Having perfect pitch was brought up in the “C instruments” thread…
I’ve a faint idea what exactly it is and found some answers on sites, but I trust real people more.
It’s like when you hear any note and automatically “know” if it’s a C, Bb, or F# or whatever not it is?
You have to be born with it?
I’ve heard there’s no such thing…my 14 yo’s former piano teacher used to bang on about her own perfect pitch regularly..it was like a mantra :roll:
Somewhere I heard that all newborn babies have perfect pitch (not the screaming I believe…). How they test that I don’t know.
Trisha
This is not from my own experience but information which appears in John Sloboda’s book The Musical Mind. He concludes that there is such a thing as perfect or absolute pitch and that it can be learned. People who start musical training very early (before age six) are much more likely to have it than later starters. Absolute pitch seems to be a matter of learning to verbally code a small range of pitches (over a 30 Hz range). Within that range people with perfect pitch don’t discriminate any better than people without perfect pitch. If I were going to be able to get another musical ability, though, perfect pitch wouldn’t be it. I’d much rather have great harmonic ability. My mother could listen to a popular song and harminize it at the piano immediately.
Once I was in a nearby park playing my whistle. Some guy wandered by and said I was playing in D. I wasn’t. I was playing in G but I was playing a D whistle. He claimed to have perfect pitch. If he did maybe he was responding to something about the bell tone of the whistle rather than the key I was actually playing in.
Steve
There are two things with a right to be called perfect pitch if they actually existed. Absolute perfect pitch would be the ability to tell what any note was just by hearing it in isolation. So if you heard G followed by C below that followed by G below that you’d know that you’d heard a G, C a fifth below and G a fourth below that. Absolute relative pitch is the ability to say that you heard a first note, a second note a fifth below it and a third note a fourth below that. Relative perfect pitch would enable you to identify intervals but absolute perfect pitch would enable you to identify not just the interval but the actual notes by name.
Strictly speaking nobody could actually have perfect pitch. The reason for this is that sound varies in pitch apparently continuously and not in discrete quanta. Think of a trombone slide or a bent guitar note in a blues. For this to be possible, matching, for sound pitches, must be non transitive. What this means is that, no matter how refined your hearing, there must be pitches so close together that you can’t tell them apart by direct comparison but could tell them apart by reference to a third pitch which sounded to you the same as one but not the other, thus proving their distinctness. This shows that both absolute and relative perfect pitch is mathematically impossible since nobody claims to be unable to hear a glissando because their hearing is too good.
I think what people really mean by perfect pitch is very good pitch. So someone with ‘perfect’ absolute pitch can tell, to within a couple of cents perhaps, whether a note is middle C, just a bit sharp of middle C or just a bit flat of middle C and so on for any note. Someone with ‘perfect’ relative pitch would be able to tell, to within a couple of cents perhaps, what an interval is or is ‘trying’ to be. I have no doubt at all that people exist with both these abilities but just how close to the unattainable perfection they come I don’t know.
Perfect pitch is when the banjo hits the dumpster bin. 
Absolute pitch does exist. I don’t know how much is inbred, how much is acquired by a long musical training, but I’ve seen it at least twice.
One example I met is a singer. Nothing fancy–church, gospel, and teacher of music in junior high. Ask her to sing the A, and you can tune to it as to a fork… Amazing, and cross-tested with an electronic tuner (as I don’t have perfect pitch!).
Another one I know is a local Hooligan piper (and I weigh my words…), Pascal.
Coming to our local session without his usual gas factory–with both hands in his pockets, as we’d say here.
Noticing it, I hand him my Copeland nickel D (which I wouldn’t play publicly: decided this was one too loud for my skills…).
He looks at it, blows in it, comments “it’s flat, isn’t it ?”. Since I know the instrument, and had it warm in my breast-pocket, I dare and meakly challenge a better musician than I am: “Well… if you say so, maybe you know better”
He toots again, ponders, says “nah, they’re all sharp”. Takes a chair, joins the circle, toots in the ear of one fiddler, and has a chat with him. Said fiddler picks his Generation, plays along… Then they start whispering a message around the session.
Next thing you know, the guitar and banjo (him being the session leader…) start retuning their instruments. Pascal the Uillean piper was right.
If this is ain’t perfect pitch, what is?
NB: he refuses to get tunable whistles. He knows his untunable low whistles are right… so the strings in his band better tune to him!
Well, strictly speaking nothing is. That’s mathematically provable, even if my attempt to sketch the proof wasn’t clear. Loosely speaking, perfect pitch is pretty much what you describe—someone whose sence of pitch is as reliable as a tuner. That’s good enough for all practical purposes.
A lot more people then you might think have good relative pitch. That’s why you rarely hear someone whistle a wrong note. The problem is knowing your instrument well, and having a great deal of experience. After playing a long practice or show, I can generally identify the roots and chords of the predominant keys we used. If we used a lot of G songs, I can pick out G,B,D usually. But this fades the more removed I get from my playing time. It’s probably something I could develop better, but not being a singer, I don’t see how it would be usefull. I think if your ear is good enough to tune your instruments, that’s all you need.
Seth
You’re certainly right. And I don’t know how often those endowed with “absolute” pitch need to re-tune to some reference like a fork, or an organ pipe, or how much they’re accustomed to said reference.
Btw… why is ITM in D? Same as why is GHP “A” now above Bb. These are the limits of the relative “perfect” pitch.
It’s Hector Berlioz, and others, striving to get some order in early symphonic orchestras who noticed the concert C had moved up a half-tone every century, on the average. This was monitored by the vintage of the “perfect” instruments that ganged together.
They didn’t state any pitch was wrong per se, but understood some normative standard was needed, hence the introduction of our modern standard “A” at 440 Hz…
Somebody once told me “Never sing a capella unless you have perfect pitch.”
