r/perfectpitchgang

and by that it’s also sounds more catching tbh

Hi guys, I'm doing an experiment in school to see if people can be trained to have perfect pitch (or improve in pitch recognition), but I do need a control group of people with perfect pitch. It's done online and should be super quick and easy (5 minutes). If anyone is interested, leave a comment and I'll pm you!

I recently learned about this thing called perfect and I was wondering if I have it, however I’m not musically experienced enough to know.

I don’t recognise the note names yet because I’m still learning theory and I guess I haven’t assigned a label for all the notes.

Here are some of my experiences:
* I have strong memory of every open string of my guitar (ABDGE)
* If I don’t have a tuner I can usually hum an E note and tune my guitar to that note though I use relative pitch to tune the rest.
* When figuring out a chord, I dissect the chord by identifying the individual notes and finding it on my guitar. However, I have to focus really hard and replay it a couple times.
* I don’t have assigned labels for the notes but they have a “shape” or “face” to them. I can say a song goes like *hums out the notes*.
* Notes can have a character; like seeing a familiar face. The G note feels like home to me, while a C feels “warm” and like its going a particular direction.

Now that I think about, the first chord I ever learned on my guitar was a G major chord for Stand By Me. I feel like I’m tuned to G as my home note.

Let me know your thoughts :)

I'm a 16 year old who recently got interested in perfect pitch and how it works on a neurological and musical level. I wondered if I had it, and I quickly figured out that compared to the stories about Mozart being able to figure the note a clock makes when it chimes at 5 years old, I definitely don't. But, I'm still better than most at recognising notes and I'm pretty confused. What I mean is that, firstly, when I do one of those quizzes for perfect pitch and they ask the note, I don't use relative pitch. Instead, I kind of ask myself does this 'feel' like a C, G or whatever else I think it is. Sometimes this is right and sometimes this is wrong (but it's more right than most people, from what I hear), but importantly when I make a mistake it's usually the same mistake. For example, I almost always confuse my Fs and my Bs. I don't know why, they just sound similiar to me. I almost never confuse a few notes, like D with A (to me, they're almost like seperate universes). I tried this on both guitar and piano and, to my surprise, if I was off, I was usually only a tone or so out. The same thing happened the other day when I was humming the Simpson's theme song and I started thinking: ''I'm dead sure that's an E at the start of the theme'' when I later found it was actually a C - C and E are two I confuse consistently as well. Weirdly though, sometimes I have to remind myself what the notes 'feel' like and I have to sit at my piano and remember - like remembering what colours look like. Then it's just a moment of 'ooh, yeah - that's what A is again.' This then reminded me of this youtube channel called TwoSet Violin, where one of the guys on the channel said he only developed perfect pitch in high school, and the gap between the right note and the one he guessed got progressively smaller. I've been doing this for about two days now, these ear tests, and I think I'm getting progressively better. I hate asking people on this sub reddit, because I'm sure you get people like me every day asking if they have perfect pitch, but I'm pretty sure my case is somewhat unusual. I'm perfectly open to not having perfect pitch, and be as honest as you want with me; I'm just looking for an answer from people who probably know best. Some parts of it sound like perfect pitch, others don't, and its such a murky area of neuroscience I didn't really know where else to turn. Thanks in advance for any replies.

I did randomly stumble on this sub just now and I did asked this question in a singing sub that was on a topic of perfect pitch and I had mixed answers. I'm fully unable to recognize a note, I can't translate a note from a piano to a guitar to a voice, like at all. However I can reproduce from memory songs if I have the same "Sounds" at disposability. Basically if I hear a piece of piano and memorize it by listening (without sheet of course and without listening to it while I'm recalling it, so it's only memory work) , I usually can replay it "by ear", it takes a lot of attempts to find the right note, basically me going through the octave until finding the note that matches (I'm in the right octave though) but all my notes match after checking with the sheet. My mother has and my grandfather had (died) perfect pitch (I know it's kind of genetic) but is it linked to it or it's something else (and if something else, I definitely would like to know the word for it so I can learn about it).

