No doubt, though I’m very intrested in anyone’s experience of recalling a note, it’s associations, how it feels etc…
Adam Neely said that different notes have different colors for him so they are really different for him. I bet I could never have such experience.
I’m sure you’ve had various emotional feelings of nostalgia from certain music.
It’s the same thing, an association. Just people with non perfect pitch need more triggers.
My opinion is opposite. I think it’s a kind of additional sensation which you either have or don’t. Like if you try to explain what is ‘red’ to a guy who is blind from his birth.
I think problem is in the name ‘perfect pitch’. Some people think that you can have a ‘not-so-perfect pitch’ or a ‘perfect pitch’ which is better )
More correct terms, I guess, would be ‘absolute pitch’ and ‘relative pitch’. Since they are not worse or better versions of each other but totally different things.
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I haven’t got fully developed Perfect Pitch but I’ve gone through almost the whole David Lucas Burge course and what I can do is sing every pitch without a reference (Aural Recall they call it) say +95% of the time and very rarely off to where it sounds out of tune next to the reference on an instrument, it rather jumps on to another “tempered” pitch if I’m off.
The cool part of recognizing pitches out of thin air works very randomly, sometimes it’s super obvious and sometimes it might as well be _____ < insert your own very weird sounding language here. Then again I’ve mostly practiced it on a keyboard using grand piano sounds and timbre is definitely a big factor in recognizing the “tone colors”.
How it feels is kinda hard to explain (how does it feel to see green?) but here’s my take: I’d imagine a song in my head or “mind’s ear” if you will and it feels good/comfortable when it’s right on pitch and weird/uncomfortable when it’s not, sorry to not be more specific but it doesn’t resemble much of anything else. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with how high or low a pitch sounds, and everything to do with their individual “character” (check out Jacob Collier talking about this if you haven’t yet).
Here’s my list of reference tunes just for fun (I use either the 1st melody or song note, unless specified):
|C|Bioshock 1 game start menu|
|C#/Db|FU B***h - Wheeler Walker Jr |
|D|Super Mario World “Demo”|
|D#/Eb |Today - Smashing Pumpkins|
|E|Caprice #1 - Nicolo Pagani|
|F|I’ll See You In My Dreams - Emmett Ray (Sweet and Lowdown)|
|F#/Gb |A Change Of Seasons “Section 2” - Dream Theater|
|G|Higher Window - Josh Groban|
|G#/Ab|All the Things You Are / Cinema Paradiso - Josh Groban Version|
|A|Westworld Opening|
|A#/Bb|You Raise Me Up - Josh Groban|
|B|A Change Of Seasons - Dream Theater|
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I was sick a lot as a little kid and the only thing that would calm me down or make me feel better was music so my mother would play lots of music as I was on my baby blanket in front of the hi-fi. Everything from Segovia guitar, classical music, pop tunes, you name it. I was almost force fed a diet of interesting music between ages 1-4 every day.
Later on when I was a little bit older kid, I would “notice things”. I’d love it when my parents would drive the car over a certain bridge on the way to our grandparents place in southern minnesota because it would make a particular “memorable” sound. This is when I was a little kid, maybe 4-5 years old.
That same sound would be emanated by a small electric fan when set to low speed that was in my room as a kid. Same pitch/texture. Somehow it was comforting because I associated it with the fan being on at night and I could sleep to that sound.
And that same note was played in a two part bass line in a Rolling Stones song “Hang Fire” years later.
I don’t think I have perfect pitch because I never was given musical training until later but I could “summon at will” a photographic “sound memory” of a particular sound. If I listen to a piece of music a lot, I can “remember it”. It’s very weird.
So I don’t think I have perfect pitch because I can’t tell you always what the note is but I can pick up a guitar often and play a piece I hear on the radio because I can “hear what they’re doing”. Common guitar chords have a tone and texture that my brain just knows “They played a Eflat, a Bminor then a D followed by a C”.
But I still say I don’t have perfect pitch because it has to be connected to a piece of music sometimes and chords in relation to others not just going to a piano and playing a middle C. I might get it sometimes but not others. And some really complicated piece with a lot of jazz fusion type chords that I might not get either.
So I think I just have better than average relative pitch maybe.
