Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

Don't be pretentious man, we are tuning guitars and violins not prepping the kids for Juliard.

The same as how you use hz to talk about a specific note, your ear understands hz when listening. Cents are just ratios of intervals subject to a given scale. Do you think we are so bad we are messing up A3 as being close to B5?

How about we use Just Intonation or 12-TET? But then should we base it on 5 limit[0] or Pythagorean[1] tuning.

See where being a pedant gets you.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-limit_tuning

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning

Most tuners work in hz. Your ear works in hz. That's all the thought that went into it.

If any of us are consistently getting to within a hertz I'll consider switching to cents.

I always observed that the number of random non-musicians who can get it right using the "major" handful of those twelve keys is remarkable enough to be considered.

Since those are the only 12 notes so many people have been hearing from every direction for so long, and truly confined to not more than a few of the major keys that are "dominant" as a result of modern instrumentation, it gets ingrained in the psyche and the notes are almost memorized by frequency. With nothing in-between, so that's what they reproduce without any training. Or can have a more sensitive ear for out-of-tune notes than an actual music student of a number of years.

I agree, it doesn't happen magically.

It just happens about any time naturally.

One way I look at it when tuning two A4's to match 440, cents are always a fraction of where you are at the time. So a 439 vs 440 is by definition 1 Hz off and here that's a little less than 0.25%. Once you get the beat note below 1 per second (actually not often so easy) you're within 1/4 cent. At this range of pitch.

You can detect the cents by ear that way and when the deviations are minimized as optimally as you can get for the particular instrument mechanics, that one instrument is going to sound about as good as you can get.

When you get down to the bass notes like A1 at 55 Hz (conveniently annoying when accompanied by the hum from either 60 Hz American power transformers as well as overseas 50 Hz) a beat note of 1 per second means you are still about 2 cents off, or 8x the deviation you had at 440. IOW at the bass end you will have to aurally integrate the beat-note signal itself for about 8 times as long as you would for the 440 tuning fork, in order to make sure the beat is not occurring any more often than once per 8 seconds, for you to be as equally in tune in both of those octaves. A practical example would be a 440 tuning fork boldly serving as reference, and starting with a proper gage string a little flat at 435. Five beats per second difference is some serious flutter and anybody can turn the knob slightly and slowly until it's within 1 beat per second and in about 5 to 10 seconds of listening confirm it's pretty well identical, and you're within 1/4 cent.

But for ear tuning of bass like this you need to listen for about 40 to 80 seconds to reach equivalent confirmation.

You're so right though, no matter how you do the math, the physics don't change :)

I have not seen any electronic tuners having AI and whether or not they would beat a human, regardless, like regular tuners they would need to be given way more time to "integrate" the signal coming in from bass notes than most musicians expect. At least 30 to 60 seconds of clean detection. With no interference from other undampened notes, background noise, or stray vibrations for the input mic or contact tuners either. Even more challenging on notes that decay within a 30 to 60 second comparison period, where a good tuner can crumble even though it seems so miraculous when it's not bass.

Not to mention limited bass frequency response of transducers which tend to roll off bass like any other imperfect audio component.

Instead, I think interval identification is the most useful skill. Hearing two notes after each other and being able to name the interval is relevant to every genre of music and live performance, so it can be played back on whatever instrument is in front of you.

The next most useful skill (in my opinion) is chord decomposition: hearing a chord and being able to identify the component notes, relative to the tonic. Diads are useful enough for guitar players/bassists, but triads are super useful for piano players, vocalists, or other polyphonic instruments.