Thanks in advance for your answers.

My son is a brain cancer survivor and developed autistic tendencies as a side effect to the brain surgery at age 4 and proton radiation. He did not have autism prior to diagnosis. He is now 16.

He has always from a young age had a strong connection to music. I (his mother) went to state choir in school, and my side of the family is the same, all vocalists.

He went to region choir this year in Texas, and has been placed in the AP HONOR CHOIR as well as the CHAMBER CHOIR (only acapella choir with 6 singers per voice part) for his Sophmore year. Proud momma over here.

His vocal coach let me know last year he has perfect pitch, if you ask him to sing any note, he can. On key.

Also, if you play up to 3 notes at the same time, he can tell you what keys you played together. Whole, Sharps, & Flats.

He also can see colors and shapes with each note, and tells me they never change. (Chromastesia)?

I’m amazed at his musical brilliance.

Just wanted to share. 🤍🎵

I don't have perfect pitch, but I'm training my relative pitch really hard and it's getting better. I plan to do an experiment - I bought a tuning fork tuned to a 440hz, and I'm planning to spend so much time listening to it that I'll eventually internalize that a, and by extension would be able to identify any other pitch. Would that work? Has anyone done something like that? I found that idea in a workbook for music schools, the idea is that before every ear training class, students would sing an A and eventually would be able to recall it from memory. I know people do that with songs, but I haven't found anyone trying it with a pure sine wave.

I'm 53 years old and have for sure never had perfect pitch, though I've always had very strong relative pitch, and am a competent musician. I never cared a whole lot, though I did periodically try testing myself for fun over the years, and always failed.

I'm generally happy to hear music played in any key, they are very equal to me.

But... in the last year I noticed a quirk. For some reason, I can always remember the exact pitches of the treble synth riff in Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", which goes like this https://mascii.org/e#u9yVkq6gp6Cn4JoIpkCwRsEtyQFNkEvRXSFFIU0hXcFNwUXBWSFFQaFGAU0IAA

Any time I think of that one tune, and only that one tune AFAIK, I can always accurately remember the starting pitch of that riff. I've gone months without hearing it or thinking of it, then one day I'll test myself and it's always spot on. I've randomly tested myself probably 15 times now over the course of a year.

I don't know what to make of this, nor what it is about that tune. Maybe the characteristics of the synth sound? Maybe the parallel fourths it's playing? Maybe because I've heard it since childhood?

If someone were to play that song in a different key it wouldn't bother me, I probably wouldn't notice. But now if I hear a car horn or something and am curious about its pitch and I'm not near a piano (a rare scenario since I have a piano app on my phone), I can figure it out by calculating from that song since I know that song is in G minor.

This trick is basically useless. I imagine having true perfect pitch could be useful for quickly figuring out complex passages upon hearing them, but I don't think I'll ever have that kind unfortunately. Still, makes me wonder if I could find 11 more tunes and eventually develop a sort of sense without having to rely on relative pitch calculations.

I'd be curious to hear from someone with true perfect pitch if there's something about this song that makes it more amenable to being remembered in that absolute way?

I can instantly identify the white keys, and F sharp and B flat on a keyboard, but struggle to do so with the other sharps / flats. For those I need to sound the note in my head and go up / down a semitone to find the closest white key before I can get the right answer, all without a reference note though.

I also found that I got better at recognising those notes after doing some perfect pitch tests where they sounded a flat / sharp and I practised identifying them.

Related question, is perfect pitch involved in being able to learn songs quickly after hearing it and naturally knowing the accompaniment a melody should have?

When I hear microtonality in music, my brain rounds up or down to the nearest pitch. I hear the pitch translated as words (fixed do solfège is what I was taught, so that’s how my brain autotranslates).

How about for you? Do you hear the cents in between semitones as a true pitch? Do you round up or down in your brain as it translates to CDEFGABC or fixed do solfège? Or something different altogether?