A friend of mine has what I think is called in English “perfect pitch” – he can tell you that a melody he just heard was “A, G, B, E”, for example. I can’t.
Short question: Now, why can’t I? Short answer: I don’t have perfect pitch.
Long question: What’s that got to do with it? I can remember what color my favorite t-shirt is; color is dependent on the wave-length of light, just as pitch is dependent on the wave-length of sound, right? So why can I remember what “green” looks like, but not what “A” sounds like? Also, why can I remember what the difference in pitch between “A” and “C” is (and reliably sing a “C” when I’m given an A to start off from?
In the Master’s column on perfect pitch, he also refers to it as pitch memory.
As I can often perform the same trick—I can hear a note or chord and recognize the tonality—I can attest that “pitch memory” is a better way to describe it. I have played the piano for almost twenty years and, over that time, I have acquired a strong memory for certain notes or chords when I hear them in another context.
You might have a hard time remembering a specific note for three reasons.
One, you may have a hard time reproducing the note with your voice. In order to hit the note it requires a fair degree of precision with your vocal cords—and it requires you to keep one note in your head while singing a different note with your mouth. This is a trick most people aren’t prepared to do.
Two, even if you have the tones of a piano memorized, you may not instantly recognize them when you hear them played on a clarinet or a guitar or a timpani. Other instruments produce other distinct waveforms and recognition isn’t automatic.
Three, unless you play an instrument, you might not know what the note is. I don’t know your musical background, but if you don’t have a name to put to it, you might only recognize it—but you wouldn’t know what to call it.
And looking at Gyan9’s response, how can you be certain that you do remember the color of your shirt? Have you ever tried to reproduce that precise color with paints or colored pencils without actually having that shirt in front of you? It’s not as easy as you think—ask any painter. You might come up with a color that’s off by one or two shades from the actual wavelength—a small but detectable difference to your eyes—but if you’re off by two percent on the wavelength on a musical note, it might well be another note. Or another octave.
Let me explain. I know the limits of my vocal range. I also have a very good grasp of musical scales, chord progressions, and tone intervals.
So when someone asks me what key something is in. I simply run through my range. For instance, I know the lowest note I can sing is “D”, almost two octaves below Middle C. Let’s say the song in question is in the key of “A.” I sing the root note (A), sing the fifth, (E), sing the fourth (D), then attempt to sing the third (C#). I can’t do the third, but I can sing the fourth, so the song is therefore in the key of “A.”
Now, I used to be friends with a blind musician, who had true “perfect pitch.” I was driving him home after a gig one night, and an ambulance went through the intersection ahead of us with the “two tone” siren going (high-low sound). He instantly piped up with “A-flat, D, A-flat, D” and after going through my routine, he was exactly right - but he did it instantly.
i think it probably has more to do with actually knowing the note names, as well as being able to identify a note regardless of the octave.
Many people have “perfect pitch” in that they can recreate a note instantly, but may not be aware of WHAT note it was.
Many singers in particular that maybe never learned music theory or even how to read sheet music, may still have “perfect pitch”.
It’s a shame Cecil’s column on this didn’t talk to any linguists. The identification of absolute pitch is not needed in most languages - indeed it can cause confusion by clouding the important sounds of words. Relative pitch is used as emphasis, or to change meaning (eg a rising pitch changing a statement into a question). There is a greater prevalence of what we term ‘perfect pitch’ among native speakers of languages where something closer to absolute pitch takes a role.
Thanks so far; but I don’t get this. Why do I have to think of a different note than the one I sing? What I am trying to do is essentially this: I would like to be able to listen to, say, A played all over, then take an hour in which I don’t hear the note, and go back after that time to sing it without having it played again. But I can’t – I don’t even come close, nor do most people I know. So I think “A”, and try to sing “A”, but what I think is “A” isn’t.
I realize that, and apologize for not specifying what I was talking about – mainly piano and singing.
That’s of course also true, but part of the problem: I know what the names of the notes are, but I can’t associate a pitch to them. My friend with pitch memory, of course, can – is that all training? I don’t play an instrument, but my friend has been playing the piano since he was four.
I also have very good relative pitch. I can tell you what kind of chord you played (major, minor, diminished, augmented, etc) but I couldn’t tell you the root. I can tell what mode a scale is in, but not the key.
