Violin is harder in the sense that the notes are not marked out. So I wonder if most of you have perfect pitch, since I know most of you are in the higher Grades already. We seem to have a broad group of beginners and Grades 6-8 here.

I do but I have never found it to help much on violin, except that it helps me to play more in tune. I'm working for grade 7.

That's great. Probably having good coordination is also a big help here. But perfect pitch is great for tuning the violin! LoL...
I'm starting on those Grade 4 pieces. Exams are only held once a year here for ABRSM, and twice a year for Trinity. But the ABRSM exams are still more popular.

hello

whats perfect pitch and how does someone test for it? ive heard about it but ive never been told what it is!

Yes, I have perfect pitch.
I recently got a violin, so I come here. I don't know what my grade is, but I already passed a diploma in piano.

Perfect pitch:If you have perfect pitch, whenever a person plays a note, you will know what the note is by only hearing.

i think my sister and i have perfect pitch! the really annoying thing about it is when i was at school, everyone kept playing notes on the piano and then asking me what note is this? what note is that? it got very annoying after a while! however, it impressed our music teacher!

I'm going to slap myself for not knowing whether i have perfect pitch or not.

Actually...i dunno ...

At one time, my school flute teacher told me: 'You are very special because you listen to the notes and play them on your instrument. You rely on your ear."

At first i didn;t know what she meant, then i read up on perfect pitch. Could i have obtained perfect pitch? I did not start piano lessons like everyone else at a young age.

Sometimes i think, maybe i have like half perfect pitch. Because i can play a song by listening to it. Sometimes i get the notes wrong. but sometimes i do get it right. Maybe i havent developed it yet.

maybe you've just naturally picked up relative pitch?

It sounds more like relative pitch to me... perfect pitch is being able to tell what a note is just listening to it.

i have completely the opposite of perfect pitch- nowhere near a note pitch lol!!

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have completely the opposite of perfect pitch- nowhere near a note pitch lol!!

Aww Natalie I'm sure that's not true

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i can play a song by listening to it. Sometimes i get the notes wrong. but sometimes i do get it right

I can do this. for some reason it really seems to annoy people that can't do it! is this relative pitch?
jess

nutter, maybe weve both got relative pitch
yey!!!

SPeaking of perfect pitch, is it true that 99% of people in music unis hav perfect pitch?



Coz if i donthav perfect pitch then chances are less, to be able to apply for uni or college?

I think I've got I-can-have-perfect-pitch-but-only-when-my-brain-feels-like-it pitch. It sort of comes and goes, somtimes I find I've got perfect pitch but at other tiems I find I haven't!

[QUOTE] 99% of people in music unis hav perfect pitch?[QUOTE]

oh my word! is that true? that is scary!

[QUOTE] i have completely the opposite of perfect pitch- nowhere near a note pitch lol!! [/QUOTE]

but you play so many instruments clarinetlover!

QUOTE (violingirl @ Sep 3 2004, 09:37 AM)

but you play so many instruments clarinetlover!

still doesnt make me have perfect pitch!!

[QUOTE] 99% of people in music unis hav perfect pitch?[QUOTE

What a load of nonsense! Who said that?! Perfect pitch is the ability to name any note, cold. It's a learned skill, not an inborn one, because the notes have been fixed by man; ie A equalling 440. I think it can only be successfully learnt before the age of 4 or 5 though.

Relative pitch is a far more useful skill, being the ability to hear and name intervals. This is something that can be learnt at any age, although admittedly it's easier if you learn it when you're very young. The Kodaly method is an excellent way of vastly improving your skills in this department at any age, however, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Violinia

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It's a learned skill, not an inborn one, because the notes have been fixed by man; ie A equalling 440.

Exactly, Violinia!!! I keep trying to tell people who say it's hereditary that it must just be that those in musical families are exposed to and remember the sounds of the different pitches at a very young age, and therefore are "born with" perfect pitch- i.e. before anyone identifies it, they have learned it.

QUOTE (Violinia @ Sep 3 2004, 12:02 PM)

A equalling 440.

What does that mean?

