"Perfect Pitch"

Hey. I've seen quite a few ads for "perfect pitch" ear training in a bunch of guitar mags. Just wondering whether any of you have used it, or heard anything good/bad about it. It sounds cool, but then, too good to be true. Tell me what ya think.

-Greg

" Perfect Pitch " is created by a mutated gene that is passed down through heredity. It ussually skips a generation, so if your mom had it then it would be passed on to your siblings.The generations the gene does not show up as perfect pitch the gene ussually shows up as some form of mild retardation.
You CAN NOT develop perfect pitch! It is a freak of nature. If you ever talked to anyone who has it (very few people do)they hear music in ways that we can never imagine, most people describe it to me as hearing colors. Imagine pushing down 11 keys on the piano and being able to identify wich note is not being played: that is perfect pitch. So if anyone ever tells you they have it put them to the test.
What the rest of us mere mortals have is something known as relative pitch.Each of us is born with different capabilities of relative pitch depending on how advanced are part of the brian that processes music is. Relative pitch can be improved upon through ear training excercises, singing, and dictation (transcribing).So those ads are a little misleading, you can improve your pitch, but you will never be able to develop perfict pitch.

I wasn't born with too much perfect pitch, and I don't see colors when I hear notes. But when someone plays a note, I can sometimes tell them exactly what note they played, but not too often. I find it very easy to replicate what someone plays or sings onto guitar. If someone plays a medium paced single note guitar passage, I can mimic it on the first try, usually. This doesn't come from something I was born with, but rather I've had a lot of practice in playing things I hear and I think about what note I'm playing as I play as to help me remember what a G sounds like, for example. You can't develop perfect pitch, but with practice you can come pretty damn close. Just keep on working. For a good workout, record a song on the radio that you don't know. A pop song might not be the best sounding, but it is usually the easiest to work with since they have the easiest chords and melody. Try to play the chords they play first, then try to play the melody that the singer sings. Developing your ear is well worth the time you put into it.

you cant develop perfect pitch but can develop somehting very close to it..
my guitar teacher doesnt have a perfect pitch but he recognize chords and notes in a song as fast as possible..
For me developing such pitch is as good as perfect, because perfect pitch sometimes is not that good thing (usualy those people are getting realy mad if someone plays false note in a song or something like that).

I'm much in the same boat as TheDirt. I can hum and replicate melodies and notes on the guitar without too much trouble. Sometimes I can tell which notes are played without having to pick up the guitar and figure them out. I don't think it has anything to do with perfect pitch though. I've just heard and played the same notes and chords so many times, it becomes second nature.

As for learning perfect pitch . . . I'll have to go along with everyone else in saying that that's impossible. I've seen a lot of the same ads, so just remember, if it sounds (no pun intended) too good to be true, it probably is.

People who have perfect pitch say it's an advantage AND a drag.

If you saw a picasso's painting, except it was in red instead of blue, would you recognize it? Well, it would take you some time. Well, that's what happens to them, when they hear something in another key. I don't have perfect pitch, but that's what people who have it say about it. I teach a little girl who has perfect pitch, and she focuses more on the notes that are played than on the music.

If you spent 2 or 3 years practising Sight Singing you might develop some really good relative pitch, the only drawback is you would be so bored that if you didn't slip into a catatonic state, you would give up real music and probaly start playing drums or kazoo...........

WOW
this pic is even better than i thought it'd be..
but tell me if it slows the page and i'll cut it off..

I find Chris Moods statement about genes a little hard to take. I mean, if someone wants to prove it to me, then fine, but unless a scientist decides that they have found the gene responsible for perfect pitch, I'm not sure how much I can believe. I have a problem with the very idea though. There is no definitive frequency that is a certain note, it is always changing (an A is significantly higher than it was, say, in Bach's time). Possibly you just hear every frequency as a different "colour", but still.

anyone who learns it is able to recognize scales, intervals and chords
but perefct pitch is simply different.
its not the same. its not only about recognizing notes

What I mean by this post is the downside of perfect relative pitch. I have pretty good relative pitch, and I HATE it when people are off when they sing, or a guitar is a bit our of tune with the song. It irks me so much that I can't get into some songs because the singing's a bit off. I miss the point of the whole piece of music sometimes just because of a slightly out of tune guitar...

when someone can't listen to most music because (that's a real quote I heard a woman who had perfect pitch say) : his head harmonics are dissonant!! What?? What we analyze as 'tone' this woman analyzed as individual pitches!! Now that sucks...

