Do Perfect Pitch Audio lessons like the one below work?
I have seen many discussions on this in various places and the consensus (though not unanamous) is that perfect pitch is an innate ability that either you got or you ain’t. An adult cannot acquire it.
I am not familiar with what the course involves, but you CAN learn relative pitch. Relative pitch means that given a reference pitch, you can identify any other pitch. Relative pitch is a skill that can be developed. One shortcut for relative pitch is associated repertoire, where you take intervals that you already know well from hearing them in some song. For example, the first two notes from Here Comes The Bride are a perfect fourth. That’s easier to learn that trying to memorize the sound of a perfect fourth by brute force.
Don’t be discouraged if you can’t acquire perfect pitch, by the way. I am a professional violist and I don’t have, and don’t need, completely perfect pitch. (I can get pretty close, but not like those who “have it”.)
IMO, as CookingWithGas says, relative pitch is far more useful and is indispensable as a musician.
Perfect pitch is apparently a special type of memory that can’t be created in someone. Some musicians have amazing relative pitch, and watching/listening to them at work, you’d swear that they do, in fact have perfect pitch, but they don’t. Some conductors know pieces so intimately that they can tell the notes that orchestra members are playing. But that’s a combination of well developed relative pitch and immense intellectual power. The program referenced in the OP is no doubt an ear training regimen that may or may not be excellent, but all it will do is help develop relative pitch.
Jpeg - is it true that the difference between a viola and a violin is that a viola will burn longer? 
Cecil on perfect pitch: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_236b.html
IIRC, previous threads have said that speakers of tonal languages, such as Chinese or Japanese, are more likely to have perfect pitch.
I don’t have the temerity to question the Great Master, but I’d wonder how anyone could tell that a child is NOT born with this ability. People I know who have this talent/ability always report that they’ve “always” had it, although I think I’ve also heard of people discovering that they have it later in life.
Jpeg - is it true that the way to get a violist to play tremulo is to mark a passage pianissimo?
No, no, no.
The joke goes like this:
“How do you get a violist to play pianissimo tremolo?”
“Mark it forte solo!”
I’ll third that. I have “full time” (as in all wheel drive) relative pitch and “part time” perfect pitch.
It is relative pitch, not perfect pitch, that allows me to go to a piano and play any melody that I could sing or hear in my head. Or transcribe it into music notation.
IMHO, that website is based on a fallacy. I think perfect pitch is orthogonal to great musicianship, or even general musical ability. I believe one could be a Mozart or a Charlie Parker w/o perfect pitch but w/o relative pitch, no way. I would expect more correlation of perfect pitch with piano tuners than composers.
Perfect pitch is not black and white either. My mother, a pianist, had perfect pitch. Mine is fallible (imperfect??) and depends on how much time I have spent listening or playing music lately. Also, my accuracy is greater with instruments I play such as piano and trumpet.
Trumpet pitches sound distinct to me because of asymmetric aspects of the instrument (ie, adjacent notes use different tube lengths), and also because horn players develop a memory of the amount of effort required to produce each pitch on their instrument.
On piano, the black keys have always sounded very different than the white ones (maybe due to a certain ‘song’ I learned as a small child using just the black keys). Even on these instruments, it sometimes takes a few seconds to hone in on the pitch. For my mom, it was always instantaneous.
My pitch sense is fairly accurate in recalling a piece of music. For example, I just thought of that song which uses only black keys starting with F#, and checking on the piano, i got it right. I can sometimes use that to back into perfect pitch, which is perhaps an example of associated repertoire.
Anyway the main point is that relative pitch is much more important. I think the associated repertoire idea mentioned by CookingWithGas, is the key way to develop it.
I’ll just throw out another great example: minor sixth - beginning of the theme from Love Story (Where do I begin, to tell the story…). How could you forget a what a minor sixth is after that? Not to be confused with the equally repeated major sixth a few notes later, which is more like the old NBC chimes. ok I’ll stop now:)
I have something like perfect or relative pitch with the guitar at times. Sometimes I will just know when I have tuned it perfect without reference to anything. Then I will check it and it will be perfect.