A guy I know has a good trick. He doesn’t really have perfect pitch, but if you play a note, he can sing it, and then tell you the note because he has memorized the “feel” of singing every note in his range. If the note is outside his range, he can try singing a harmonic or common interval, and usually deduces the right note.
The difficulty yuo face is that you didn’t learn to “feel” the A (or other) where you need to place it to reproduce it.
The voice is not an instrument that can be compared to others, where you can acutally see what you are doing. It depends on a lot of factors that even have nothing to do with the structure of your vocal cords (who determine for a great deal the tessitura)
You need to train first of all the use of your breath and what is named “placing” your voice = you must feel the resonance where it needs to be in order to be able to reproduce the exact sound you want and where you like it to be and which colour you want to give it.
I would recommend you to start humming using the resonance of the sinus cavities. Depending the hight of the sound you should feel it as if the sound resides “behind” the upper part of your nose, or higher up in your front and by all of this you also feel it in the sinus of what is called “the mask” . I can’t describe this well in English
In any case: you must avoid to “feel” your throat when humming because when you feel it, you are busy to push your larinx upwarts blocking the vocal cords and at the same time the back of your palate also blocks the free flow of the air.
It must feel as if you let the air pass behind the larynx.
When you do that correctly, you should start to feel dizzy at first but that sensation is temporarely.
When you can humm a sound correctly, you can also sing it correctly just by opening your mouth on open vowel you feel comfortable with.
Once you can do that and go back to hummming the tone without any difficulty/force, you have it placed. Once you can do it on any chosen vowel you can also do it with addition of any chosen consonants, placing those always “on your lips” = avoiding any consonant to block the larynck or make the back of you palate block your throat.
The whole thing must start by learning how to master your diafragm for being able to dose your breath.
That can best be trained by taking a deep breath, learn to feel your diafragm and its mucles by holding your breath a few seconds and then start counting on an uninterrupted breath flow. This also without “feeling” anything moving in your throat = by imagining that your breath passes “behind” the larynx .
Counting like that is an excellent breath-control training.
I think it was Caruso (or Gigli) who once said: “The breath is the chair of the voice.”
Which is absulutely correct.
About having what you call “absolute pitch”, it is something you seem to be born with.
Nevertheless it can be trained very effectively with what my teachers named “musical dictation” = someone plays a piece and you write it down.
You can train it also for example by learning to play the violin, because then you are absolutely required to “hear” correctly if you don’t want to sound like a singing cat. I didn’t hear the B-flat correctly until I started to play the violin (which had as side-result that it became the instrument of my preference at cost of the piano).
I always thought some people simply had a talent for this, and that while it can be learned, it is considerably more difficult for some than others.
I have pretty good pitch memory. If I hear a tune in a recording (and get it into my head that that is the “right” key), and later hear the same tune transposed, it drives me nuts. My wife, who is a semi-professional singer, yells at me all the time because, while singing along with some pop star in the shower, I shred my vocal cords trying to be a shrieking first tenor. Out of horror at my poor technique, and concern over vocal self-mutilation, she’d tell me over and over that it’s no sin to be a baritone, drop it a half-an-octave, find my fach, etc. And I’d say “yeah, but that’s the wrong key.” This would only annoy her more, because to her, it doesn’t matter. Since transposition preserves all the intervals exactly, it’s still the same tune. Well, no it isn’t I say, because it’s in a different key. And I can tell, every time. “Gaaaah!” she would scream. She picked up on it eventually, and tried to fool me playing something on a keyboard. I was like “no, no, NO that’s the wrong damn key!” She stared at me and said “I raised it half a step! How can you tell? You have no musical training, you bastard!” To which I replied “What, you can’t?”
I don’t know a C from an E, but I’ll know the difference days apart. I suppose if I took the time I would remember them all, but I’m too lazy.
When it comes to singing I think the best singers learn their own abilities and transpose what they are singing to match more than the other way around.
Voices are pretty unique and even a good impressionist will eventually “lose the illusion”. Much better to sing in your own voice and range.
Hopefully you’re not thinking of one note and singing a different note. You’re trying to hit the same one.
