I am completely tone deaf. Can’t tell a note from another, sing or anything musical. I would love to be able to sing at least tolerably well. Are there any sites or books that might help?
I don’t know much about the causes of tone deafness, or whether there are degrees of it, but when you say “Can’t tell a note from another”, what exactly do you mean?
For instance, if I play middle C on the piano, then play F above that, can you (a) tell that the notes are not the same (and if so) that the F is above the C?
I guess I don’t know whether we’re talking the same language (in that I don’t know whether I’m doing the same as trying to describe blue to someone who’s colourblind - a difficult exercise since we don’t share the same perception at some level).
Anecdotally, I know that the ability to become better at learning intervals - and by extension recognising chords - can be learned by someone who can hear the difference between two notes. It just takes time. Whether it’s possible to learn this when you’re starting from an inability to differentiate two tones, I know not.
There’s an interesting article here and I’ll bet you’d find more using google. Good luck…
I can tell that the notes are different if played close together in time but I cant tell which is higher unless they are quite far apart say 5 white keys. thanks for the article. I am glad to know I am not alone.
I’ll see if my wife (music teacher) or father-in-law (music lecturer) know if there’s any way this stuff can be learned.
Oh, and btw - you’re certainly not alone; I don’t know what the percentages are, but I’ve known a lot of people who couldn’t hold a tune.
And a lot of them probably weren’t shy about singing, either.
You got it 
Actual tone deafness is rare; awful relative pitch is common.
A tone deaf person cannot hear the difference between two unrelated pitches. If you sing the Star Spangled Banner on nonsense syllables to a tone-deaf American, he won’t be able to recognize it.
Far more common is poor relative pitch. This can be trained into a person, and is a great deal of work. If English was more dependent on pitch slides (we use it to denote questions vs. declarations and to denote stresses on words; there is subtlety possible but pitch slides are not necessary to communicate in English), there would be few of us with pooor relative pitch. I’m a music major, and I’ve noticed that those raised speaking East Asian and Pacific Island don’t have any trouble in sightsinging classes. It may be that they are sons and daughters of hard work and determination, but it may also be the fact that pitch slides actually determine the word being said. In… stink, now I can’t remember. Perhaps Cantonese… the (oo) sound is an entirely different phoneme when it is slid up vs. when it is slid down.
Relative pitch is the ability to be played a tone, and to sing a particular interval away from it. For instance, a major third is fairly easy to find. If you can be given a D and hum back an F#, you’ve found the major third above D. If I play you a random note and you can sing me whatever interval above or below I want, you’ve mastered relative pitch.
The other end of the spectrum is perfect pitch. This is a physical thing like tonedeaness and can’t be gotten rid of. For some, it’s linked to perfect memory - these people can glance at a random page, close the book, and read it to you. They know every single tone by heart. This is extremely rare; I have met perhaps six people who have it.
The slightly more common form of perfect pitch is something like tinnitus - you can always hear a particular tone. You can then find other pitches based on relative pitch (I’ve got a middle A stuck in my head frequently, but am terrible so far with relative pitch)
The first kind of perfect pitch might be worse than tone deafness because other musicians tend to slip away from the starting tonic and the difference between the written (perfect, imaginary) music is grating. Eidetic memorizers tend to be brittle people, in my experience.
i am sure you are right cdhostage. I had no musical input as a child (we didn’t have a radio and neither of my parents sang or encouraged me to sing). On the other hand, we have gone out of our way to make sure our children have lots of exposure to music and singing. It seems to be something you pick up without effort as a child, but by the time you are an adult it is almost too late
One thing to consider is that the ability to hear the relationships between pitches (i.e. are they different…which is higher…) is different from being able to sing them back accurately. One is entirely a matter of perception, and the other requires the ability to translate that perception into physical activity. If you’ve ever tried throwing a ball with your off hand (most can’t without looking silly), you’ll know that having coordinated muscle memory for an action is crucial to doing it well. Some people have a “natural” feel for how to sing, and others do not.