I would like to have this with everything I hear/play musically.
You guys make it sound like “perfect” pitch is governed by one gene or something. It’s either on or off. What if the truth were much more mundane and complicated? What if… there is a range of ability in being able to hear and duplicate pitch. Maybe some people are better at “perfect pitch” and others have it only part time or “almost”? Maybe there’s a whole continuum.
When a musically inclined person hears a note played, they can “match” that note a few seconds later. What would happen if you just increased that waiting time? At what point do you not remember the note accurately? If you play a note, tell someone it’s a Middle C and then wait a while and play it again, they would probably know if it was the same note.
Some people are probably just better remembering what the note sounds like.
Furthermore, I recently (last year) read an article in a respectable publication (sorry I don’t remember where) that new scientific research indicated that perfect pitch can be an acquired skill. It makes sense to me. I don’t see why you couldn’t teach someone to remember different pitches and match them.
I hate to say this but I think Cecil’s column is a bit of an overexaggeration. For example, he talks about the U of C professor who would read sheet music and “hear” the music in his mind’s ear. Well you don’t need perfect pitch to do that, just a lot of experience and training. Cecil says: “Snatches of seen-but-not-heard music would float into his mind the way we might remember an advertising jingle.” Hearing music is a very physical action, and the “rememberance” of music is never as enjoyable as the actual physical experience, so saying “He had an experience of music most people would never know.” wasn’t actually something the professor said, but a bit of Cecil’s own wishful thinking, I think.
I think all that stuff about transposing music and perfect pitch being unpleasant for people is bullshit too. That would be like saying that playing a piece two octaves higher would be jarring for the rest of us with “relative” pitch. It would be strange, but not necessarily unpleasant. The same for the aging eardrums argument. The mind is a flexible thing, and associating pitch with particular music is a learned experience. I don’t think it would be a big deal. Not one of Cecil’s better columns. Maybe Cecil took a vacation that week.
O.k. say you can teach someone relative pitch, the question remains, why are some people born with good relative pitch, and others are born “tone deaf”?
jpg: What’s the difference between a violist and a SCUD missile?
answer: a SCUD missile is more accurate.
I also used to know a guy who had perfect pitch in B flat. He played, of course, the trumpet, and when he’d hear a note, he’d call it by a name that was a major second higher than concert pitch. i.e., he’d hear a C and call it a D, because for all the years he’d been playing the trumpet, that note was a D to him. Although that would indicate that he had developed it later in life, it turned out that he always had perfect pitch as a kid, and when he started playing trumpet, it sort of got confused for him. So he USUALLY had perfect pitch in B flat, but sometimes in C. All of which tells me that perfect pitch is related to memory and may be a particular type or application of a particular memory skill. (I wonder what other memory/cognitive tasks correlate with the presence of perfect pitch.) Also, in music school, I saw guys do parlor tricks with their talent. You could lay your forearm on the piano and a couple of guys would be able to tell you what notes you were mashing down. All of them. And some guys could transcribe orchestral music when they were listening to it, and almost as fast as they were hearing it. My first wish was to have that ability.
I would venture to say that you do not have perfect pitch, but very well developed relative pitch. I’ve never heard of anyone having perfect pitch that comes and goes. My experience with this is fairly limited, however my sister and I have played a game in the past where one of us plays a note on the piano and the other attempts to identify it (she’s a music major). We both can do this rather accurately, however neither of us claim to have perfect pitch (my methodology involves humming a pitch I recognize–usually a C–and figuring out the interval between the C and the played note). I’ve also had instances where I’ll hear a note or chord and instantly know that it’s the starting pitch for a certain song. I’ve gotten to the point where I can hum an A 440 Hz just because of the opening note of “Stairway to Heaven.” In fact I just tested myself and did hum the correct note 
I would tend to agree that the audio lessons improve one’s relative pitch, as opposed to perfect pitch, which as most sources I’ve read, is an innate ability.