The standard pitch for the A at the pitch of an A-string on a violin is 440 sound vibrations per second. Nowadays.
In the past it has been flatter, for example in Mozart's time the standard pitch was about a quarter-tone flatter than today. I think.

So in mozart's time concert A was a quarter tone flatter? interesting. if i could only go back in time my violin would sound in tune ( The tuning peg on that string doesn't work )

Oh, and yes, I do have perfect pitch, but it's a nightmare switching between clarinet violin and double bass - bass sounds an 8ve down from written, clarinet sounds a tone down and the violin varies depending on whether im playing in any other than first position

Another annoyance is my schoolmates - whenever im in a classroom with a piano they sit there plonking on random notes and asking me what they are and im in constant demand before concerts to help tune people's instruments as well

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Another annoyance is my schoolmates - whenever im in a classroom with a piano they sit there plonking on random notes and asking me what they are  and im in constant demand before concerts to help tune people's instruments as well

I have both those problems too!! It's so annoying!

same with me! it used to happen to me all the time at school!

This whole thing about perfect pitch becomes more and more dodgy the more you think about it. A was fixed to 440 at some point in time; this means that if the people who have "perfect pitch" went back in time they wouldn't be able to pick the notes out any more because they would all sound "wrong".

Also, their ability to name the notes played on the piano is a weird one - the notes on the piano aren't the actual notes anyway, seeing as the piano is a relatively modern and "tempered" instrument, meaning the notes aren't exactly what they're supposed to be but an approximation. Yes, I know this doesn't appear to make sense but it's true.

Apparently the real Eb isn't equidistant from both D and E, and Eb abd D# are actually two slightly different notes. For the piano to work, though, Eb and D# had to become the same note, and placed equidistant between the two white notes. Same with all the other black notes, obviously.

So when a person with so-called perfect pitch recognises Eb and calls it Eb or D#. they must be REMEMBERING the note as they've heard it played on the piano so many times.

Perfect pitch is all about sound memory based on exposure from a very young age.

If the 12 notes of the scale really were placed at equal distances from each other, this phenomenon wouldn't occur:

When playing the violin, if you play B on the A string followed by C, you have to put your fingers pretty close togther to make the right sound. If you then play D followed by C#. ditto. But the C natural you played and the C# you played won't be as close together as the other semitones you've just played. Weird but true.

Yes, go figure!

Violinia

The teacher I had for theory at grade 6 - 8 was a violinist.
She told me that you have to play slightly differently when playing with piano accompaniment than when playing in an orchestra.
The difference caused by having to keep in tune with the even tempered piano.

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The teacher I had for theory at grade 6 - 8 was a violinist. She told me that you have to play slightly differently when playing with piano accompaniment than when playing in an orchestra. The difference caused by having to keep in tune with the even tempered piano.

Aha! proving the whole point, no? I also think the people here who complain about the bore of being asked to demonstrate their perfect pitch all the time protesteth a little too much...

I wonder if their perfect pitch goes as far as recognising the difference sounds when a violinist plays by himself or with a pianist!

Violinia

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I wonder if their perfect pitch goes as far as recognising the difference sounds when a violinist plays by himself or with a pianist!

Lol... I don't really think I'd like to try that!!! And sorry to everyone who thinks I complain too much!

Having just asked someone with perfect pitch (not me) it is possible to tell the difference between a D sharp and an E flat (when played on, say, a violin obviously not on the piano as it's the same note) but he is a pianist and just says that one is flatter than the note on the piano; the other is sharper so it's not too hard to tell. There must be some finite resolution to it though I wonder how accurate it is, 1 hertz, 0.5 hertz maybe less... It's hard to test to much less than a semitone although I often hear comments of just that's not a note, 'nearly an F sharp' (that's when asked what note car alarms are and so on!).

As for no one being born with it, I tend to subscribe to the thought that everyone is born with it and most people loose it through not using it: this better explains why more Chineese people have it (apparently pitch is more important in communication in spoken language) and why more blind people have it too.

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As for no one being born with it, I tend to subscribe to the thought that everyone is born with it

Yes, but you couldn't possibly be born with it because the "recognised" pitches are just those set by people, today at A440.

It has to be some kind of memory.