I’ve had a number of voice students who could hear accurately, but could not sing things back accurately, or match pitch. In most cases, some voice training got them on track so that they could sing well in tune, though never with the same facility as students with more intuitive gifts. So, you might help yourself by trying to distinguish how much of your difficulty comes from not hearing things clearly, and how much is simply the ability to recreate it with your voice.
There are a number of ear-training programs on the market (I don’t have the names, sorry…). But you can buy software that will allow you to take interactive instruction in pitch perception on your computer.
Another suggestion - take piano lessons. Associating the sound of musical tones with a physical action and a visual picture (your fingers depressing the keys - a thing you can both feel and see) may help to develop your tonal perception.
Good luck!
A
I never thought of it, but I guess im tone deaf too, even then I don’t hear much at all anyway, but I used a voice coach to teach me to sing. She said I sounded just like a hearing person if I had a few drinks first.
Cdhostage, I hate your definitions for pefect pitch and relative pitch. I see two problems: One, your definition (and I have seen others post the same definition here and other places) require that someone with pitch ability be able to sing, so that they could sing back the intervals. According to your definition, someone who was mute but not deaf cannot have perfect or relative pitch! The concept is supposed to be about hearing.
The second problem is that your definition refers to human constructs such as the name of the interval “Major Third”. I took a couple of years of theory so I know what this means intellectually. But that doesn’t mean you can play D and I would remember what F# was (perfect pitch) nor do I remember how “big” a Major Third was so that I could extrapolate to F# (Relative pitch).
To me, perfect pitch people can remember precisely whether or not one pitch is the same as another that was played at a different time. So, you play me a pitch (and I don’t care if you give it a name) and then you play another (again, don’t bother naming it) and I can say that they have the same frequency or they were different. Practically, this should also mean that I can differentiate very small differences between pitches by saying “the first was higher”, etc.
To me, relative pitch means that I can mimic all of the correct intervals, but I cannot guarantee that I start in the right place. I can play a melody such as “Mary had a Little Lamb” on the piano by starting at any key (the white and black things, not the name of a scale). Only one of them is the “intended”, “correct” starting key, which usually offers its name as the Key (the scale name not the black and white things). If I had good relative pitch, and you sang MHALL to me, I couldn’t tell that you had started on C or E, but I would know that you went too far down on your second note (or not far enough).
I notice that **Figaro **has alluded to the singing thing.
Now, your definitions might be considered to be correct, but I don’t like them. I think mine are more useful and less artificial.
i find alcohol solves most of my problems too handy 
I have tried using a piano to pitch my voice, but the difficulty is knowing when you get it right, or even to go higher or lower. i might bite the bullet and go for proper lessons, just to get some feedback.
thanks for all your suggestions
Depends, often good training can really improve relative pitch, even for adults, but you have to approach the problem differently. A child might be able to figure it out intuitively. With adults, you may have to teach them some of the basics about acoustics.
For example Sniffs_Markers’s brother in law had dreadful pitch. Of course he loves to sing and sing loudly. To keep the peace on the homefront, his wife was able to teach him about “beat frequencies” etc. and he can now distinguish between different notes, much, much better and sings quite decently.
I’m pretty darned “tone deaf” in the sense of relative pitch and I was exposed to music my whole life (but never learned an instrument). So recently I started to learn how to play the electric bass. It’s improved my relative pitch tremendously because I get to hear discreet notes.
Sniff_Markers has been working in the recording industry for a long time now, and claims she’s never met anyone would couldn’t be trained out of “relative pitch” tone deafness. However, as Figaro mentioned, getting someone to make his/her voice behave is another story. That, luckily, is often just a matter of practice, practice, practice – get those muscles in shape so they do what you want.
Some people do have to work at it more than others.
On an interesting related note, some musicians can lose hearing in specific frequency ranges from repeated exposure to intense volume. Happens in orchestra pits sometimes.
