Can perfect pitch be developed?
 

Does anyone here have perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch? It is the ability to recognize a note by ear without using a reference point. I found some mp3s of a course designed to teach anyone how to develop this skill. I haven't gotten far into it, but the author claims that anyone has the ability to learn it.

I'm going to try my hand at the course over the next few weeks, but I was wondering if anyone here has had experience with perfect pitch.

I don't know if I trust the people that say perfect pitch can be learned. I know you can develop relative pitch. I've never tried any of the things that supposedly teach you perfect pitch but they might work. I'm skeptical on it because it's basically something you're born with. The people I've met with perfect pitch don't necessarily like it because everytime they hear something even slightly out of tune they are bothered by it. It is hard to enjoy almost anything when you have perfect pitch because you can't simply ignore the fact that something is a bit (or a lot) off. My personal opinion is that relative pitch is actually better to have. It can be just as helpful with out the extreme annoyances of perfect pitch. Honestly though I still wish sometimes I had perfect pitch...like in my ear training class when I'm taking a test and I have no idea what's going on. I'd be interested to hear from someone who does have perfect pitch.

Yes it can. I developed it. I never had it as a kid but after 20 years of listening to music, and 10 years of being a musician I noticed a was remembering music in the right key. I'd test it. e.g. A song I hadn't listened to for a good while would pop into my head. I'd stick the CD on and sure enough, exactly in key. So yes it can. Some could argue I was born with it and didn't notice before, but I'd tried to develop it before with no success; it just crept up on me with experience.

Also it's been noted in the past that people who speak tonal languages, such as Chinese, have a larger occurence of perfect pitch in their population.

Can you tell any pitch played on a piano without looking? That's really cool if you developed perfect pitch without a class or without any of those 12 cd sets that you have to buy for like 200 dollars or whatever it is.

Yeh I can, but I'm not great and I do get it wrong now and again, but then again, I've never focussed on getting it right, I just noticed I was developing it. So the potential is there at least.

It comes down to the fact I'm a music freak, I've listened to so much over the years. I probably spend more time listening to music than anything other one thing. The fact I'm a musician helps. The fact that every time I tune my guitar I hear a reference E, A, D, G, B and E etc. I guess after a while it subconciously sticks.

I agree that perfect pitch isn't that important anyway, hence I never really found a reason to improve mine. Relative pitch is what's important for a musician to have; perfect pitch is just a handy bonus, but of no huge use.

One of my grandfathers had it. He could just listen to something once and play it instantly after.

it can be developed but its harder to develop with these dumb tapes and CD's than if you just have a vested interest in music, I was "born" with perfect pitch and generally speaking I am not one to bite my tongue if you sing in the car..or anywhere for that matter and suck

I just went to church and sat next to my dad.. oh man I forgot hes no musician....

I have a friend who's a horn play who has perfect pitch in the key of B(flat)
so yes it can be learned to a degree...the people born with it are lucky bastards though
I have perfect relative pitch.

I was a roadie for many years and after tuning P.A.'s for a while you recognise which frequency is feeding back or there is too much of in the mix. That's what all the "Check, one two, check" shit is about. You know what your voice is supposed to sound like when it's amplified and you adjust the graphics so it sounds right. Anyway, I don't have perfect pitch but it got closer as the years went on. I play as well, so I guess that helped a bit.

My choir teacher and my mom both say I have perfect pitch. I don't see how though because all I know how to do is sing. I can't read music, or play it so I don't see how I could have it...ya know someone can't tell me "Sing a c sharp" and then I'll sing it because I don't know what that is. I think they're confused most I can do is if you play me a note within my range I can sing the note exactly...thats it as far as I know. But I can tell when someone is singing a wrong note even just slightly even though I don't know what the actual notes are....so I suppose if I trained my ears I really could have it. I've heard it argued that you have to be born with it but I don't think that should necessarily be held true...more than likely it just comes easier to some people then others.

Asta!!

I don't think perfect pitch can be learned. Relative pitch can be and perfected to the degree that it may seem like perfect pitch. For example, play any note on the piano and I can tell you by not looking what it is in 2-3 seconds. That's only because the tinnitus in my ears rings at concert pitch A. From there I do the intervals quickly.

