I don’t, which is too bad because I like to sing, much more than anyone with ears enjoys hearing me sing.
But I don’t even get the concept of pitch. If someone says to me, “Sing that an octave higher” or “Sing that in B flat” or whatever, it means nothing to me. Someone once asked me to harmonize with him, and I sang for a few seconds. and he stopped and said, “No, that’s off. Way off.” I said “What’s off?” and he said, “You’re supposed to be singing ‘LAAAA’ but instead you’re singing 'LAAAA,” and I said “They both sound the same to me.”
I draw the analogy of someone painting who can only see in black and white. Some shades look a little darker than others, but basically they all just like shades of gray.
I used to have perfect pitch, but it’s eroded of late. I had to practice for a while before getting it around age 14 (basically, playing keys from the piano and associating it by ear repetitively until I could recognize them reliably). Now at 35 I find that I’m having a hard time telling differences between Fs and F-sharps, As and A-sharps, etc.
The basis for all of these is matching pitch. Hearing a tone and being able to detect when the frequency you are singing is the same as the one you are hearing. This can be improved with practice. Everything else you mention builds on that. An analogy would be matching a paint chip to an identical paint chip.
Learning to match pitch is much the same as for example learning to throw a baseball accurately. Singing is a physical activity, although how your body does it is invisible. You are awkward and fail all over the place, you keep practicing over and over and correcting and correcting and strengthening as you practice. You start with a given degree of natural talent and improve from there.
If you really want to improve I suggest you try a few voice lessons.
I find the idea of voice lessons funny. I don’t even get the concept of “pitch.” Someone trying to teach me how to sing would find the first few sessions as confusing and frustrating as I do, I suspect.
What does music sound like to you? When you listen to two or more other people sing/play, can you tell whether they’re singing/playing in tune with each other or not?
I do have a pretty solid sense of pitch. I played a saxaphone all the way through college, and these days instead of (or in addition to) singing along with music, my fingers almost involuntarily play an invisible sax, matching the music I’m hearing (regardless of whether the music contains any sax or not). If you name a note, I can sing it, albeit maybe not with pro-level skill. Knowing what an A440 pitch sounds like, and also what the 120-Hz hum of electrical appliances here in the US sounds like, and also knowing that frequency doubles or halves with each octave up or down, I can generally pin down the frequency of a heard note to within a few percent.
Take heart: I suspect this is true for most people. I sing in my car with the tunes cranked up, but not anywhere else.
I suppose I can tell if something is horribly discordant, but I don’t know if I could you what the problem is, other than “I don’t like this song.”
There’s a scene in Spinal Tap where one singer is off-key, and the other one corrects him, and I could hear that the song sounded wrong but I had no idea what the singer (Christopher Guest) should have done to make it sound right.
Here’s an online piano simulator I just Googled up:
If you slowly click one at a time on five of the white keys near the middle in order from left to right, how do you perceive the different noise they each make?
If I slowly clicked one at a time on some of the same five keys you did and also some other keys, do you think you could identify whether the sound you hear from each was one of your original five or not?
If I slowly clicked one at a time on the same five keys you did but in a different order, do you think you could “sort” the same sounds into the same order you heard when you clicked them? Could you say e.g. “That one was #3”?
My first vocal coach told me that the something that can be difficult to overcome for a novice singer is tone deafness (amusia). She tested me and I was not. To the best of our knowledge, tone deafness is just a function of our brain chemistry, much like color blindness. Somebody with tone deafness just interprets sound differently. The good news is that with a lot of patient training it can somewhat be overcome. You will simply need a lot more ear training than someone else. If you can play on a piano, or virtual piano such that you know you are striking different pitches, then you can start to retrain your brain. Lessons would also help, but tell your coach that you are likely tone deaf so that they’ll be patient.
This test might help you determine if for are for sure tone deaf (I struggled with 1/32th and 1/64th tones
probably because of my age).
Ultimately, keep singing if it brings you joy!
(To answer the question in the subject, yes, I sure hope so since I’m working at switching careers to singer! )
These are all learned skills. Everything you’re describing suggests you have poor relative pitch, and relative pitch can be practiced and improved upon.
You say you like to sing. When you listen to a song on the radio, does it sound like the same note over and over again? Or are you able to hear a melody?
If you can sing “Happy Birthday,” you understand pitch.
Same here. I totally don’t get it. When I first heard about auto tune I listened to examples on YouTube and didn’t hear any difference between auto tune and not auto tune.
Fair enough! But when you listen to someone singing, you can recognize the different pitches that form a melody? It doesn’t sound like just one sustained pitch?
Do you get the idea that some sounds are higher or lower than others? If so, then you grasp the concept of pitch even if you don’t yet have the vocabulary or training to describe it.
HAH! I guess I am like slicedalone. If two or more notes are played I can certainly state, “That one is higher, that one is lower.” But I lack the ability to produce matching tones vocally, with ease. If one were to play a tone (note on a piano), with enough time I could match it by moving my vocal pitch around where a person listening would say, “Now you have it.” But it would be like a baby taking it’s first steps - it’s not walking. And what I could achieve would never be singing. Note: I also have very bad sense of tempo.
I say all of this as someone who has had training. I studies acting at an academy and as part of the curriculum we had singing classes with well known professional coaches. One stated at the beginning of the class, “I can teach anyone to sing!” After we completed the course, he admitted that he was not able to teach me (within the 12 weeks we had).
My sense of absolute pitch is better than my sense of relative pitch. When I play the key of C in my mind, the notes that are half tone steps do feel different from the others, but they feel like they are a higher step than the others rather than lower.
On the other hand, if I have heard a note from a song clearly and often enough, I can usually identify it by poking on a well-tuned piano long enough, without having to listen to it for reference.
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