# Why can't I remember the pitch of a musical note?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-i-remember-the-pitch-of-a-musical-note/229389>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 15, 2004, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-i-remember-the-pitch-of-a-musical-note/229389 "2004-02-15T20:25:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![purplycow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/7feea3/32.png) [@purplycow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplycow)\
**Post date:** [February 19, 2004, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-i-remember-the-pitch-of-a-musical-note/229389/21 "2004-02-19T07:00:26Z")

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> [@NoCoolUserName](#):
>
> 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.

Ahh, that happened to me too. Plus, I’ve always associated “do” with C when it comes to solfege. So when our choirmistress taught us some Kodaly exercises with the hand signals and started with a non-C major “do” I ended up really confused :o … But on the whole perfect pitch has been really useful 😃

Does having perfect pitch automatically mean you have relative pitch as well? I think I have both but I am not sure if this follows naturally.

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**Author:** ![NoCoolUserName](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5fc32e/32.png) [@NoCoolUserName](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NoCoolUserName)\
**Post date:** [February 19, 2004, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-i-remember-the-pitch-of-a-musical-note/229389/22 "2004-02-19T15:10:28Z")

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Perfect Pitch ™ has been described to me as a very long tonal memory. Once you hear a note, you never forget it.  
Relative Pitch ™ is the ability to know/sing any specific interval given a starting note.

If you already know every darn note anyway, why would you need Relative Pitch? 🙂

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