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Yes, but you couldn't possibly be born with it because the "recognised" pitches are just those set by people, today at A440. It has to be some kind of memory.

Cecilia's absolutely right. Perhaps what you should be saying is that everybody is probably born with the ability to recall exact notes, and the ability will last a lifetime if the child listens to enough music from a young enough age.

A university in California doing research into the whole thing has found a preponderance of the ability within the Ashkenazi Jewish population. They seem to be attributing this to some sort of special ability these people have, which I think is nonsense. I think it's all about exposure from a young enough age, and Ashkenazi Jews tend to value music education - it's a cultural thing. My family are Ashkenazi Jews and while I don't quite have perfect pitch I have an unusually good relative pitch, with with I managed to fool the researchers on their website that I had perfect pitch!
I'll post a link to the site if anyone's interested.

(When they found out I was Ashkenazi Jewish they got even more excited, but I patiently explained to them that I'd done the test using relative pitch, not perfect pitch. They took some convincing, because they thought they'd designed the test to make it impossible to use relative pitch; they fire the questions at you thick and fast.)

Anyway, I really don't think my musical ability,whatever it is, is something I was born with, but is all down to my mother, who was whistling Eine Kleine Nacht Musik to me (and taking me to concerts) from as long as I can remember. It's all to do with exposure, it really is.

I'm sure you could teach any child to develop perfect pitch. In fact I've witnessed Cyrilla's teaching, where she uses a tuning fork and inadvertantly develops primary-aged children's pitch to the extent that on arriving at her lesson they can all sing a perfect A without any prompting.

That is the development of perfect pitch. If you did the same thing with the other 11 notes, you'd have a child who managed to develop perfect pitch.

Violinia

When i personally say that i have perfect pitch i actually mean that i could tell you the name of any note played on piano or other instrument ie F, A etc.

It seems to me that in western culture this is seen as the extent of perfect pitch. however in eastern music (indian, etc.) quarter tones are sometimes incorporated into the music and musicians who have perfect pitch could tell you whether a note is B# or actually C. (in much the same way that violinists can make the differentiation between quarter tones in music)

Itwould seem apparent that the meaning and skills of someone with 'perfect pitch' vary depending on cultural upbringing and that some of us who claim to perfect pitch would 'only' be gifted with a kind of 'extreme relative pitch' (i would be forced to 'humbly'place myself into this group )

Sorry about the essay, but felt it all needed to be said.
Any thoughts or ideas on this would b very well appreciated!
Adam

Yes, to be more precise I believe that every child is born with the ability to recall the absolute pitch of sound waves that they hear. If the child's ear is trained (even just by environmental sounds) the ability is not lost. Obviously though being used to hearing certain notes and naming them the pitch is associated with a letter name and can be discretised by the listener into semi-tones but ultimately it is the sound in the head that is the perfect pitch not the actual assigning of a name to the note. In an analogy with vision-we're not all born knowing that red is called red but we can all see colours and differentiate them right from the start even though we can't name them.

I agree though that unless it is nurtured it is lost. I wonder if a way to 'teach' a baby perfect pitch would be to play a certain note to go with each activity, say a G when you feed them etc. and then pitch would be important to communication and they wouldn't loose it; then again maybe they'd just feel hungry every time they heard a piece in G major!

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maybe they'd just feel hungry every time they heard a piece in G major!

I would really hate to be that baby...

QUOTE (AnotherPianist @ Sep 4 2004, 10:17 PM)

As for no one being born with it, I tend to subscribe to the thought that everyone is born with it and most people loose it through not using it: this better explains why more Chineese people have it (apparently pitch is more important in communication in spoken language) and why more blind people have it too.

Oh fiddlesticks... I'm chinese and so are most of my students and fellow teachers and their students, and I think I only know my violin teacher and another piano teacher's daughter who has perfect pitch. I certainly don't! Sometimes my chinese (one of my colleagues' too) words come out wrong and it causes a great laugh cos it means something else. Although I must say I did envy those who did until now... when they say everyone asks you to identify note when you walk into a room... LoL.. I guess I don't envy them now! I too have relative pitch so problem is when one note on the violin goes off, the rest that follow go off too! So maybe perfect pitch is really very useful for the violin.
Anyway I have also have a sometimes on sometimes off sense of pitch I dunno why. I used to have very good relative pitch until my late teens when I started singing the blues and pop songs, where they twist and turn their tunes. Weird.

