11th August 2024
Three years ago, I discovered I had an ability known commonly as “perfect pitch”. During that discovery process though, I took many tests which I seemed to keep failing - at times even managing to convince myself I didn’t have it. Different but similar words being thrown about online confused matters even further, so this blog forms “the guide I wish I had had” of sorts.
There are many different terms used to describe slightly differing abilities on the topic of pitch comprehension. They often get confused for one another, and so described briefly these are:
The innate ability to hear a frequency and correctly remember it over a period of time. Most people’s pitch memory lasts a few minutes to maybe an hour, meaning if you play them a note and ask them to sing it again after a few minutes, they’d sing something flatter or sharper than what you played. In people with the ability to develop perfect or absolute pitch, pitch memory is either infinite or lasts long enough to be considered effectively infinite. There is not enough research into pitch memory to be sure, but the best consensus we have currently is that the duration of your pitch memory is something you are born with and no matter how much you practice, it cannot be changed in any meaningful way.
“Perfect” is a colloquial word, “absolute” is the scientific word - but the two are used interchangeably and mean exactly the same thing. This is an ability which people who have long or infinite pitch memories can develop by committing to memory the 12 notes in the octave, as well as their names. This gives them a “note dictionary”, meaning they can hear a frequency in the real world, find the one that matches it in their head, and then label that real-world frequency with a note name. In practice, this is the ability which is most famous - the ability to hear a telephone bell for instance and instantly describe it as “that’s an E-Flat”.
This is the ability trained musicians have to understand how two different notes relate to each other. In it’s simplest form, this is how anybody sings along to songs they like. It is how you can listen to a song you have heard before, then pause it and keep singing along - because you understand that the next note relative to the one you last heard should be higher or lower. A trained musician can use this ability to play a C on a piano, then be able to sing a G. As far as we know, genetics have little baring on your relative pitch abilities and almost everyone can learn it with a bit of practice. It is something most people pick up when studying music at school or learning how to play an instrument.
This is a term which I came up with for the purposes of this article - you won’t find it used elsewhere. This is the best way I can explain how people with perfect pitch can take a sound and map its frequency to a note name. For most people with perfect pitch this becomes instant and effortless, just like how you start by learning a new language from a dictionary but it soon just becomes second nature.
Most people who have a long or infinite pitch memory (and who know about it) are classically trained musicians. I am not - I had a few music lessons but I always enjoyed playing more than learning. I still, to this day, cannot read sheet music, but I do enjoy producing music and playing recorder (and various other folk-woodwind instruments) as well as piano. As a result of this slightly sacrilegious approach to learning music, I was never exposed to a “note dictionary” if you will. Most people learn to read sheet music, and so when they read an E, they play an E, and know that they are playing an E. To people with long pitch memories, the sound of an E and the name of an E will become synonymous - and this is how they develop the ability known as perfect pitch. They learn to associate the note label (ie E, F, G#) with the sound of the frequency of that note because they are exposed to the name and the sound simultaneously.
If, however, you learned like me, then you were only exposed to the sound of the note, never its name. Fair enough, I knew a few of the note names on recorder but I didn’t learn to think in them - if you asked me to play a D I would have to really think about what I needed to do in order to get one. Instead, (albeit unbeknownst to me) I started to use my pitch memory to associate the different finger positions on recorder with the frequencies. As a result, I was able to pick up my recorder, put a song on to play along to, and instantly know which finger positions to use to get the right notes. I never knew that 3 and 2 fingers would play an E, just that the note in the song sounded like “that sound it makes with 3 and 2 fingers”.
As you can see, perfect pitch requires two ingredients. The first (and most fundamental) is the ability to consistently remember any given frequency for an almost infinite time period. The second is the musical training to know what frequencies to remember and the names we give to those frequencies. If you have the first (excellent pitch memory) then you have the potential, given the right education, to learn perfect pitch by learning the “pitch dictionary”.
The problem with the way we test for perfect pitch currently is that it is atomic. The methodology does not split the ability to remember pitches infinitely (the innate bit) from the ability to remember note names (the learned bit). This is fine for most people with perfect pitch - if you’ve been musically educated from childhood, both of these are second nature to you - but if you only have the innate pitch memory and have not been exposed to musical education for long enough to have developed a “pitch dictionary”, you will fail any perfect pitch test instantly.
