the tune properly there may be problems of hearing (your own voice sounds different to yourself than to other people), timing (slow songs I can do perfect, above a certain tempo my brain cant keep up), predicting the note (I know this next note goes up a by a fifth, can I hit it without correction), and production (hearing a note and producing the same note with my voice).
So perfect pitch is just hearing - production in the right time is a whole other story.
Seems perfectly plausible to me. When this paper was published in ’83, I didn’t have the necessary educational background to understand it, so I showed it to somebody with a doctorate in psychology and asked him to explain it to me. He told me that what it essentially said is that people who have absolute pitch don’t search their memories for a comparative reference when they hear a tone; they somehow just recognize it from past exposure. He analogized it to hearing a dog bark and recognizing it as such. When we hear a dog bark, we don’t scratch our heads and say “um…let’s see…what was that—was it a cat?” We just immediately recognize it as a dog’s bark. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we can faithfully reproduce that sound ourselves. If I imitate a dog’s bark, it doesn’t fool a real dog for one second. I’ve never been able to get a dog to bark back at me, nor have I ever set off a neighborhood chorus line with a fake doggy bark—it just doesn’t sound real to a real dog.
Also, read some of the other abstracts referenced on that page. You’ll see that there’s a continuum of AP ability which varies widely in humans; it’s not an all-or-none phenomenon.
The late Jo Stafford, who has one of the best voices you’ll ever hear, was often billed as “Miss Perfect Pitch,” but she denies having perfect pitch in interview after interview.
In her interview on the CD release of her “Ballad of The Blues” when asked if she has perfect pitch she says “No, I have good relative pitch and I am a very careful singer.”
She goes on to explain, that if she had perfect pitch she would never be able to do things like her comedy albums (under the names Darlene Edwards and Cinderella G Stump, where she sings WAY and I mean WAY off Key) See Example from YouTube
Minnie Riperton is another one that denied having perfect pitch and says she had “good relative pitch.”
