I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…
How far does it go on your own case? Are there degrees of it?
Can you do the level harmony recognition like in the video below, or it's more the individual notes when played on it's own?
I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.
Here in Brazil we have churches that allows members to sing songs from a book that we call it Christian Harp[1] as part of the worship, the result is a lot of people who can't sing to save their own life end up singing and musicians from the church try to find the song key and chords in real time, it ends up being a great practice to develop a good ear. In this video you can see an example of how it is: https://www.y…
I'm really impressed by the guitarist making her sound better and her pitch was all over the place
I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…
Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a certain age (at least that's layman my understanding).
Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a new language?).
I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern? When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand. It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in id…
Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other things. People learn to identify the pitches because they sound different and learn the names for them. Nerd note: the name "Perfect pitch" is something of a misnomer because the frequencies the note names refer to is a social construct which has changed over time[1]. A=440 is the predominant concert pitch now but since "pitch taste" generally gets brighter/s…
I don't think "pitch taste" is a good way of describing it. It's not about the pitch itself. It's about the timbre. Musicians wanted a brighter sound, which they could accomplish, for example, by tightening their strings a little more. I personally really like a darker mellow sound and very much enjoy the 415 A and historically informed performances. I also think pushing to a 443 modern A is stupid and tune all my ensembles to 440. There is a little practical bonus to starting higher, though, which is that it helps mitigate the tendency of pitch to drop over the course of the piece.
I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern? When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand. It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in id…
I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear, confirmed by tuning fork. From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number of engines it had without looking. My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, an…
I used to recognize cars by their engine-noises, and hear bats when I was walking home through various parks late at night up until I was early twenties.
These days too much loud metal, and age, have taken their toll, and I have no ability to do either of these things any more.
I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern? When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand. It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in id…
What you heard is likely a rare hearing disorder called Diplacusis or Polyacusis - aka hearing additional erroneous pitches: https://www.neilsperlingmd.com/blog/2018/05/everything-you-n... I've had it in my right ear ever since being exposed to a loud engine for 9+ hours in 2021. It gets noticeable for loud sounds, especially in the 3700-5200hz range; in my right ear, I'll hear a high-pitched ringing overtone on top…
I'm really curious about the circumstances of a loud engine for 9+ hours. Were you involved in auto racing or something?
I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…
Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do. Never occurred to me to practice perfect…
Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility.
If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them. They practice by associating a different colored flag with each chord.
Had to look up the technique, Eguchi method, and it uses color rather than complicated musical notation to associate with each key. Interesting how those who have synesthesia naturally have this same color, key association.
But not every synesthetic person sees the same colors for every key, right?
Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch? And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ? Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?
We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it".