On a similar note (sorry!), if you use a standard for labelling pitches other than the 12-tone system we use in the West, then most perfect pitch tests will fail you too. This one is more solvable - all that would be required would be setting up a different array of frequencies and labels on the test, but it proves that the pitch dictionary is learned, and not innate as your pitch dictionary is relative to your chosen pitch system. (On a side note, a pitch dictionary doesn’t just contain note names either - I’ve got the ability to know whether any given helicopter going over the house is the police helicopter or not because it has a distinct pitch entry in my dictionary)
Anyway - tests. When I first discovered I had perfect pitch I was worried by the fact that the excellent test I found on this site always failed me, even on easy mode, because I had not yet learned the “pitch dictionary”. I can now score 100% even on the “all notes” mode after a bit of training - so don’t worry if you think you might not have perfect pitch because one of these sites tells you you don’t. There is a chance that you have the innate bit (pitch memory) which is needed to be able to develop perfect pitch, and with a bit of learning of the pitch dictionary, you will be able to develop perfect pitch.
If, however, you don’t have the pitch memory ability, then sadly it is unlikely you will be able to develop perfect pitch in any meaningful capacity. People have done DIY experiments trying to, and some people get to a working level with a lot of practice, but I think that just shows they have a slightly better pitch memory than most. Pitch memory is likely a spectrum. People with infinite pitch memory sit at one end, tone-deaf people at the other. You can fall anywhere in between those two rare extremes; most people fall somewhere just below the middle from my experience.
Don’t be disheartened by this - even saying this as somebody who possesses this rare ability, it’s far from everything it is cracked up to be. It doesn’t make you a musical genius; it doesn’t really serve as anything more than a party trick and the ability to save a few quid on a guitar tuner! In fact, I wonder if had I not had the ability to “play by ear” as I called it back when I was being taught music, might have I put in more effort to learning sheet music and classical training at school? Perhaps.
Now that we have a good fundamental understanding as to what perfect pitch is, and had a look at how it is believed to work (although there are so few studies substantiating this evidence that these beliefs should be taken with an ocean’s worth of salt) is there perhaps a way to test for just pitch memory for those who do not have musical training? I’d suggest there is:
Begin by taking a song which you haven’t listened to for a while (at least a day). Make sure you know it well enough (if you know the lyrics by rote, you probably know it well enough). WITHOUT LISTENING TO THE SONG AT ALL use the voicenotes feature on your phone to record yourself singing the first verse or the chorus - any section of the song will do. Stop the recording, then go and listen to the studio version of that song. Skip to the section which you have just recorded yourself singing. Check to see if your pitch memory was correct - play the section of the song and the recording you made, and see if they sound like they are in the same key. If they are, try it a few more times with a few more songs - the chances are if you can do this consistently, you have a long or infinite pitch memory. Don’t worry if you get one or two wrong, I find that songs I am less familiar with or which I haven’t listened to in a few weeks can start to slip out of tune (although if you have developed perfect pitch you can cheat by remembering the name of the first note of the song, then using that as your starting point.)
Conversely, something that can clue you into this is if you get annoyed by out of tune material - I am currently watching Young Sheldon, and I knew instantly upon starting Season 7 that the theme tune sounded a lot lower than it should have been (they re-recorded it in a lower key). Similarly, about 10 years ago people on YouTube used to pitch music up or down slightly to avoid copyright claims. I was always able to hear this instantly, and it annoyed me immensely, but it seemed to bother no one else. That is likely because relative pitch (which others were using to interpret the song) doesn’t care about the starting note, only how it relates to the notes which follow it. Given that the entire song had been transposed up or down, the relationship between the notes remained unchanged, so most people never actually noticed unless they listened to the original immediately before or after. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you probably have an above-average pitch memory and might be able to learn perfect pitch to some degree! All you can really do is give it a go.
This guide outlined that:
I hope that this guide manages to help you understand the terms and concepts associated with perfect pitch. If you have it, enjoy it - see what creative uses you can come up with for it! If you don’t, don’t worry. Relative pitch is far more impressive, because you have to work hard at developing it - you aren’t just born with it! Here’s a good place to start learning relative pitch if you’re interested.
IMPORTANT: This article is based on my own experience. I tried not to make any absolute claims of certainty, and you should note that scientific research is incredibly sparse on the topic because of how difficult it is to research (we’ve already discussed how flawed the methodologies are), and how small the pool of people with perfect pitch is. Your experience may differ from mine.
Tagged as: music thoughts ideas perfect-pitch