But think of it this way. Suppose you can remember the last note you heard but you can’t always reproduce it. If you try to hit the note and fail, you’ll forget what the target note sounded like, yes? Now your mind is stuck on the note you hit rather than the one you aimed at. In order to recall a note, you have to be able to ignore all kinds of other tones you’re likely to hear: a honking car horn, a telephone, someone’s Discman, a ringing bell, and your own voice. You have to lock on to the A you want and keep it safe in your head.
If he’s been playing since he was four, he can have learned it easily in that time. Naming the notes is only part of it, yes, but through repetition he has burned certain notes into his memory.
I can call up a number of useful songs in my head that contain notes I know. From a Leon Redbone song, “Diddy Wah Diddy,” I can pick out the lowest E string on a guitar. From there I can get to A, an easy fourth up. I can hear the song “Shook Me All Night Long” in my head at will, and that distinctive three-finger G guitar chord. Or the Bb second inversion from “Downtown,” the crowd number in Little Shop of Horrors. I can get an Eb from Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time” and a D from Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville.” (He writes a lot in D, actually.) And no matter what I last listened to, I can pull these songs up in my head, precisely on-pitch.
Even though I can call up a C, D, Eb, and E, I can’t pull a Db out of my ear. I simply don’t have a strongly-remembered song with a distinctive Db.
Training is the key: training and exposure. When I worked at a piano store, the salesmen would demonstrate the features of the instrument, including transposition (moving the notes up or down in increments of half-steps) and tuning (moving the notes up or down in increments of 1/10th Hz). I discovered at that job that I could tell if someone had left an instrument even a few ticks out of tune. I’d sit down to play and I could hear it was a tiny bit sharp or flat. I don’t know if I can still pull off this trick after all this time, though.
Oh, I’m not saying my wife’s wrong. She isn’t. She would know a hell of a lot better than me, since she’s trained for years in voice and can play. The problem is, if I’ve learned the “original” tune in a different key, and I hear it transposed, it bothers me. It’s grating somehow. So for my own personal amusement, I’d rather sing like I’ve got my balls in a vice than transpose downward, because if I do the latter, it’s no longer personally amusing.
This is, according to my wife, a really stupid thing to do, and she’s probably right again. If I listened to a recording of myself (she’s threatened on more than one occasion to make one when I’m not aware), I’d probably want to crawl into a hole. I’m probably putting nodules on my vocal cords or something. I don’t care. I have no aspirations to be a performer. My wife thinks I may have perfect pitch, and considers it wasted on me, but what can I do?
It comes in handy when I want to tune my guitar, though.
to me color and music are very similar in the way they are percieved by the brain.
Some people are very good at naming shades of colors though most of us have a hard time without a basis to start from. For instance if I showed you a bunch of yellow swatches of various shades most people could easily lay them in order of brightness, but take an individual swatch and it is hard to tell if it belongs on the high or low end of true yellow without other swatches to compare to. By the same token other colors affect how we percieve things.
A yellow swatch on a dark blue background will look brighter than the same swatch on a light green background.
Music is similar in that while a single note may be hard to identify, a short series gives perspective. Ambient noise and other instrumentation can also very much affect someones initial perception of a tone.
I like to transpose things downward to fit my voice, but that’s precisely because I do play at the same time. It’s like reading something in German, translating it to English in your head, and singing it in French. It’s very engaging and makes me feel like I’m using much more of my brain than simply pounding out the notes I’m familiar with.
Different keys have different tonal qualities to them, too. In some registers I can growl and be bluesy; in others I’m too far out of that range. Of course, I harmonize with the melody for fun, so if the singer isn’t in my range, I make up a harmonic line that is. I find it fun to explore the harmonic possibilities of the song, especially if it’s a song I know by heart.
Your wife is right about being too harsh on your voice, but if you don’t care, I guess that’s up to you. My roommate, with little training, can do a similar trick to yours: while listening to Dave Matthews, I asked him to put on a particular Weird Al song, and he began singing that other song on-pitch even though he was listening to a song in a different key. That ain’t easy.
I sang in the L.A. All-City Choir (way, way back in the high school days) with a guy who had perfect pitch. When the choir director asked us to sing the piece up 1/2 step, to get a different feel for it, he almost went nuts because he had to sight-transpose every darned note. The first, and only, time I was happy that I don’t have perfect pitch.