I dont quite grasp what perfect pitch is can someone explane what that means and how would someone now if they have perfect pitch. and also how could you tell how good your relative pitch is?

Well, perfect pitch is the ability to name or sing a note out of nowhere, without a reference. Let's say you want to tune your guitar, and you can hear when it reaches every note's right on the spot. It's quite useful when you try to find out a progression, or when you are writting a tune, you can just write it down silently, directly to the staves...

Relative pitch is the ability to sing or hear a note (when you are given the interval) when you have a reference. Let's say someone plays you a C, and tells you to sings the minor third. (Eb in this case) That's something you can work on, since most pro singers have the ability to harmonize lines for example. I'm sure you have it a little too, can you name a minor chord from a major one? Well, if it's yes, develop it to the extreme, and you'll have relative pitch.

But there's no such thing as a definitve note frequency, it's arbitrary. If someone with perfect pitch from the 14th century (for example, or even 18th) played what he thought was an A, it would be closer to an Ab or G, so would that mean that he didn't have perfect pitch? If someone says "sing an a", what note do you sing?
Does this mean that if someone with "perfect pitch" went to a very contemporary classical concert, he/she would think that all of the orchestra were sharp (as they often tune to A 445 now)?
I'm not saying perfect pitch doesn't exist, but in a much less mystical way than it seems to be discussed here. I have yet to be given any proof by anyone I have actually had the oppurtunity to talk to that perfect pitch is anything much different from an extension of relative pitch and good memory. Steve Vai alledgedly used to play a tape that simply played an A 440 note in his sleep for so long that now, although he doesn't have perfect pitch, can always sing an A 440, and therefore can pick every note off that. That's not particularly important, but sort of funny.

well, Bardsley, what you say is true, someone who was learnt that the A vibrates at 440 hz will think that the entire piece is sharp if the reference is 445 hz. That's a drawback of perfect pitch, as if you saw colors so good that as soon as it's slightly off, you see a different one. Think about seeing mona lisa in blue instead of beige...(the contemporary artist who made all those colorful faces including the monroe one, must have had perfect pitch) :D

Heh, it's going to take a while for everyone's concept of natural skin tones to catch up with Warhol's, lol. Though you may not realise, I am actually aware of the flaw in my argument; that just because note values don't change it doesn't mean that perfect pitch isn't real, but I just find some people are a little far-reaching in their concepts of perfect pitch, and end up saying that basically some people are born with the ability to hear the perfect "A" or whatever, that is some objective thing.
Also, I think that people are not born with perfect pitch, it has more to do with exposure to lots of music at a very young age. In the same way that children must be exposed ot language immediately if they are to learn it (studies of isolated humans have proven them unable to learn language effectively when they are older), people's ear must be exposed when they are very young to lots of music, as you can't absorb music in the same way when you are older.
Kinda makes you mad at your parents, doesn't it?

Which brings us to the conclusion, "People with perfect pitch have the ability
A)to hear notes as if they were colors, telling them from one another
B) to run screaming from any music, yelling 'noooooo, not that again...'

:D

I had read that 80 percent of the adults with perfect pitch had had parents, or some kind of relative, who played an instrument, and that they were there when they practiced.

Some autistic people have developed a brain ability we could all develop. They have developed theirs because they are sick, and we don't know how to develop those abilities to the extreme in a 'normal' being. Those abilities include instantaneous calculation, huge visual memory, total recall etc... Maybe perfect pitch is a small case of autistic ability? Something you can't do, but you can name notes out of nowhere? Einstein had a hard time writing, except for numbers...

Have you ever seen the movie 'Pi'? . . . it's a pretty obscure independent film. The main character is a sort of autistic weirdo who can do all sorts of math problems in his head. He ends up going insane and taking a power drill to his temple.

thanks guys
I was going to mention how perfect pitch is uncommonly evident in people with autism and other idiot savant syndromes. I don't think perfect pitch is a learned thing, it's something your born with.