Almost nobody can do that without a reference point. And even with a good natural sense of relative pitch and a reference note, it still takes training to be able to be able to correctly identify individual tones in a composition.
Then you do have a sense of pitch. Just not a very good natural one. If you were tone deaf you wouldn’t even be able to do that.
Music is weird. A lot of people think they have perfect pitch when they really don’t. And a lot of people think that if they don’t have perfect pitch, they must be tone deaf.
All my family (mum’s side anyway !) are/were musical.
Some professional.
Matching and relative pitch seem to be innate.
Perfect pitch is not really much use tbh.
A very simple exercise to help anybody demonstrate relative pitch.
Can you hum the first four notes of “Here Comes the Bride” off the top of your head? Dum DUM DUM DUM. That’s a perfect fourth interval.
If you go to LSLGuy’s piano link upthread, you can play it yourself. C → F → F → F
But it’s also D → G → G → G, or C# → F# → F# → F#. And so on.
This is why - if you play a note on a piano and tell me it’s a B-flat - I can sing any other note. Not because I have perfect pitch, but because I know where other notes are relative to a reference note. I know that a perfect fourth is “Here Comes the Bride,” a perfect fifth if “Twinkle Twinkle,” an octave is “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and so on.
Some naturally have very strong relative pitch. Some don’t. But it can be learned. True perfect pitch probably can’t be learned as an adult, but it’s for the most part overrated in any case.
Right. It’s a little like how Patrick Mahomes is a great quarterback because of how he can throw the ball relative to the line of scrimmage at any given moment; the latitude and longitude of one stadium or another is immaterial.
Some folk in this thread might enjoy Musicophilia by Sacks. At least one chapter concerns the relatively small number of people who lack any concept of pitch, including extreme cases of people to whom music sounds cacophonous.
Worth reading - as is anything by the author.
I sing and play music quite a bit, and for me singing or playing harmony is quite challenging. And the concept of what you “hear” - as to whether it is a specific note or what - is quite a complex topic.
It’s (inadvertently?) hilarious. Someone PAID to record that guy?
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I have decent pitch. But that’s after a lot of time in bands and choirs. I played guitar with a friend and, before a gig, we were practicing, and he said “Ok, it’d be cool if right here you could come in with the counter-melody on a sus4.”
I knew enough theory to know that while we were playing a basic F-A-C chord on our guitars, he wanted me to sing a high B FLAT.
I was baffled, and it took a LOT of practice to come in on what almost sounded like a dissonant note.
(hijack):
For me, the classic “sus4” is in the bridge of “Stairway to Heaven,” where the guitar strums D2 D D4 D2 D D4…
Also, Pete Townshend used it a lot in Tommy.
Voice lessons aren’t just saying “no, sing a different note.” Voice lessons concentrate a lot on the physical act of singing, on how to control your lungs, diaphragm, mouth, posture, and so on. You’d practice particular actions and repeat them.
If you took golf lessons the instructor wouldn’t just stand there and say “Hit it better.” They’d actually help you understand how to stand, hold the club, begin a backswing, and so on. Same with voice lessons.
Have you ever attempted to visualise your sounds? I’m talking about spectrograms and stuff. I don’t have such a problem, and, to tell the truth, I have never tried to use spectrograms while singing and etc, but this solution isn’t absurd, is it?
I’m another one who is baffled by key and pitch and octave. I greatly enjoy music, though. Maybe more than some of you. My wife winces at people who are off-key or flat or whatever and I just listen.
It borders on offensive for those of you who can hear these things to tell me that I could easily learn by doing simple things. Maybe I’ve thought of that by my age.
I don’t have perfect pitch and I can’t read music. Though I have a good ear. I sing, I did so “professionally” for some years. I met my husband when I joined the band. We were “bar stars”. I also sang in choir in high school and college, and had voice lessons in high school.
Anyway, I can tell if something, especially singing, is off pitch. I hate karaoke because most of the people that do it are bad at singing. That’s cool because it’s supposed to be fun. But some of it is not fun to listen to.
I can harmonize with most stuff, hell, I have tinnitus, I can harmonize with the ringing in my ears. However, I can’t tell you if I’m singing in C, D, F, Etc. I’ve noticed most people don’t notice clashing pitch. At work our coffee posts beep every three hours to be changed. I hate, hate, it when they go off all at once, because they all beep at a different pitch and it ain’t harmonious. Apparently, I’m the only one (in 16 + years) that noticed they are pitched differently, let alone that the pitches are discordant.
The OP should sing all they want if they find joy in it. I don’t sing “out” anymore 'cause my husband will never play again due to Parkinson’s. I sing in the cooler while I’m stocking it. I sing in the car. I’ve gone to karaoke a few times before Covid. Sing like no one can hear you as the sappy saying goes. It’s fun and good exercise.
I took a Music Theory course in college (so long ago that we only had Gregorian Chants to work with and one of the things we were tested on was relative pitch. The instructor would play a simple melody, telling us what note he was starting on, and we had to write the melody on a musical staff.
Tangentially: one thing I still remember from that class is that the key of C Major and the key of a minor are both played on the piano only using white keys. The difference is in the interval between notes (half steps vs whole steps).
You can tell if you have decent relative pitch this way: Sing happy birthday. Now trying to sing it a little higher. You will actually be in a different key and singing different notes, but if you can still sing it so it sounds right, you can discern relative pitch.
Perfect pitch is the ability to hit a note or identify it without having to hear surrounding notes or a reference note to get the relative pitch. For example, many people can sing a song by being asked to, but people without perfect pitch might start it on the ‘wrong’ note, but still sing it ‘correctly’ because they have good relative pitch.
You don’t need perfect pitch to sing, even professionally. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch, and they are usually people intensively schooled in music starting at an early age. But most people can identify when a note sounds discordant or doesn’t belong on a scale when they hear it relative to the other notes on the scale.
One in 10,000 is the number I’ve heard, as well. But I’ve also read (when I researched this years ago) that among musicians, it’s about one to ten in 100. I clearly do not have it, but I know at least three people that do – my music teacher growing up, a piano player at the high school I went to, and at least one musician I played with at the university I went to. That I know three wouldn’t really make sense unless it was more prevalent among musicians (or I’m unbelievably lucky.)
and one of the things we were tested on was relative pitch. The instructor would play a simple melody, telling us what note he was starting on, and we had to write the melody on a musical staff.