So you think you can hear?

Some musicians are blessed or many would say cursed by Perfect Pitch or Absolute Pitch. Perfect or Absolute Pitch is your ability to recognize EXACT tones and chords - BY EAR. More precisely, the ability to identify the pitch of a musical tone without an external reference pitch. To be considered an absolute pitch possessor, an individual must have the ability to identify pitches accurately and instantaneously.

Here's a quick lesson:

WITHOUT Perfect Pitch: You do not know what tones you hear -- it's like hearing in "black and white":

WITH Perfect Pitch: You know the EXACT TONES you hear -- it's like hearing in color:

This does not mean that you associate visual colors to tones to learn Perfect Pitch. Instead, you learn to hear the SOUND colors of the tones.

Think of it this way: Your eye sees VISUAL colors. Likewise, your ear can learn to hear PITCH colors.

Your eye sees colors of LIGHT. Likewise, your ear can learn to hear colors of SOUND.Once you tune in to these PITCH COLORS, you'll naturally name any tone or chord -- BY EAR -- just like you can name colors by eye.

Ernst Terhard on Absolute Pitch: Although Absolute Pitch in humans ordinarily is dependent on labeling of tones according to musical-notation conventions, it is not merely the "pitch class" (i.e. the musical note name) that can be identified. Rather it is pitch itself. A tone's pitch is identified with significantly better accuracy than the plus/minus 3 percent frequency tolerance preset by the semitone interval that forms the smallest unit in the Western music notation. An AP possessor can tell if an acoustically played tone is sharp or flat relative to a standard intonation internally available to the AP possessor. It appears that the standard intonations of different AP possessors may be different, dependent on the level of intonation which they have been exposed to in early childhood. This becomes evident when AP possessors report to feel uneasy or even confused when they have to listen to, or to play, music on a level of tuning that differs from their internal standard.

Even in "genuine" AP possessors the skill appears to be somewhat fragile - which fits into the above view. Gerald Moore, the famous English piano accompanist, described in his book "Am I too Loud?" that as a young man he had Absolute Pitch and gradually lost it later. This is most remarkable, as the loss happend in a period of Moore's life in which he still was fully engaged as an accompanist. He pointed out that he regarded the loss of Absolute Pitch as a relief, i.e., with regard to a problem that he frequently had to solve, namely, transposition of pieces on the piano. In view of the above findings one may be inclined to suspect that Moore may unconsciously have himself "trained off" his Absolute Pitch faculty, as it had made transposition harder to him.

So it appears that, in a sense, the ability of Absolute Pitch in principle is implanted in every human, but is easily lost in infancy and/or childhood when it is not maintained and developed by training in naming musical tones. It may be not too far-fetched to speculate that, without such active maintenance, the natural Absolute Pitch faculty is inadvertently "trained off" in infancy, i.e., in the course of the vast acoustic/auditory learning challenges that an infant must accomplish, in particular in acquisition of its mother tongue.

Whatever, the faculty of AP cannot be regarded as an outstanding, sophisticated auditory achievement, because it was found in a number of non-human animals. For instance, the ability to recognize absolute pitch was found in a number of birds, and in a frog (Elepfandt, A. [1986]. Wave frequency recognition and absolute pitch for water waves in the clawed frog Xenopus laevis. The ability of adult Xenopus laevis to identify water wave frequencies was demonstrated by go/no-go conditioning. The acuity of frequency recognition is of absolute-pitch quality.). This indicates that AP is an elementary, rather than sophisticated, feature of the auditory system of vertebrates.

Another type of evidence in favour of the above view was provided by our own experiments on recognition of musical key with students of music as subjects. The advantage of experiments on musical key recognition - as opposed to recognition of single tones - is that they can be carried out both with AP possessors and with non-AP possessors. Roughly speaking, the result was that only a small percentage of musically trained non-AP possessors are totally unable to recognize musical key. About 30% of the non-AP possessors were able to tell whether or not musical samples were played plus/minus 1 semitone "off key".

The general view is this: To become a "genuine" AP possessor you must early in life become aware that you already are an AP possessor, and this kind of awareness, of course, may emerge from the experience that pitches can be identified, though at first imperfectly, to a certain higher-than-chance extent. When that level of performance and awareness is more or less spontaneously attained in early childhood, the ability may become "genuine" by practice.

Read more on the website of The University of California Genetics of Absolute Pitch Study and fill in the survey and take the test if you are interested!

A bibliography of absolute pitch that contains more than 350 papers http://www.absolutepitchstudy.com/