I am a musician from Massachusetts with “perfect pitch”, and I would like to share some experience with you that may be of interest to you and your readers on this subject.
First off, the reason why I put the phrase “perfect pitch” in quotes is that I believe no such thing exists. I have participated in an experiment that may help explain why. When I was in college, I had a roommate who was not only musically inclined, but also your standard computer programming geek. (His girlfriend and now wife also had “perfect pitch, and was very useful in her job at McDonald’s because she knew which machine timers were going off based on the pitches they produced. Isn’t it great when these people find each other?) He had a midi setup in which a synthesizer was connected to his computer for the purpose of recording music. Well, he wrote a program in which the computer randomly selected a note. Your job was to guess the note it played, and play it on the keyboard. If you played the correct note, the computer randomly selected another pitch. If you played an incorrect note, the computer played the same pitch until you found the correct one. Once you completed a series of notes, the computer then produced a series of calculations including: the average number of attempts for each pitch, the average time for each pitch, the average time it took you to find each interval, etc. Well, guess what, everyone who tried this out produced better times with more attempts. From this I am concluding that for musicians, the pitches are learned over time. The person that sings a note almost instantly upon being asked for it does not have “perfect pitch”, but rather relative pitch really, really fast.
Now, having really, really, fast relative pitch, as you suggested with “perfect pitch”, is not always a good thing. I sing in my church choir at Boston University, and yes, I am often used as a pitch pipe. Last month, we performed Bach’s “St. John Passion.” – with Baroque instruments – the ones that were used in Bach’s day 300 years ago. Guess what? Baroque instruments are a half step lower in pitch than what we are used to. So what we know as a “F#” sounded like an “G” back then. This created a nightmare for me, because I had to transpose the entire 2 ½ hour piece down a half step in my mind!” There were occasions in rehearsals when I was throwing off my entire section by singing the notes slightly too high.
So while it’s cool to be able to spit out a note when asked, I’d prefer to just carry a pitch pipe around. Unfortunately, while I believe relative pitch can be learned, I don’t believe it is something that can be unlearned.
You raise a good point SPinner, although as I recall baroque pitch is not quite a semitone, it is slightly less. I used to play baroque woodwinds in lower pitch - yes they’re still made - now I just stick to drums.
If the pitch of modern instruments differs from older ones, then A has not always been 220/ 440 cycles, and perfect pitch must be relative.
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Cecil’s column can be found on-line at the links thoughtfully provided by Duck Duck Goose.
The column (including Slug Signorino’s illustration) can also be found on pages 236-239 of Cecil Adams’ book “The Straight Dope Tells All”.
The topic has also been previously discussed here:
Que? How does that follow? Just because old instruments are tuned differently that doesn’t mean perfect pitch recognition doesn’t exist, it just means the label for the pitches is different and is learned.
You know the old line about a rose by any other name smelling just as sweet. An A by any other name would still be 220/440 cycles.
Sorry, Picmr, I don’t think that posting links for a newbie who just got here 5 minutes ago is a “giveaway”. I never saw the point in yelling at them and waiting for them to post it, tapping your toe impatiently. I always thought it was much better just to go ahead and post it yourself, so we could all get on with the conversation.
(Arnold does have a life, you know. Just because he’s so good at this stuff doesn’t mean that we can all start hitting the Back button whenever we see there’s no link, saying, “Oh, Arnold will take care of it…”)
Duck Duck Goose, I read picmr’s remark “what a giveaway” as meaning that your behaviour reminded him of another poster that used to frequent these boards, and had the same posting style as you. Unbelievable you say? Well, some people have no difficulties in believing the impossible.
Oop. Didn’t mean to cause confusion Duck Duck Goose. I meant what Arnold said. Seemed vaguely amusing at the time. Your posting of the links is of course perfectly appropriate.
In response to Irishman: as I said, my memory is that the difference between pitches is not a semitone.
My memory is that one cannot play a modern instrument with (copies of) baroque instruments and transpose. They are out of tune. I haven’t played seriously for a while (last thing I did with a recorder was muck around on some pop record), so it’s been a while: I’m off to find a citation.
This would suggest that when played on “original instruments”, A does not equal A#, and thus if pitch were absolute it must have annoyed the hell out of some people in the eighteen century.
Huh? I can see that an eighteenth-century person with perfect pitch would be annoyed with our music, being almost a semitone sharp, but why would they have a problem with the music they’re used to? The pitch is absolute, so a person with said talent or skill could distinguish from memory between 440 Hz and 420 Hz, and the more unfamiliar one would surely sound awkward, but the lack of familiarity would be the only reason it would sound awkward.
I’m not sure I understand the logic of the OP–he says that
perfect pitch is a fiction–it’s just very skillful relative pitch
it makes it impossible for him to transpose
Doesn’t the last statement contradict the first? If you have perfect relative pitch all you’d need was the new opening note of the piece & you’d instantly be able to transpose it.
No. Not at all. Whether you call it perfect pitch or very skillful relative pitch (about what I call it,) once you’ve learned what the pitches sound like, the knowledge stays with you. Each note has a certain sound, and the pitch is “supposed” to sound like it. My friend who conducted one of the singing groups I used to be in would occasionally start a song in a different key, to see if we sounded better. If he didn’t tell me this before we started, I would go insane because what I was singing didn’t match what I saw on the page, and the notes didn’t sound right. For me, it’s like trying to read a post where every word is spelled horribly wrong. Cognitive Dissonance.
It’s somewhat limiting. I don’t like singing in a different key than the original. I have a hard time matching “unintentional” new keys, especially if I’m singing harmony (of course that’s not true if the key change is written in.) I didn’t have this problem when my pitch was less “perfect.”
And there are degrees. I don’t feel confident enough in my relative pitch to act as a human pitch pipe in a performance, although I’ll do it for informal singing. But I’ll stop digressing - it’s probably easier to take musical dictation or transpose on paper with “perfect” pitch, but (at least for me) sometimes it can be damn hard to vocally transpose.