What is Perfect Pitch?

Hi, and welcome to VirtualSheetMusic.com and LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. The question today is, "What is perfect pitch?" It sounds like a great thing, doesn't it? Well, we're going to discuss the benefits of perfect pitch and if there are any detriments to it today.

Perfect pitch is actually a misnomer because it has nothing to do with intonation, being in tune. It has to do with simply pitch memory. Somebody with perfect pitch can hear a lawnmower outside and boom! Without even thinking about it, just like you and I can identify orange or green without even giving it a moment's thought, people with perfect pitch they know the pitch.

So if they sat down at a piano they can go, "A." Well I don't have perfect pitch. I can go pretty darn close but relative pitch is adjunct to perfect pitch. For the vast majority of people, including professional musicians who don't have perfect pitch, once you have one note, you can relate it to all other notes. So that someone with a well-developed relative ear, you might think they have perfect pitch because you could play notes at random on a piano or another instrument and they could just name them all once they have the first note.

But a person with perfect pitch, they don't need that reference pitch at all. In fact, they don't even have to give it any thought. Now, are there any detriments to this? Because you could see the benefits. My gosh, for transcribing music that is...for listening to music and being able to write it out, having perfect pitch is a tremendous help for that. Because you just hear the notes and you put them on the stack. You don't even have to figure anything out.

When is perfect pitch a problem then? Just imagine this, if you've ever sung in a choir and you have the music in front of you and you sing what you're seeing, it's not a problem. And maybe the choral director will establish the key. And if it's in C major, you all sing in C major. Or maybe they say, "You know what? This is a little bit high for the choir. Let's do it again but we're going to do it down a whole step." Now, the rest of the choir without perfect pitch, it doesn't make any difference. Once they have that reference, they can sing no problem.

A person with perfect pitch is going to have to calculate every note and transpose it. Because when they see a C, they hear an absolute pitch C, not that B flat that the choir director wants them to sing. Actually having perfect pitch can be a challenge in certain circumstances. What about the fact that somebody gets used to a certain pitch? At home, maybe their piano is tuned to 440. Then they go play in an orchestra and it's tuned to 442 or 444 and they go, "No, you're all wrong. This is the pitch." Well, believe it or not, that can happen, because their reference is so ingrained that they actually have to think to be able to play in tune if a group is slightly off.

Worst yet, getting back to that choir analogy, imagine singing in a choir and the choir drifts up or down during a performance. Which can easily happen if it's acapella, if the choir is not accompanied by any other instruments. Well, a person with perfect pitch is going to go nuts. They're going to naturally try to get the group back to the right pitch. Well, that might not work so well if one person is singing correctly and everybody else is off a little bit.

So perfect pitch is not an end-all solution. Ultimately it's essential for all musicians, regardless of whether they have a well-developed relative ear or perfect pitch, to understand the underlying structure of music. Perfect pitch can be a tremendous help in certain situations. But at the same time, it's not a replacement for understanding the inner workings of music that you must develop if you don't have perfect pitch.

So, if you don't have perfect pitch, don't feel it's a detriment to you. If you have it, enjoy it, but also you should do your work so that you're just as comfortable transposing and you understand the relationships between tones as anybody without perfect pitch would have to do anyway. So that's the long and short of perfect pitch. Love to hear from any of you who has perfect pitch or know people with perfect pitch. I'm sure there's many stories you can share.

Again, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com and VirtualSheetMusic.com. See you next time.

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