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more blind people have it too

I think this is because blind people cant use sight for ordinary everyday things, so they rely on their sense of hearing more than a sighted person. this probably fine-tunes their musical ear as they can hear minute details of music.
jess

I do have perfect pitch as does one of my sons. I tested him (age 9 or so??) when he had to sit thru a long performance of "Messiah" by getting him to guess what key he thought each section was in & write in the programme! It is useful for playing the violin, and very useful for aural tests in exams as you can hear what the chords are , then work out the cadences! However there is still a subtle difference between naming a note played on a piano and conjuring a perfect "A" out of thin air! (actually a lot of violinists develop a good ear for an "A" even without standard "perfect" pitch) Sometimes I can be confused listening to something on the radio which can be difficult to fix in my mind between two keys - perhaps they have been playing on "authentic" instruments or the recording is being played slightly fast or slow which slightly alters the pitch.(That's my excuse anyway! ) Sometimes if I think too hard about what a note is the certainty goes - it's usually better to go with the first thought. As earlier people have said, "perfect" pitch is really exceptionally good absolute pitch memory - my mum (bless her) cannot remember absolute pitch for more than a few minutes it seems (after a piece of music has finished playing she will be found humming it later in a completely different key) but she can sing perfectly in tune within a choir or with an accompaniment as long as they keep going!

I found it hard when the other son was learning the trumpet as it is a transposing instrument and his "written" C sounded like Bb to me, so when he asked for help I had to keep stopping to mentally transpose. I also find it very hard to sing at sight "transposed" or if a piano is out of tune, although I could transpose something I know fine by ear. People without perfect pitch will sing a tune happily in whatever key you start them off in (unless it goes out of range of course!). I suspect there is a large inborn component to this ability, which of course if someone is never exposed to music they will probably never realise they have - unless perhaps it is part of a talent for imitation??

Fascinating topic - there was a BBC Radio 4 documentary once which would be worth looking out for in case it is ever repeated

I too was thinking how people are able to get perfect pitch. I thought it was a learnt skill because all people are born the same.

What if someone was supposebly born with perfect pitch but he/she never had any music lessons, and thus was not exposed to music, because of no funds for lessons. Would the person still have perfect pitch?

I don't think perfect pitch is totally learnt. I think you have to be born with a good inclination towards pitch first, before you know you have perfect pitch. Maybe people not exposed to music can hum out the church bell or train whistle in tune long after they have heard it just that they've never been taught that it was in "A" or "B" or whatever?
All of the Yamaha junior music course students (ages 4-6) are taught to listen and sing in solfege (like C is Doh, no matter what key they are in) which is more for people with perfect pitch but very few can remember their pitching after the course is ended and they don't practice their aural skills everyday. Most of them still learn some kind of instrument but they "forget" their pitch. So perfect pitch can't just be "acquired" at a young age. You either have it or you have relative pitch. Unless you're tone deaf, that would be a different matter.
One of the ABRSM examiners once told my teacher that when a person loses his/her perfect pitch (mostly when they are older like 40-50) it's sudden, and then they are even worse off because they have to start from scratch learning relative pitch. They get totally lost.

I started piano when I was four and I don't have perfect pitch =/ Is it possible to learn?!

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Sometimes if I think too hard about what a note is the certainty goes - it's usually better to go with the first thought

Sorry 1stviolin but that's not perfect pitch! That's good pitch memory. I can listen to a piece of music and nearly always guess what key it's in just by focussing on it for a few moments and getting a feel for it. Sometimes I'm out by a semitone but never more. I don't consider myself to have perfect pitch though, as perfect pitch is something else, or at least I think it is.

From what I understand, perfect pitch is the ability to name any key, lightning fast, the second you hear it. And never get it wrong! Somebody with perfect pitch would be no more likely to name the wrong key as a sighted person would call a colour the wrong name, or even slightly the wrong name.