Perfect pitch is rapid fire naming of pitches without much thought. That would be hard to learn.

Yea I play trumpet so if I hear a trumpet note I can guess pretty close to it if not get it right. I guess that's where the key of Bb comes in that jonjon42 was talking about. Horns are in the key of F though if you were talking about a French Horn. If you were just using horn to refer to a trumpet though then you are right about Bb.

Most people who claim to have perfect pitch actually have relative pitch. It's difficult to tell. Most violinists for instance have 440 "A" drilled into their heads so much from tuning that they hear it. From there you just have to do the "math." Guitarists have those "E"'s drilled into them. Pianists have middle "C". Etc.

I am one of the people who say that perfect pitch cannot be developed. You either have it or you don't. If you don't have it you can be taught relative pitch though. Perfect pitch is very rare. A person with perfect pitch <i>never</i> gets it wrong. Ever.

So basically, it's not perfect pitch... :hmm:

i am reading about the cognitive neuroscience of music these days.
from what i have been able to piece together about teh various neural networks that inform the processing of sonic material, and their lack of a particular center in the brain, and the malleability of these networks, it would seem that perfect pitch is as or more often a training function than it is something in-built.

It absolutely can be developed, and relies on a physiological skill called "audiation." Audiation is a word invented by Edwin E. Gordon, and it refers to the ability to hear music inside your head. People who have highly developed "ears" have great audiation skills. Gordon invented a standardized test to measure audiation, the PMMA (Primary Measure of Music Audiation) and the SMMA (Secondary Measure of Music Audiation).

Audiation is the only explanation for Beethoven's ability to compose while deaf, or Mozart's ability to compose orchestral works while riding in a buggy. It also explains why jazz musicians play circles around everybody else even though they usually don't have formal training.

The more you listen to quality music, the more you improve your audiation skills. As a test, sing "Happy Birthday" to yourself inside your head right now.

Did you hear one voice or harmony voices?
Was it a capella or did you hear accompaniment?

I heard 20 or so people singing the same notes but each with their own individual voices. What does this mean exactly?

I was interested in this too. I found that almost everyone is born with the ability but unless you are taking music lessons, or listening to music that part of your brain isnt stimulated and doesn't develop. It's a small window, I think by 3-4 years old is when it is too late to acquire perfect pitch.

I don't think so. Like I said earlier, I have 'A' ringing in my head constantly. I can not only hear music in my head, I can learn it also due to relative pitch easily. Works good. Driving home, hear a song, boom, I get home I play it immediately, if it is memorable. Your right though, experience helps

To hear any pitch at any time, a raindrop, glasses ringing, a fart whatever and say,..Bb,..F#, A, without thought is perfect pitch. Just like people looking at a number chart and asked to bang off as many and as fast as possible. It's automatic.

Perfect pitch also relies on the notion that a pitch is good,flat or sharp. It might be a Ab but its a little flat. That is perfect pitch.

You're in a bus with a drunken football team.

its a skill all professional musicians should have.
i'm not talking about pop singers either, i'm talking about people who study music, write music, play music.

being able to recognize what key the music is played in is essential to a jazz musician
because their solo's are based on notes in that key.

I have always had very good pitch for as far as I can remember, from when I was 7. At that age I asked my mother if I could have piano lessons, which I did. To this day I have great ease in recognizing keys and the notes being played, I can sing back almost any melody instantly and sometimes the accompaniment as well. I usually can hear people singing or playing out of tune even slightly when other people may be marveling at that person's skills. I've never trained my pitch but I've heard a lot of music and studied music to a degree. I think I probably have relative pitch, but very good one at that. Perfect pitch I'm sure can be attained with much studying, drilling and years of experience. But I also think that some people have a natural talent that will help them get there more easily than others. I really like having this ability and it makes me feel very "in tune" with the sounds of the world.

i have long wondered whether the idea of perfect pitch as something built into one's wiring from birth is more an ideological than descriptive proposition. having this ability would be one way of marking members of the hardwired cultural aristocracy that 19th century aesthetics understood to be the proper producers of Art. these would be the folk who engaged in Creativity in the 19th century sense: you know, the Genius who worked in direct communication with some god somewhere, delivering unto us examples of platonic Forms that we can later go experience in a Museum....or a Concert Hall....which in a sense is not surprising, given that so much of this same aesthetic ideology was about excluding the processes particular to making things from consideration, replacing them with systems of classification and conceptions of the Great Tradition and how it reproduces itself.