Ok, on one hand you admit that you can hum a particular note, but in the next moment you say that perfect pitch is something innate (and something you don’t have) Why isn’t it a matter of degree? How much of a stretch is it to imagine that you can practice different notes, just as you did with these few, to the point where you are always accurate?
Since it’s not very useful, I doubt many people have taken the time to try this, and that’s why you don’t encounter many people with perfect pitch who have developed it, but I bet it can be done.
I suppose it would be possible to practice to attain an ability similar to those who have perfect pitch, but I think the main point is that those people who actually have perfect pitch have had it “since they could remember” and have not had to work at all to attain their ability. This is what I meant with innate. Sure, I can hum an A now no problem, but that doesn’t mean I can immediately hum any note. I would have to use my knowledge of intervals to figure out the other pitch (which is what I do when tuning timpani 
), whereas someone with perfect pitch just instantly has the ability to sing the note.
I have perfect pitch, and the thing that I find really irritating is when someone/something is playing something that is very subtly out of tune, less than a semitone out.
I can report having what I now know to be perfect pitch ever since I can remember, and when I’m listening to music, even pop tunes on the radio, I could tell you exactly what the pitch notation would be (even to the quarter tone for some singers who like to bend pitch :rolleyes:)
It really gets on my nerves :eek:
I have what is referred to as “perfect pitch”, but I believe the term is just advertising hype.
I can also sometimes tell what song is playing on the radio after hearing maybe a 1/4 second of it, from its tone…and I can tell from outside a house if a TV is on inside. I was born with pretty good ears, I guess…too bad my eyesight is so bad.
Hey Phraser, doesn’t the end of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” piss you off?
I can do that too, but I don’t claim to have perfect pitch.
Y’all are confusing perfect pitch with something else.
Phraser, I get irritated (wince and cringe) when something is out of tune too, but it’s just a matter of degree (other people around me don’t notice unless it’s really bad). The phrase “Out of tune” doesn’t mean the whole piece is shifted a few notes, it means that something in the piece is out of tune to the rest of the piece, or that one instrument is out of tune with the rest. The same concept extends to your point about singers and quarter-tones. I’ve been to concerts and operas and have noticed when singers or musicians have been off slightly (relative to each other).
Those things have nothing to do with “perfect pitch”. Phraser, you must have musical training or you wouldn’t know what key something is in. In order for perfect pitch to come into play, you must have heard a piece previously and then hear it again in a different key and know which key or how far from the original key it is. Since it’s a learned thing to know a musical piece is supposed to be in a particular key I fail to understand why that would be irritating on an auditory level the way “out of tune” is. There is real physics to describe why certain note combinations are “discordant” or pleasing to the human ear, and moving a piece up and down the scale doesn’t change that relationship.
If you’re unusually sensitive to “discord” that is not the same as having perfect pitch.
I don’t have “perfect pitch”, however, I can tell if a piece is in a different key than usual, if it’s a piece I’m familiar with. At any rate, hearing something in a different key is a much different experience than hearing it “out of tune”.
I don’t have perfect pitch, but I have a pretty good ear. I just listened to it. What pisses you off?
Rusalka: I “knew” what keys things were in before i learned what keys were. That was a vocabulary I learned later on. As for transposing a piece, that doesn’t bother me as much now that I have done a bunch more music theory… it used to confuse me as a small child- i knew the piece was the same but didn’t recognise it as the same because the pitches were different… happy birthday in g was different to happy birthday in f. I’m not put off by dissonance or dischordance, just notes which are supposed to be the same (eg singers singing a duet, both supposed to be singing the same not but not quite getting there). It sounds somehow less… bright? I don’t know. I can tell they’re not singing the same note and it irritates me.
I don’t much care whether this is called perfect pitch or not… it’s both useful and irritating…
As for queen, yes, i find the end of “somebody to love” irritating.