I just listened to an interview with Jo Stafford. Though she was often called “Miss Perfect Pitch,” she said in the interview she did not have it nor want it. She claimed that a singer would have a hard(er) time singing with perfect pitch.
Her exact words with a person with perfect pitch always sings a G Sharp as a G sharp and never and F Flat.
She went on to say she could never have done the Darlene Edwards persona or her other novelties “Tim-TaShun,” “Fuedin’ and Fighting” etc if she had it.
She also said something about singers need to be able to slur cords?
What was she talking about?
On another question. She said some words are unsingable? What is that about.
Concert standard tuning places a middle A at 440 Hz. Symphonies and pianos usually adhere to this… Other instruments or small groups often not so much. 440 is just an arbitrary value that all modern symphony instruments have enough tuning range to accommodate. There is no underlying reason it couldn’t be another number, but a standard is needed and 440 works.
Each octave (doubling of frequency) on a piano has 12 notes, counting all white and black notes. On a conventionally tuned piano each note has a frequency 1.0595 times higher than the note below. This is called equal temperament.
A given tune will mostly use only 8 of those. Which 8 get used determines what key the tune is in.
The notes on a piano are a half step apart. It is called a half step, because most of the notes in a given scale will be a whole step apart. For a major scale there will be half steps between the 3rd and 4th and 7th and 8th notes.
For the most harmonic sound, you want most if the notes in the key to have ratios that are expressible as ratios of small integers. For major keys you want the third note of the scale exactly 5/4 the 4th note exactly 4/3 and the 5th note 3/2 the fundamental, for example. The fundimental, 3rd, 5th (and usually the octave) form the major chord. On an equal tempered piano, these will be off by on the order of 1%. But they will be equally off in all keys, and you don’t have to retune the piano to play in a different key.
A decent musician on a trombone or violin will adapt to the key and play the notes in the more harmonic ratios…and even beginners will tune guitar strings in perfect 4/3 ratios and violin strings in 3/2 ratios. Harmonicas come in different keys rather than being equal tempered.
So the first problem is what to call perfect pitch…is it the equal temperament of a piano or the the better sounding ratiometric tuning? Depends on if the singer is accompanied by piano or a guitar.
If the instrument is playing the melody rather than just harmony a singer will blend with the instrument and words will be hard to understand… Unless the singer is little off at least at the beginning and end of each syllable. But the singer needs to be dead on when holding long notes. No, they don’t so much intentionally think about this while singing, but with practice it becomes instinctive. Singers often add some tremolo (pitch varying up and down quickly) even if not consciously that also helps the voice stand out.
This is why being a good singer is not the same as always singing exactly the nominal pitch of the note.
My spouse actually does have perfect pitch. It didn’t hamper him being a musician. Even if he can identify, produce, or tune an exact 440 pitch, or any other pitch you care to name, it’s not like it causes him some sort of weird pain if the group he’s playing with tunes to 447.5 or 402 or whatever, he just adjusts. What does annoy him is that deviations from the group tuning are much more apparent to him than to most of the rest of us - but that’s also true of people with highly trained and refined relative pitch.
Yes, that is how I have always understood it. Perfect pitch means you can tell the absolute pitch of a note without having to compare it to some other, reference note that you have just heard (or are now hearing). It does not mean that your singing or playing is forced to conform to some inflexible standard. If the rest of the band is tuned with its middle A a few Hz off 440 Hz (borrowing Kevbo’s numbers) you might know it, when they do not, but you can still play or sing along with them fine.
If by “symphonies” you mean “symphony orchestras”, no they don’t. The pitch is usually higher than 440 and if they use a piano it is also tuned accordingly.
What’s important to a musician (singer or instrument) is relative pitch: Your Ds should be a certain amount higher pitched than your Cs, and your Es should be a certain amount higher than your Ds, and so on. It matters very little just how high or low you are in absolute terms, so long as all of the relationships between the notes are right.
What’s usually referred to as perfect pitch means that you can hear and/or produce not just the relative pitches, but the absolute pitches: You can tell, for instance, that the C the singer is producing is a different pitch than the C you heard last week or last year. Now, perfect absolute pitch naturally implies perfect relative pitch, but it could also be an annoyance: If you’re used to hearing a song in one absolute pitch, it might sound wrong in a different absolute pitch.
Compare, for example, a song that you’re used to hearing in one tempo, but which you then hear in a different tempo: Even though you can speed up or slow down, it’s not going to sound quite right to you, and it might make it a little more difficult for you to sing along.
This is true for a friend of mine - he’s got perfect pitch, and he’s also in a local band that plays bars and small gigs. They do pretty much entirely covers, and it really makes it hard for him when they have to adjust the pitch for the band’s singing range.
In order to keep it from being too hard for him to deal (he is one who claims that “wrong” pitch is painful - like nails on a chalkboard*) they alter as MUCH as they can about the original song if they have to change the pitch. So it’ll be faster or slower, or the beat structure will change, or they will use different harmonies, anything to make it distinct. That way he can think of it as a different song, and not have such a hard time.
*According to him, Hell is a Karaoke bar.
I see this is a zombie thread started by a banned poster. However, I didn’t see this part of the question addressed.
The only thing I can guess is that we sing *vowels *(and the nasal sounds are hummable - they can have pitch). So a word that had only the briefest of vowel sounds - a schwa - with non-nasal consonants might be near impossible to really enunciate at a particular pitch.
“Curt” comes to mind.
Or, are there words made of entirely voices sounds? Does “sh” count as a word (it does in Scrabble)?
I can whistle a perfect 440 A. It comes from having set my clocks to WWV for 40 years. The ‘second’ tone, repeated 60 times a minute, is a 440 sine wave tone. I learned to whistle it. I tune everything to that.
Good point. R is a nasal, and thus singable. I can’t think of any English words that just have a schwa vowel and no nasals.
Similarly, the only voiceless sounds in English are neither vowels nor nasals.
Whispered words aren’t singable. *Sh *is the only word I can think of that is just a voiceless sound.
In a chorus, or something, with nonsense syllables, “ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch…” or “t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t…” or the like would be unsingable, but those sorts of things are all I can think of.
My favorites are “word” and “world.” Tony Bennett sings “worrrrrrrrrrrrrld,” which is something I’ve been taught not to do. But if you can sing like Tony Bennett, you’re allowed to break that rule.
This is very interesting: I have very poor absolute pitch, but I decided to test how poor by whistling a middle C without any reference. I tested this with an electronic tuner and to my surprise I was only 20 cents flat. How does this compare to perfect pitch? How many cents would a note have to be off before someone with perfect pitch could pick it up? I assume no-one’s hearing is good enough to pick up a difference of 1 or 2 cents.