i am not sure what the functionality of the notion of perfect pitch is, either---if folk above are linking it to having taken solfege, then it should be obvious that the naming function--the ability to identify particular pitches on the piano---is a function of training.

nor am i sure what level of cognition would be most operative in the ability to identify pitch. i would imagine that you would see how good somone';s pitch recognition was by listening to how they interact with other players in an open-form space. i would imagine that these interactions would be far more indicative than would be the matter of whether you have assimilated the particular tasks associated with solfege, which is itself tied to the idea that composition amounts to the writing down of a mental image of a piece that would somehow take shape in the composers brain away from any particular instrument.

on another note, i am not sure why there would be a point in claiming that the ability of improvisers to react to each other in real time is an index of perfect pitch. there are any number of other factors at play there as well. maybe how you think about this is a function of the genre you work in? maybe all that is really at stake here is the question of how you map the features of the genre you work in outward, how you use those conventions to assimilate all music?

Mozart could do this as a child. There is a verified story about him describing the difference in pitch and tuning between two violins that he heard on two different days. This is exactly what audiation is all about.

Mozart's ability to audiate was much more advanced than most mere mortals, but we all have the potential to increase our own audiation skills, and the answer lies with LISTENING.

Here is a link about audiation from the man who coined the term.
http://www.giml.org/frames.html

Just a note on perfect pitch...

Everyone I've met with "perfect pitch" failed miserably when tested on it. It's easy to have "perfect pitch" so long as nobody calls you on it. They say "that's A sharp," you say "no it's not" and they get all flustered. I have lots of people tell me "that's not exactly in tune," but I go and check, and it IS actually in tune.

That's not to say it doesn't exist, but I've never seen anyone who actually had it, after years and years of musical study.


On the other hand, when I learn a choral piece and sing it for weeks straight, for several months after (at least) I can start close to exactly on pitch, but then it slowly withers away.

i dont have perfect pitch, but i have a pretty good sense of it.

if i hear a note, i can guess relatively close to it.

i can also tell if i'm sharp or flat very easily ( i play flute/piccolo 6 years)
but this is because im so used to playing and i know my instrument inside and out.
its like a bond with my instrument, and i know if im not hitting the sweet spot.

I have played guitar for so long in standard A-440 that certain chords are forever ingrained in my brain. I can listen to a note then compare it to one of the chords in my head and tell you what note it is. For example if I start with a G-chord in my head and I hear a B note I will recognize it as the major 3rd and know that that note would be a B. I think that's what someone meant by doing the math. I do not believe that is perfect pitch, though.

my guitar teacher had it.

he got me pretty close to it but i need one reference point to go on still.

The performance director where I studied music had it. She was amazing. One day, seemingly flustered that what I was playing on guitar was being duplicated right back at me on her piano, I decided to adlib something. It was kind of like Megadeth meets Schonberg meets Cecil Taylor. Well guess what, she played it right back at me. I couldn't even repeat what I did.

When I asked her how she did that, she replied it is natural, that she always had it and never tried to better it cuz it just happened.

Unlike the composition prof I had that was similar but would see colors for different pitches. I can still hear him saying, "modulate, modulate, too much red."

i have a friend that plays piano thats amazing.
he can also play a tune back if you play it on your instrument.

My dad used to know a guy who could hear the guitar once in a song and be able to play it back to you on his guitar...he said it never failed and then my dad put on a Yes record. He had no idea what Steve Howe was playing...So they thought they had to go see them in concert and when they did they got as close to the stage as they could to see what fuckin notes he was playing and the guy said something along the lines of "They're all broken chords!" I don't know what the hell that means.

Asta!!

Im developing it right now, so yes, it certainly can.

well, im fuckin hoping anyhow!

I've been around two piano players who had it. I could play any group of notes at the same time on a piano, like ten notes at once that made no sense and they could then sit down at the piano and sound the same ten notes. I think some people are born with perfect pitch and some develope it further.