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People with “perfect pitch” will lose it as they get older. It can get “off” as much as a full semitone. They can’t tell B from C like they used to.
As I said above, I don’t have perfect pitch, but a funny thing happened to me once (actually more than once). Someone started playing a grand piano in the next room (it was in Tchaikovsky museum in Votkinsk). The instrument was surely tuned well (I mean, chords and intervals sounded the way they should), but at the same time the whole thing sounded terribly out of tune to me, it was surprisingly unpleasant to hear it. Very unusual and funny sensation! I happened to be there with a friend who’s got perfect pitch, and I asked her if the instrument sounds okay to her, and she instantly replied, “Oh, it’s just a bit flat, less than semitone; they play in A major, but it sounds almost like Ab major”. As for me, of course I couldn’t tell the key, but for some reason I heard that something was “off”.
My GF is a pianist and has perfect pitch (since childhood). She says all elite instrumentalists have it (I don’t know if that’s true). She is really annoying in this regard but sometimes useful, e.g., I can be listening to a song, and ask, “what key is it in,” and she will tell me right away, along with what the chords are, except this also contains lots of eye-rolling 
, so I often suffer and try to figure it out myself (or find the sheet music and cheat). She has a friend with even better ears—another pianist—that can basically listen to multiple instruments in a recording and directly write down sheet music for everything.
GF claims that perfect pitch is extremely important for being able to memorize a large body of music, I suspect that they might be remembering every note, somehow, this is way beyond my ability to understand. I think that her argument can be recast as, “elite musicians memorize huge amounts of music, hence they have perfect pitch.” I formerly thought that perfect pitch is really about analysis, and it has that benefit, but apparently the real benefit is exactness to the point where memorization is easier.
Disclaimer: This is all magic to me, as I have tin ears, I can only report what I seem to understand.
Perfect pitch is just that. You can identify a note down to the cent. It is much different than any referential pitch.
Many people can reference a song or interval or whatever and get close but perfect pitch isn’t close. It’s dead on, every time.
It isn’t learned or acquired, at least in any recreatible way. It’s inherent. You have it or you don’t. I’ve heard people say they used to have it or they developed it but it’s so often misunderstood that pinning down what people are talking about is impossible.
I have known about 3 people with perfect pitch and you can tune your guitar to concert with their pitch. The amount they bitch about out of tune instruments albeit live or just listening to top 40 is dependent on the type of person they are.
Is it a boon or a bane? Like everthing else in life it depends on what you do with it. But I can tell you that learning relative pitch is 1000x more important than perfect pitch. It’s just a lot easier for perfect pitch people to learn relative pitch. Just math if you’re have perfect pitch.
I think that perfect pitch allows is a mental fluidity such as we all have with words.
It’s probably as easy for them to memorize the notes as it can be for us to memorize sentences.
Because my mind has such an intuitive grasp of English, it’s very easy to memorize and repeat what someone just said. They probably feel same about repeating and remembering music phrases as we do reapeating what someone just said to us.
Lucky mother f’s lol
This is absolutely not true. Rick Beato is one of the most brilliant improvisers, teachers, theorists, etc and he says (in the same video posted above I believe) that he does not have perfect pitch, although his son does. I would say that the majority of musicians, even the greats, do not have perfect pitch. It’s important to define perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is the ability to hear ANY pitch and properly identify it with no previous reference - whether it’s a frog or a car horn or a tuba. I have heard that non musicians can have perfect pitch and not even be aware. Relative pitch is the ability to identify a pitch from a previous reference.
Entertaining example: I know from my handy piano app that my electric tooth brush hums a B lol. I was brushing my teeth and heard a song on the TV in the other room that I had never heard and I could tell from my well developed and constantly practiced sense of relative pitch that my tooth brush was humming a minor 3rd relative to the song. So I knew the song must be in Ab.
In my opinion, the latter can be worked to a very high level. I can hear almost any song and immediately figure out the chords and melody. And there are countless times where I am playing a song on stage at a gig that I have never heard before. But, I have also worked on learning songs by ear from day one. I never learn a song, riff, chord or solo by tab or sheet music. I was also lucky enough to have a great ear training course in college.
