# keys on key board play different notes? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 23, 2019, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877 "2019-11-23T16:31:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Greg\_Charles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Charles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Greg_Charles)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2019, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877/21 "2019-11-24T21:20:07Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > Can you tell which key on a piano is being pressed just by listening to it? I certainly can’t but my musical skills are abysmal. Would you need to have perfect pitch to do this, or can most musically-educated people do it? > [@Musicat](#): > > To answer question #1: yes. Perfect pitch is not needed; good, educated, well-developed _relative_ pitch is. … I’m confused by this. Isn’t the ability to tell the exact pitch of a note that you hear literally the definition of perfect pitch? [Quote=Wikipedia] Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. [/Quote] > **[Absolute pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch)** > > Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given pitch without the benefit of a reference tone. AP may be demonstrated using linguistic labelling ("naming" a note), associating mental imagery with the note, or sensorimotor responses. For example, an AP possessor can accurately reproduce a heard tone on a musical instrument without "hunting" for the correct pitch. However, pitch labelling is less common than pitch recall. > The frequency of AP in th... Relative pitch would let you transcribe a tune you heard, but you wouldn’t necessarily reproduce it in the same key, unless you were given the starting note. I thought perfect pitch was an innate gift, but the Wikipedia article seems to say it can be developed to some extent. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2019, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877/22 "2019-11-24T21:58:46Z")
> [@Richard\_Pearse](#): > > As for the OP, words would become short musical phrases. I think you’d be able to learn the phrases better than you could learn to distinguish a single letter out of context. I’d be curious to know how many words would have the same “tune” as another word but in a different key. To start with a famous (if somewhat forced) example - how easy would it be to distinguish **HAL** (the name of the malfunctioning computer from _2001: A Space Odyssey_) from **IBM**. Same relative pitch steps, one semitone apart. I’m a musician, and I doubt I could do it if they were separated by a few other words. But I could identify a semi-tone modulation in a piece of music, because music generally has a structure and the notes in a piece have a relationship to each other defined by the key. If the piece was chromatic or atonal - no chance. ---
**Author:** ![Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b487fb/32.png) [@Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walken_After_Midnight)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2019, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877/23 "2019-11-24T22:06:06Z")
The distinctive musical motif from the movie _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ is meant to be a form of musical language. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind#Music): > [@](#): > > [John] Williams wrote over 300 examples of the iconic five-tone motif for Close Encounters—the five tones are used by scientists to communicate with the visiting spaceship as a mathematical language—before Spielberg chose the one incorporated into the film’s signature theme. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2019, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877/24 "2019-11-25T01:30:23Z")
I wonder if this would help – you assign 7 keys to the 7 notes of the diatonic scale. Then the next 7 keys are similarly assigned to the next higher octave but are slightly flat. Then the next 7 are the next octave but are even more flat, or maybe those are sharp. And so on. You would identify the octave by how flat/sharp the notes are. I assume musically trained people can tell the difference between, say, a flat fifth and any other interval. ---
**Author:** ![Ignotus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ecc23a/32.png) [@Ignotus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ignotus)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2019, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877/25 "2019-11-25T16:34:34Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > I wonder if this would help – you assign 7 keys to the 7 notes of the diatonic scale. Then the next 7 keys are similarly assigned to the next higher octave but are slightly flat. Then the next 7 are the next octave but are even more flat, or maybe those are sharp. And so on. You would identify the octave by how flat/sharp the notes are. I assume musically trained people can tell the difference between, say, a flat fifth and any other interval. I’m fairly sure this would make it easier to _learn_ the system – particularly if the letters were assigned in approximate order of frequency. Making the space bar silent (effectively a rest) would probably help even more. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/keys-on-key-board-play-different-notes/843877.md?page=1)