perfect pitch

[josep skitto]

watching some famous singers music making video, they are just playing chord immediately no hesitate in live. are they all perfect pitch? so can express sound what they think immediately? or can it train? 

[Atlas007]

If by perfect pitch you mean what is documented here, that’s been debated (and still is), but most people (including musicians/singers) don’t have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is something that cannot be acquired. However, training (for most people) will help developing their skill to play/sing in tune.

[triplets]

You can have perfect pitch to recognize notes. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had it.

You can train for that apparently.

[Atlas007]

29 minutes ago, triplets said:

Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had it

Not intending to be snarky here (honestly!): I have always been fascinated by certain assertions... But how one could actually know about something that happened so long ago?

[triplets]

1 hour ago, Atlas007 said:

But how one could actually know about something that happened so long ago?

Exactly, how do we know that the Egyptians built the pyramids? Either you believe it or you don't.

Edited May 24, 2022 by triplets

[josep skitto]

12 hours ago, Atlas007 said:

If by perfect pitch you mean what is documented here, that’s been debated (and still is), but most people (including musicians/singers) don’t have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is something that cannot be acquired. However, training (for most people) will help developing their skill to play/sing in tune.

if they are not perfect pitch, how they can play chord what they thought immediately in live no hesitate? can it train ? how sound in my brain just play immediately. i think it is impossible not perfect pitch. playing chord no hesitate what they think means they are memorizing all note.. is it possible despite of not perfect pitch people? i think it can't be trained

[fuzzfilth]

Can you train yourself to touch the tip of your nose with eyes closed, without missing? Sure you can, while you certainly could not when you were small.

Can you train yourself to sing C', without missing, provided you have a voice that can sing ? Sure you can, while you certainly can't do it without training. It may take ten years and countless rehearsals, but if you've done it often enough you know how to set your throat and vocal cords so you'll hit something fairly close to C'. 

Also, in a reference-free ensemble, say, three singers, you adapt to any establishing pitch in milliseconds.

Perfect pitch has little to nothing to do with this, as it is the ability to precisely tell the pitch of a heard sound. You may have perfect pitch (which is a blessing and a curse because then even just transposing "Old McDonald" up one semitone will already make it sound wrong), but you may still be completely unable to articulate a decent note, let alone that one note you meant to sing.

Edited May 24, 2022 by fuzzfilth

[David Nahmani]

54 minutes ago, josep skitto said:

if they are not perfect pitch, how they can play chord what they thought immediately in live no hesitate? can it train ? how sound in my brain just play immediately. i think it is impossible not perfect pitch. playing chord no hesitate what they think means they are memorizing all note.. is it possible despite of not perfect pitch people? i think it can't be trained

Consider that music is a language. Can you think of a word and say it live in front of an audience? What about a full sentence? A full story? What about improv theater where you react live to some unexpected situation? It's the same with music. You learn your notes, your scales, your chords, your chord progressions, then you use them as a language to express emotions. It's all things you can train yourself to do. 

Perfect/absolute pitch is another discussion, it's about the ability some people have to hear a pitch and tell you the name of the note. I don't believe you can train that, you either have it or you don't. The people who do have it can listen to a recording and tell you that the recording is not exactly at 440 Hz but slightly sharp for example. They have somehow memorize an absolute reference. I don't believe that perfect pitch is necessary or even helpful in order to be a musician, unless perhaps you forgot your tuner and you're trying to tune your guitar to 440 Hz. 

[josep skitto]

2 hours ago, David Nahmani said:

You learn your notes, your scales, your chords, your chord progressions, then you use them as a language to express emotions. It's all things you can train yourself to do. 

if i think e major in my brain, how do i know that sound is e major? Shouldn't it be memorized e major sound? is it possible to train?

 

[David Nahmani]

Just now, josep skitto said:

if i think e major in my brain, how do i know that sound is e major? Shouldn't it be memorized e major sound? is it possible to train?

Yes, it's possible to train. You have to train your ear.

Can you sing the first four pitches in "happy birthday to you"? Then you can sing the first four notes of a major scale. It doesn't really matter whether you sing it in E major or C major. What matters the most is relative pitches: how one pitch sounds against the previous one.

I remember learning intervals by memorizing the first notes of famous tunes. You can find your own tunes, but for example:

• 2nd (Happy Birthday To You)
• 3rd (When the Saints Go Marching In)
• 4th (O' Christmas Tree)
• 5th (Star Wars theme)

etc....

At first when you hear an interval you may have to sing one of these songs to check but after a while it becomes second nature and you hear it. It helps a lot of if you play an instrument like guitar or piano because then you can also visualize what the interval looks like and make it match with what it sounds like, reinforcing that memory.

[josep skitto]

3 hours ago, David Nahmani said:

matters the most is relative pitches: how one pitch sounds against the previous one.

okay thanks!

Edited May 24, 2022 by josep skitto

[Atlas007]

16 hours ago, triplets said:

Exactly, how do we know that the Egyptians built the pyramids? Either you believe it or you don't.

Pyramids are there. Carbon 14 could date same of their periods of construction, egyptian artefacts of that periods are found within them. Rosetta stone was discovered to decrypt what was written about same during that period. Etc…

[MikeRobinson]

For whatever it's worth, I've always been able to listen to a note and to know (correctly ...) which note it was.  I recognize it, and in my mind's eye I can see my hands playing it.  (Note: "on a keyboard," which means that the sound I remember was always correct.)  I remember what that note sounded like, and realize that this note is the same one.  Maybe that's "perfect pitch."  I don't know.  But I've been able to do it since I was a kid.

My late father in law could tune [Johnny Cash's ...] guitars by ear.  He played in one of his bands and was always the one who did it.  He could also tune a piano without reference to a tuning fork, and in his early days he did that for a living all over the hills of North Carolina.  I'd watch him tune his instruments without any reference, and I also could hear when it was right, which it always was.  During any live performance I can "simply, hear" when a player needs to re-tune, and whether it needs to be up or down.

Maybe that's unusual – but it isn't, to me.

Edited May 25, 2022 by MikeRobinson

[MikeRobinson]

Funny thing about the Rosetta Stone:  until then, no one suspected that Egyptian hieroglyphics were a syllabary – a representation (like Sequoyah's Cherokee language) of what the words sounded like.  There was in fact no "sentence structure" within the language: it was effectively a sound recording.

Had the preserved sounds not sufficiently resembled modern (although "archaic") Egyptian speech which could still be recognized, the language and therefore everything written in it would have been lost forever.

Edited May 25, 2022 by MikeRobinson

[triplets]

On 5/25/2022 at 8:06 AM, MikeRobinson said:

I remember what that note sounded like, and realize that this note is the same one.  Maybe that's "perfect pitch."

It is perfect pitch. You just have it. You can identify notes without specifically training for it.