Perfect pitch? I’m not sure if it’s achievable as an adult. More importantly, I don’t believe it’s necessary apart from bragging rights. I have gotten through my professional life as a musician just fine with out needing the ability to tell what note the 18 wheeler that just passed by was humming.
I would venture to say that most elites have a very developed sense of relative pitch.
Also, I think there is a large scale misunderstanding with musicians or the musically inclined to associate perfect pitch with talent. Like it’s the be all end all. I know people who claim to have perfect pitch and they are by no means on a world class, elite level of musicianship.
My several cents on the topic 
Edit: just thought of an elite level reference. There is a world class jazz player where I’m from. I was lucky enough to be able to take lessons from his teacher. His teacher told me that this guy has perfect pitch and has the ability to play any note that is in his head. I have listened to this guy extensively for over a decade on recordings and I do not hear evidence that he can pull new notes out of his head. Because there is a lot of repetition in his improvisations from song to song (mind you this doesn’t stop him from being one of the best jazz guitarists on the planet). But it sounds more like worked out formulas than this esoteric, untouchable realm of being able to pull notes from the depth of the soul, as his teacher would suggest.
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Also, I believe that you lose it as you get older too…
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I wouldn’t know how to quantify that. I can say that my sense of relative pitch just keeps getting better in my 30s - I can identify notes and keys sometimes just from hearing them now. Whereas a few years ago, I couldn’t. But that may change when I’m 70.
I think its a known thing that happens - the perfect pitch drifts off. Relative pitch however is retained (as far as I know), probably because you can train relative pitch…
This is exactly how she says elite people play, they hear the exact instrument in their head, as if it is off a tape, and their fingers make the sound in the real world.
Perfect pitch is not a skill. It’s inherent. Relative pitch is earned and invaluable. Very easy to understand. Although having an ear for music is also very important. And that is also an inherent skill but one that can be added to.
That’s kinda my point though by mentioning that. The guy I’m talking about is one of the best jazz guitarists out there. Very well respected. But from what I hear on his recordings and numerous live concerts, I’m not convinced he has this inhuman ability to extract notes from his soul - I just think he worked his ass off. Like Steve Vai. Steve Vai claims he isn’t naturally talented. He said in an interview that he can’t play even a very simple song on piano. I would think if he had this esoteric ability to summon notes from the center of the universe, he could play any instrument just as well as guitar.
Classical music is generally read from a page, referenced with recordings, memorized and then turned into the performer’s own interpretation. That’s where the spirit is. I’m not buying that every pro is summoning notes from some lofty realm that we can’t reach. Unless we are talking about freaks like Jacob Collier, who does, in fact, play any instrument on a virtuoso level. With someone like Jacob Collier though, it’s more than just perfect pitch. There is genuinely something turned on in his brain that other humans don’t have access to. I would not say this if he was a single instrument virtuoso like Steve Vai. But not only does Jacob have perfect pitch, he also has an extremely advanced knowledge of theory, harmony, technical ability and rhythm.
I would think if someone had the ability you speak of, they could summon new notes, patterns, ideas, etc on the fly. You could say jazz improvisers do this. But do they REALLY do it? I know a LOT of theory. And a LOT of harmony and scales. I can improvise pretty well over all but the hairiest jazz or fusion progressions. And if I have time to work it out, I can play over that too. Coltrane had the ideas for Giant Steps (one of the scariest chord progressions on the planet) worked out for a LONG time before he recorded the album. Listen to Tommy Flanagan’s piano solo on Giant Steps. That’s the sound of a world class, elite pianist basically sight reading that tune. And it sounds NOTHING like Coltrane’s fire. I would think if he had the ability your girlfriend speaks of, he would have sounded like Coltrane. Or better.
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I’d like to say btw I hope that doesn’t come across the interwebs as ornery. 
I don’t mean to discredit your girlfriend. My main point is I don’t think this stuff is magic. When I watch a brilliant performer, whether it’s John Petrucci or Diana Krall, I think what I’m seeing is the result of hard work and maybe even obsession. And, as far as I know, neither Petrucci or Krall have perfect pitch. Petrucci in a recent interview talks about the difficulties of remembering how to play back catalog Dream Theater songs. So it’s obvious that he cannot simply envision the music and then play it. So if it takes rote memorization for someone on the level of Petrucci, I’d say it’s de facto for pretty much anyone else.