What we have is good key memory and I know I have very good relative pitch, but I don't have the perfect pitch that these perfect pitch people have.

As for acquiring it, some people say you can and some people say you can't. I think if you have good pitch recognition already you can probably perfect it. A few months ago I carried out a short experiment, which was to see if I can improve my pitch recognition. I tried to keep the note C in my head at odd moments throughout the day, and of course only managed to keep it up for two or three days. However, it's now even easier to pitch a C out of nowhere, just after doing it for those couple of days. My plan was to spend a week on each of the 12 notes until I had them all. Hmm, yes, the phrase "get a life" springs to mind...

But yes, I do think you can learn it.

Violinia

*laugh* i was trying that with the C note today.. I'm not sure if I can do it I have a bad memory >_<

Just happened to had a discussion about the legendary "perfect pitch" last week with my piano teacher (but personally I am not interested in this topic at all).

She said that some people happened to born to have "perfect pitch" - which I seriously doubt! And for those who don't have "perfect pitch" can be trained - which I truely believe!

Seriouly... think of the piano and how that wierd concept of 12 equal-temperament and/or the well-temperament came about. One person MUST be trained to tell what a note is - training means giving the definition of a note. Without knowing what is C D E F G A B... (and the sharp/flats) how can a person "born to have perfect pitch"?

My jaw will fall IF a person can name a pitch before s/he can know his/er parents names! I would be even more amazed if anyone born before the guy (Pythagorus???) who invented the well-temperament would have a perfect 12-tone pitch....!

Perfect pitch doesn't have anything to do with whether you play the piano!! It's an easy enough mistake to make though. I've always had perfect pitch (I used to sing before I took up the violin at age 4... I didn't start the piano till I was 6) - I think it's really just something you're born with.
However, I think relative pitch can be learned. That's where you can work out the note from the last note you heard. A lot of very musical people can do that... but you definitely don't have to have it to be a musician! (Or, apparently, a piano tuner... strange...)

The problem with the colour analogy is that you can get "intermediate" colours - is that turquoise, greeny blue or bluey green?? One thing I have noticed I can spot is that if I have recorded something from Radio 4 (yes, I'll admit it, The Archers) on one tape player & play it back on a different one, things sound very slightly sharper - the "pips" at 6pm for example. Likewise some recorded music on the radio may not be at "standard" pitch. If someone with perfect pitch (whatever that is defined as) spent a long period of time (months??) away from any modern tuned instruments to "reset" the memory, listening perhaps to some ethnic quarter tone music, wouldn't the ear adjust and learn a new standard?? I'm not sure - I certainly couldn't adjust to a flat piano, but if anyone would like to send me to research tropical island music for six months or so.....

The colour analagy is a correct one, you can get intermediate notes aswell; people with perfect pitch can tell if something is not a note just as well as they can tell that it is, I am often informed that car alarms are between a C and a C sharp or whatever!

Colour is the frequency of a light wave, just as pitch is the frequency of a sound wave: they're directly analagous. True if we wanted to treat colour in the same way as sound we'd have to discretise it and have a definitive red a definitive yellow etc. and not allow anything inbetween, and I'm sure if we'd been brought up with only these shades and nothing else we'd instantly notice if they were wrong below a certain tollerance.

I still believe everyone is born with it, okay it has to be tempered to the modern scale, I agree with that but ultimately perfect pitch is not the ability to name notes when played it's the ability to remember the absolute frequency of a sound wave (obviously to within a certain tollerance). Everone is born with that but it is lost; although I make no assertion as to whether it can be re-learnt, it's certainly not easy to relearn but I would not say it's impossible, I just don't know. Compare the amount of time we spend telling children this is red to the amount we spend saying this is a C!

If only certain people are born with it (or the ability to do it) why do so many blind people have it, surely it must be that everyone has it and they don't loose it because it's more useful to them and they don't have to dedicate such a huge portion of their brain to vision so it can be used to retain other skills. I don't think that there's something special about being born blind that adds perfect pitch. Perfect pitch just the same as being able to remember that red is red (in fact it's easier as it assumes that there's only one shade of red in the world), nothing magical: but it can be very useful in aural tests!