151–160 of 257 posts
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Perfect pitch means that you can identify (give the name of) different pitches without the help of instruments. This is a rare ability even for trained musicians.
We need a GPT for musical pitch. (unpack that)
Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit…
There are some downsides of perfect pitch. For one, choral singers with perfect pitch sometimes have a hard time re-tuning if the rest of the choir shifts pitch. (This can happen naturally over a long piece that has no accompaniment.) Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch lose it when they hit a certain age. Imagine being an accomplished painter. One day, you wake up and see leaves as blue-ish…
What age (or age range) is that?
While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.
As an amateur musician and composer who doesn’t have it, seems like it would be handy for transcription and tuning, but I don’t know what else. You must still be able to “switch modes” to relative, right? Otherwise you couldn’t even hear musical structures the same way, because aside from timbre they’re all relative.
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May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'
Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on command. If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect pitch fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some downsides of perfect pitch. For one, choral singers with perfect pitch sometimes have a hard time re-tuning if the rest of the choir shifts pitch. (This can happen naturally over a long piece that has no accompaniment.) Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch lose it when they hit a certain age. Imagine being an accomplished painter. One day, you wake up and see leaves as blue-ish…
> Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch lose it when they hit a certain age. What age (or age range) is that?
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…
No perfect pitch for other instruments.
Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit…
The benefit is rather small if you look at ear training for professional musicians and what properly trained relative pitch looks like. It basically doesn't matter anymore as soon as a professional musician holds his/her instrument. In short: There is basically no difference anymore as soon as the trained musician without perfect pitch gets provided 1 reference tone (which is why perfect pitch gets commonly attributed to people that do not have it).
It is more like a "shortcut" when it comes to ear training, but ultimately a professional musician with perfect pitch and a professional musician without pefect pitch arrive at basically the same destination in practice, making the advantage minimal when it comes to the things a musician actually does.
Rick Beato has a certain kind of obsession with the topic that makes it seem so much more important than it actually is in the real world.
Also noteworthy that there are disadvantages to perfect pitch (transposing instruments, losing it with age, etc.), and interesting video on that topic by Adam Neely [1] was already linked.
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I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch. I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears. Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least m…
I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.) I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cau…
Maybe you could apply their methodology to yourself to retrain your A to 440Hz?