I think this might be painting tone deafness with too broad of a brush. One problem is that the term “tone deaf” is applied to a range of situations, so it is difficult to come up with any brief, consise definition.
I cannot hear the difference between notes that are close together on the scale. There is no difference at all. However, as the range of notes becomes larger, I can in fact hear a difference. For me, if you were playing notes successively higher from the original note, my hearing process would go something like this “those two notes are the same … those two notes are different, but I cannot tell you if the second note is higher or lower than the first … those two notes are different and the second note is higher than the first.”
So you see, I am completely tone deaf within a certain span, and have awful relative pitch outside of that range. Even though poor relative pitch can be improved with training, keep in mind that there is also somewhat of a “combo deal” when it comes to tone deafness.
I would also point out that if you sung the Star Spangled Banner to me with nonsense syllables, I would recognize it fairly quickly due to the range of notes, however I would have a much harder, if not impossible, time with Mary Had A Little Lamb, where the notes are closer together provided you changed the beat and tempo as well as the words. I could nail any common tune that was played with traditional timing based on the rhythm of the notes, that’s usually how I identify most songs to begin with.
FWIW, I asked Mrs Xerxes last night about improving ‘tone deafness’ (however we define it). She teaches music to 600 kids and has some 10 years experience. What she said backs up most of what’s been said here: that in the vast majority of cases, there can be quite a bit of improvement. She also added the caveat that even in those kids who could - by all definitions - now hold a tune, every now and again there’d be a howler of a note.
I really don’t want to get into this discussion but I just can’t help it.
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First of all, while it could be construed as unreasonable to assume that just becasuse a person can’t sing a melody that’s played to them they don’t have good relative pitch, in my experience most musical people can sing. (Defining musical people as people who love music and listen to it all the time or people who play an instrument well or can pick out tunes on an instrument after hearing them - NOTE I included people without any musical training who just love music)
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In the case of someone who can’t sing but claims to have good relative pitch it would be possible to test it by asking them to write what they hear (a common task in music schools) or verbally identify intervals or to pick it out on an instrument. This requires some form of musical training however.
The only other way I can think of is to play a tune. Then play several versions of this tune with subtle differences and ask someone to pick the one that matches the original making the melodies more and more complex as you go along and bringing in more voices etc. This involves the element of multiple choice however which guarantees a certain percentage of ‘guesses’ will get through the net…
Anyway this is getting off the topic really (Sorry).
You can train your ear to be better - there’s a big difference between what young children in music schools are expected to identify/ recreate and what college students are supposed to be able to identify/ recreate. So there’s hope for everyone but for some people it definitely comes naturally. Like with everything there are varying degrees if talent in this area. Everyone can study maths and improve on it but not everyone will become brilliant at it.
As for Perfect Pitch - perfect pitch shmerfect pitch. Good relative pitch is where it’s at. Music’s not just about identifying tones by their letter name. It’s about melody, rhythms, harmony and texture. You won’t get far on perfect pitch alone.
And also for those of you who read the rather interesting link posted by Xerxes a while back I just have one little bone to pick with it.
Mozart’s ability to write music having heard it only once is more due to his excellent relative pitch. He wouldn’t have even needed perfect pitch if he saw that a particular piece was in ‘G Major’ or whatever. Just a little training in the musical styles of the time and harmonic languages and then away he goes. (He may well have had perfect pitch as well but this is less helpful in this regard).
for anyone who wants to know who the hell I think I am spouting on like I know something - I have a Masters Degree in Music and majored in Composition and love music too so hopefully this won’t seem too arrogant
I agree that it’s usually true, but I know several people who are avid listeners and appreciaters of music who cannot carry a tune vocally. My experience of them is that the issue is not one of perception or experience, but of vocal function. My father in particular is as perceptive a listener than I am, but cannot sing even close to in tune. He can whistle a tune, however…
thats interesting figaro, because even though I can’t sing in tune, I can seem to come close by whistling. Wonder why?