I enjoy the act of singing, but I cannot carry a tune in a bucket.
Yep. I did an AP music theory course my senior year of high school and the test was brutal. I barely passed and even that was a shock. I must’ve killed the sight singing and non-auditory components because I felt completely lost when it came to “listen to this and then answer questions about it.”
Heh, yeah. The dorm I stayed in was the dorm for folks majoring in music, as well. It was really common to run into someone with perfect pitch there.
In some situations, perfect pitch is even a hindrance. Playing guitar with a capo is problematic for me. If I’m playing in the key of D but capo-ing it to the key of F#, my ears tell me to play an F# instead of a D (and likewise all the other chords). It’s tricky to have to override what I’m hearing.
I can tell when I note is off in context (if I know the music) but have no idea if it is sharp or flat, just that it is wrong. I can hear it when I sing as well as when others sing.
I have a great ear, good rhythm, and a baritone voice with a good range. I can’t sing a “B” if you ask me to, but I can hit an octave higher or lower from what I’ve just sung, and can pick out a wrong note immediately when I hear it. It impressed my guitar teacher. I used to be able to sing from Johnny Cash up to Roy Orbison range easily, with forays into Queen and Boston (though not as high as Brad Delp’s freakishly high notes).
I’ve tried to make a real-time pitch analyzer so I could get instant feedback on my pitch, but I was unsuccessful at making it real time. I was impressed with my ability to create a program in only a couple of hours that would analyze a simple tone to find out its frequency despite me not previously having known anything about the WAV format, but I was unable to proceed further.
Maybe there are other programs out there created since (or before) that would do this.
I’m in that club, too. I think the issue is the way in which I perceive my own voice, if I listen to a tape of me speaking, or, God forbid, singing,……it sounds nothing like the way I hear my own voice when I speak. Not even close. It makes trying to tonally match what I hear fruitless.
Hehehe, my recorded voice sounds mostly like I expect it to. It’s that pitch and mostly that timbre that I expect, but it sounds like I have two steaks for lips.
I don’t remember anyone saying it could be easily learned, just that it CAN be learned, and that one begins with very simple things.
That’s true of everyone. I can’t recognize my own voice on a recording, and my speaking voice is more alien than my singing voice. But matching pitch is different. it’s the same frequency whether a total stranger sings it or you do.
But if someone plays a note and I try to match it, it sounds right in my head but to an outside observer (and a recording device) it’s several notes higher.
okay, that’s different.
I have fairly well developed senses of pitch, yaw, and roll.
To be fair, harmonising or “singing a B flat” is a hard thing to do. You could have a perfectly good sense of relative pitch but have trouble harmonising or singing a specific note.I have good relative pitch but wouldn’t be able to do those things well (I could harmonise to some extent I suppose).
Thanks, you just made me return my breakfast.
My ex, bless her heart, was on of the most tone-deaf persons I’ve ever met. She had a normal speaking cadence, her own taste in music (mostly punk and polka), was very intelligent and educated individual (speaking five languages). But couldn’t keep the pitch to save her life.
I tried to teach her to keep a simple melody in unison, but gave up when I realised she struggled with the concept of “higher” or “lower”. Some people jut don’t have it I guess.
I have near-perfect-pitch and I find this thread mind-blowing. I have always wondered how people that can’t sing on tune experience music. I have quite a few family members that cannot sing on pitch at ALL and the strange part is, many of them seem not to realize there is even a difference. I have nieces that will get up in front of a crowd and sing horribly off key and they think they sound great. And their parents, who are also relatively tone deaf, cheer them on like they are doing great. I sit there and wonder, “Do they not hear it?” And I’m not talking about being slightly flat, I’m talking they are singing wildly random notes instead of the melody.
I have often thought that most singers that can’t sing on key are simply unable to produce a matching tone, but if that were true, they would hear how off they were when they tried to sing along. But I keep hearing people singing that clearly have NO IDEA that they are way off the correct pitch.
In case you’re wondering what I mean by “near-perfect-pitch”, it means I can find a harmony line to go with any melody. Typically, I can find at least 3 different harmony lines, and I can tell you if they are a third, fourth or fifth harmony. If someone sings a note or plays a tone on an instrument, I can identify the note within a half-step. So if they play an F on the piano, and I try to guess the tone, I will guess an E, F, or F# consistently.
The first part is relative, and the second part is perhaps some sort of pitch memory, but not what I think of when I hear “perfect pitch.” Can you tell what note a bird is singing or an alarm is ringing in? Some singers are good at imitating perfect pitch by singing the note and just knowing the tension of their vocal chords and what note they are singing, approximately. But it doesn’t really matter, because you have very good relative pitch, and that is a far more important skill.
I can’t sing to save my life. I play piano well, reasonable guitar, bass, drums, harmonica, but singing? Forget it! If I hear a recording of myself sing, I can tell it’s off … not just a few cents here and there, but at times half to whole steps. Somehow, it sounds good in my head, but hearing a recording reveals the truth. If I play melody notes in unison with myself singing, I can match the notes, but there is usually a warble as I have to slide into the correct pitch. So I might start 50 cents sharp, correct to 20 cents flat, and then end up +/- 5 cents of the note. And if I sing in a group, forget it. I can’t hear myself at all, especially when everybody else is singing “Happy Birthday” in their own concept of a key and melody line. When I pick out a melody at my instrument, I generally have to hear it clearly in my head and pick it out from my head’s melody. If I try singing the melody and match pitch to the instrument , it starts faltering at points. It really is odd.
I’m no singer. I tried back in middle school & high school. They tolerated me in a basic chorus class, but as soon as we were talking competitive try-outs, I came dead last. Every time.
I totally get the ideas behind higher & lower pitches. I can read sheet music haltingly and imagine how a given simple melody would sound. I can and have followed along watching & hearing my wife play and kept my mental place in the sheet music aligned with where she’s really playing. I can certainly follow ordinary musical melody & think higher / lower or even “about 3 steps higher, about 4 steps lower, etc.” as the melody unfolds. But …
Pretty much everyone believes the way they sound to themselves in their own head is different from how a recording of them sounds. What I’ve noticed is that a recording of me speaking sounds about 5 steps higher than the same speaking sounds to myself. Yup: the difference between an A and an F.
That difference would certainly make trying to sing to match the pitch of the rest of the group difficult.