We discussed this a little over a year ago. Some of what was said might still be interesting.

Here's my theory...
Music is a human contrivance. The twelve tones used in Western music are just something we invented to make sense of chaos. Therefore, how can someone be born with an innate ability to hear pitches that don't exist in nature? In my opinion, one does develop the ability to recognize notes by their western names, but that person would not be able to then identify the other, contrived notes of Eastern music (Indian classical music uses a different set of frequencies than we do). Also, it is difficult to say anyone has perfect pitch because they can identify piano notes. Every note on the piano has overtones that accompany it. Overtones are other notes, higher than the one played, that sound in sympathy with that note. A piano, because it has 87+ strings that might ring in sympathy. A guitar, on the other hand, has only 5 other strings that can ring in sympathy, so the overtones are different. This means that an A played on piano is just different than the A on guitar...well you get the idea.
As to Beethoven, the ability to compose while deaf was not based on his ability to audiate the pitches he wrote. For one thing, he wrote his music louder and louder so he would not have to. Secondly, the ability to compose is based on knowledge of music theory, and as Beethoven proved in his early work, he was very well acquainted with the theoretical conventions of Vienna, and knew what would sound good. For one thing, people would force themselves to like anything Beethoven wrote melodically, and he simply had the know-how to take those melodies and make the orchestra work around them.

It can't be learned. End of story. My voice teacher had it. And it wasn't just memorizing the keys on the piano. She could tell the pitch of ANYTHING. Even a burp. It is actually a gift and a curse because you hear everything in pitches. It's like, having too much going on inside your head at once. I think many people are getting perfect pitch confused with relative pitch. If I worked at it, I could memorize the pitch of a specific key and relay that back. I have very good pitch. I can remember a song and sing it back in the same exact key. But it isn't perfect pitch.

I studied under someone with Perfect pitch and I know a bass player with perfect pitch and another bassists with absolute pitch.

They're different things. One is more accurate then the other. When someone is born with the ability to distinquish note from note and it's flatness or sharpness my understanding is that it's Absoulute. You can develop Perfect pitch and Relative Pitch.

Relative pitch is to distinguish the relationship of one note to the next. Hence the example of the guitarist who could play back something after hearing it right away. Relative Pitch is a very important skill to have. Playing two notes at once and being able to tell you exactly the relationship between them is a vital skill for any musician.

I have very good relative Pitch. When listening to a piece of music I can tell it's Key with a good deal of accuratcy (a 4th of 5th off) generally. I also can sing/hear an A440 and a Bb a half step above from my work with horns and as a guitarist tuning it. I can sing all 6 guitar strings without it in my hand and tune it without a tuner. However if someone went over to a piano and played a note I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly what it was but give you a choice of 3 notes (as mentionedeither then note itself of a 4th or 5th away).


I don't think as a musician that I would want perfect pitch. I've seen it drive to many musician's crazy in terms of tuning. Don't get me wrong playing out of tune or singing out of tune is painful. But for someone who has to go through their dayly life hearing the clink of a fork on a diner plate and thinking (That's an F and it's flat, damn I hate it when it's flat). That's not the life for me

These pitches do exist in nature. Absolute (perfect) pitch is rare but real. There are people who can reproduce a pitch regardless of cultural biases. Absolute pitch has nothing to do with hearing a pitch as it relates to other pitches. That's relative pitch and it can be fooled by cultural biases.

Overtones come from the string itself as well as vibrations from other strings, objects in the room, the material the instrument was made out of, even vibrations in your own head can add (or subtract) overtones from a single note.

Usually, perfect pitch is measured using a sine wave in a lab environment.

Relative pitch is entirely different. Most musicians develop relative pitch over time if they play music a lot.

I meant not that the pitches themselves aren't in nature...what I mean is that the A we use was not an "A" in Baroque music, and is not the same as "dha," the 6th degree of the Indian scale, which is pitched sharper than Western music. My point being that A 440 does occur in nature, but a hummingbird doesn't know it's an A because the Greeks (I believe) invented the diatonic system, and that system is the one we have to work with in regard to "perfect pitch." In other words, you can't be born being able to sing an A on command - you have to learn what A is before your mind can do that.