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gcanyon 7 hours ago

I've seen articles that say that absolute perfect pitch is a curse, not a gift, because it wanders with age, and then everything is "out of key".

jaggederest 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Approximately two billion people who speak tonal languages demonstrate that it's really not, I think, given that e.g. native cantonese speakers reproduce to within a quarter semitone across a lifetime barring something like neurological or significant hearing issues. They don't all have perfect pitch, that seems to be related more to music training early in life, but something like 60% of Mandarin speakers who were trained musically before age 6 have perfect pitch. In those cultures, not having at least relative pitch is a learning disability similar (or perhaps even more problematic) than dyslexia is in e.g. english speaking populations.

dbcurtis 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My kiddo has perfect pitch, and for them listening to a baroque period organ is kind of trippy because back in those days A was more like 436 Hz than 440. OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses. These days, they are grooving on Angine de Poitrine, so somehow they are OK with microtonal scales. It probably varies from person to person, but I can see where perfect pitch could give you another way to be annoyed by the world.

eventualcomp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've heard of musicians with very strong senses of perfect pitch flocking to flute or oboe, because anything not keyed in C (perfect pitch equiv) results in too much cognitive dissonance. Clarinets are keyed in Bb (you play a C, out comes a Bb), horns in F (you play a C, out comes an F), trumpets in Eb (this should be clear), and so on...

Like motion sickness with musical tones - you see one thing on the page, you have a sense for what "note" you're playing, but out comes something else.

I have perfect pitch but it's not really useful, except for noticing that my instrument is getting sharper. But that doesn't matter since you have to be in tune with the rest of the band/orchestra.

NobodyNada 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a musician who doesn't have absolute pitch, but does have very strong relative pitch. My understanding is that perfect pitch is neat party trick, but actually a hindrance instead of a help in most musical circumstances. Relative pitch, on the other hand, is incredibly useful (and fortunately you can train and develop it later in life).

Because most people don't have perfect pitch, (Western) music is built on the relationships between pitches rather than the absolute pitches. So with absolute pitch, you can play something by ear; with relative pitch, you can play something by ear in any key.

Learning to think of the notes you're playing relatively instead of absolutely is already a difficult leap for most musicians, and my understanding (though I don't have absolute pitch so I can't compare from experience) is that absolute pitch makes this skill significantly harder to acquire, since you have to retrain your ear in addition to your hands.

If I were offered a choice to trade my sense of relative pitch for absolute pitch, I most certainly would not take it. I know well the feeling of incongruity when my muscle memory is stuck in the wrong key, and absolute pitch would mean I'm stuck there all the time instead of being just able to shake my head, focus on the new key, and clear my mind of the old.

amelius 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem with absolute pitch is that a choir without accompaniment will often drift a semitone or so over the duration of a song. Then if there are people with absolute pitch in the audience this can be cringy.