I actually think it would be worse than useless, it would be unpleasant. Most of us tune our instruments to the point where we can’t hear any discrepency, or to the point where our tuners can’t. If you could detect tiny differences in pitch much more subtle than everyone else can detect, then I suspect almost every performance you listen to would sound slightly out of tune. That would just be painful I think.
I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with such perfect pitch they could hear a note and say “that’s an A, but its at 438 instead of 440.”
What I have encountered several times is singers with such good muscle memory that if you tell them to sing an A, they can produce a note out of thin air which is a reasonably well in tune A.
–James
That’s exactly right, at least for some. I’ve a blind friend who has perfect (okay, for the mathematics gurus out there, very good) absolute and relative pitch. On more than one occasion I’ve seen him pull all the strings off his guitar, oil the fretboard, and then install new strings, tune it up by ear and then ask me to double check with my tuner and he’s “dead on” by a good-quality electronic tuner. But, he cringes through performances that I thoroughly enjoy in my blissful ignorance… 
Yeah. It’s actually a mystery to me too.
I don’t know about the limits of relative perfect pitch. I think the convention to play a lot in D probably has something to do with that being the standard key for Uilleann pipes and a very comfortable key for fiddlers. I can’t see that it would go back to the days of wandering harpists but I might be wrong.
When did that occur? Late 1920s , early 30s? It’s a bit of a problem for those of us who like old flutes and concertinas although you can have a concertina adapted.
Of course, this whole argument is rendered moot at the first appearance of a set of pipes in a session. NO one can tune perfectly to them using their regular tuners. The u. pipes of course use a completely different tuning scale - ‘just temperment’ not ‘equal temperment’. Some fiddle players are capable enough to handle this transition, though most of the ones that show up to session out here are married to their @#*! elec. tuners. 
Oh yeah, that is assuming the pipes are in tune with themseles in the first place!
A=440 was formally adopted in the United States in 1920.
–James
most of the people I’ve known that claimed to have “perfect pitch” seemed to always be out of tune. usually in my band we tune to the person with the most strings, the 12-string wins.
Relative perfect pitch is how people play by ear. They hear a song and automatically know which notes to play, usually on the first try, even if they could not tell you the name of the notes they were playing (my dad was like that). Someone on this thread said that perfect pitch is not another musical ability they would want. I say that it is a great ability to have. When I hear a song, I know exactly what the notes are, as soon as they sound. Who wouldn’t want to be able to do that? You don’t need music! And when playing with others, or with CD’s, knowing which note or which chord they are playing is very useful and fun.
JP
Actually, much earlier: A=440 was assessed in mid 18th century (though internationally spread later). Let me see my books…
Original comparisons of various orchestral pitches (different within Paris, or within Vienna) were works of Frenchman Lissajous and Prussian Scheibler.
The first noted the gradual rise of concert pitches with the time, while the latter invented a true sonometer giving the absolute number of “vibrations per second” (H. Hertz wasn’t born yet…) as early as 1834… after 20 years of research.
Led by Scheibler, a scientific congress established in Stuttgart, 1834, the A=880 “vibrations per second”. Which we would call today 440 cycles/second or Hertz. This was established by averaging Scheibler’s samples.
However, by the time Scheibler experimented his method, then sampled the various pitchges in use, some orchestras in Europe had already crept up to A=900 v.p.s. (a semitone higher!) when they were compared again at the Exposition Universelle of 1855.
This is were Berlioz weighed in (being also a reputed critic) and accused the wind instrument makers to be the main responsible for this pitch drift.
Whoever the scapegoat, it did cause serious practical troubles, esp. since singers could less and less follow the written pitch (imagine you’re singing the Queen of the Night, while the orchestra rose a full tone and a half since Mozart, and you’re supposed to follow!).
However, since some kind of apparatus was available, orchestras adopted at that time some kind of reference to “freeze” at least their own sound.
Few scientifically aware makers, like Boehm, offered to tune your flute to Paris, Berlin or Vienna pitch.
Some measured orchestral A references, first half of 19th century, and sparing you the decimals:
1836, Paris Opéra Comique = 442
In 1857 already:
Paris Opéra = 448…
Berlin Opera = 448
Vienna Conservatory = 445
Milan Scala = 452
London = 452 (up to 455 in some theaters)
Note that one century before (ca. 1750), the average A was at ca. 420 Hz. i.e. about a full tone lower than 445.
It seems one of the lowest pitches was reported by Leonard Euler, the mathematician, with an A=397 (!) in Saint Petersbourg, 1739.
Now, do you still wonder why Russians have such great bass voices ? 
Seriously you may see now how what was originally “C” became a D in Ireland, while the Scots and Bretons drifted from a supposed G to A then to Bb. All used traditionnally made “folk” woodwinds…
Music and math are similar, but also very, very different. Musical ability or sensitivity does not need to be (nor can be) proven by mathematics.
(Okay, so I haven’t read the rest of this thread, and I’m sorry if this has already been touched on.)
Musical pitch perception and visual color perception are very similar. The guy who advertises a course in perfect pitch in music magazines (can’t remember his name and I’m too lazy to go digging for it…Burgess or something?) does an excellent job of comparing the two senses. His take would be that like in a rainbow a yellowish hue can turn to orange with all the colors in between, so can a musical pitch go from one color to another. Perfect pitch is the ability of the ear/brain to recognize various pitches and assign a name to them, much the way our eyes can tell that orange is orange and yellow is yellow, and still see all the colors in between. The eye sees the colors, the brain gives them names. Likewise, the ears hear the notes, the brain gives them names. The in-between notes are the ‘teals’ and ‘mauves’ of hearing.
Okay, I’ll go read the rest of the thread now…