Perfect Pitch, and why almost nobody is tone deaf.

perfect pitch what it is what it isn't and how you might almost be able to get it perfect pitch is a musical term that refers to the specific and fairly rare musical oral ability to correctly identify and produce pitches by name on command but before we get into the details of what that means and how you might even be able to develop it we should briefly cover what it isn't because the term is a bit of a false friend which is a linguistics term for words that sound familiar but aren't for instance english speakers might see the norwegian word gift and assume that it refers to a present but it actually means married and if they see the german word gift they might assume that it means gift or possibly married but it actually means poison and if you see the french word poisson you might think that it means poison but it actually means fish so if your german friend is marrying a norwegian in france be careful what you order for dinner so hearing the term perfect pitch for the first time you might assume that it refers to playing exactly the right note or playing with great intonation or playing with a very beautiful tone which all sound correct and are things musicians definitely want to do but the specific term perfect pitch is something else as we said perfect pitch also known as absolute pitch is the ability to correctly identify and produce pitches by name on command that basically means that you can hear this note and instantly know that it's a c actually it's not it's an f actually i'm kidding again this is an f the first note was a c and if you had perfect pitch you'd already know that perfect pitch is a bit like being able to identify color because you can see this color and instantly know that it's yellow except you probably know that it's not this is purple and this is yellow and of course you know that they're just different and not only would you never confuse them most people can tell you the names of those colors without hesitation that's what perfect pitch is it's knowing that this is an f just kidding it's actually an e flat and at this point you may be realizing that some musicians have a superpower that you don't have and it does seem kind of uncanny to the people who can't do this and can't even really understand what it's like to have this ability which usually raises the question do i need to have perfect pitch to be a good musician simply put no you don't need perfect pitch to be a good musician and that's easy to prove mainly because there's a lot of great musicians without it and because perfect pitch is really pretty rare it's often said that 1 in 10 000 people in the general population have perfect pitch but there doesn't seem to be any data to support that number and 10 thousand is just too high of a number anyway here's what one in ten thousand looks like that's roughly the rate at which triplets are born which is common enough that you wouldn't be completely shocked to meet a triplet but rare enough that you probably haven't and you almost certainly don't know more than one set but there's a good chance you know at least one or two sets of twins which occur at a rate of about 1 in 250. among the general population the number of people with perfect pitch is probably somewhere in between those two though it does seem to be much more common among people who grew up speaking languages with tonal or pitched qualities where the same words have different meanings based on the pitch of the word spoken mandarin is probably the most well-known but examples exist all over the world and what's shown here is just a small sample among trained musicians it could be as common as 1 in 25 which means that while lots of musicians do have perfect pitch about 96 don't but despite the fact that most musicians don't have perfect pitch there's no question that it's helpful just like being tall in basketball of course height has nothing to do with all the other athletic skills you need to master to be a good basketball player and there's nothing you can do to change your height anyway no matter how advantageous it is not in any way that would be useful for basketball anyway not not really there's almost certainly no way to get taller but you're probably thinking that perfect pitch is different than height and you must be wondering is it possible to learn this power or maybe not perfect pitch what about nearly perfect pitch what about pretty good pitch could you develop that not really but also maybe a little many things exist on a spectrum of some kind they're physical things that can be measured like height or how hot a chili pepper is those kinds of things are what they are and there's not much you can do to change them the carolina reaper is spicy and i'm not getting any taller it's just the way it is but skills knowledge and abilities also exist on a spectrum like fluency in a language or understanding of the star wars universe these things can be changed with effort and practice they're not set in stone even if aptitude talent and interest can play a role then there's things that are sort of a mix like the ability to see color which is influenced by how many types of color sensing cone cells you have in your eyes most people have three types of these cells and identify colors easily however some people have some sort of deficiency with these cells and may have trouble distinguishing the difference between colors most commonly red and green or blue and yellow some people even have four types of these cells and can see differences in colors that most people can't of course you can't change your eyes to have a greater or fewer number of these types of color sensing cells however even if you only have normal vision if you're trained in art or design you may be able to differentiate more subtle differences between colors and have the vocabulary to identify colors more readily music is a bit like that because whether you have what musicians sometimes call good ears or bad ears is influenced both by a person's level of musical intuition and how much musical training they've had so it's maybe more of a grid which broadly breaks down into four possibilities let's look at each section which will lead us to the ways you might be able to develop almost perfect pitch or something that's nearly as good starting in the lower right we'll find a condition known as amusia it's basically the opposite of perfect pitch and what many people refer to as being tone deaf people who experience amnesia may have difficulty reliably identifying when two notes are the same or different whether pitches are going up or down and they may have trouble understanding and repeating rhythms or even clapping on the beat complete and uncorrectable amusia is probably pretty rare most people who call themselves tone deaf aren't because people hear and identify pitch timbre and melody all the time without even realizing it not only can most people identify a wrong note in a familiar tune but you also know what kind of day your friend is having when you pick up their phone call with hi and they say hi and you know there's a massive difference between oh good you're home and oh good you're home you can probably even imagine what different things sound like like a motorcycle driving along screeching to a halt and then speeding away and this may come as a surprise but most people can even tell a difference in temperature in the sound of water pouring that's all related to the ability to process identify and categorize what you're hearing if you can do any of those things you're probably not really tone deaf and even if you really can't sing and you know you can't sing you're still ahead of those poor people who think they sing pretty well and have no idea that they don't next in this section you'll find a wide variety of people including banos lpx spakes and unm's which are terms that i just made up and absolutely nobody in the music business uses yet thanos are birthdays and national anthem only this bunch will sing for cake and national pride but not too much beyond that then there's elpix that's the loudest person in the car club or choir who loves to sing along under the cover of a strong speaker system or even a loud choir and organ they don't usually want to sing without accompaniment but there's a good chance that the volume is cranked they'll sing along and nail every note of the guitar solo spakes are show tunes pop tunes and karaoke enthusiasts they don't want to just sing along they've got great ears a great voice and they love to build a solo just try to get the microphone out of their hands finally we have unm's who are untrained natural musicians this group includes amateurs and professionals alike who don't have much formal training in music but they do seem to have a keen natural sense of what sounds good they sing beautifully or maybe play an instrument and they might even be excellent harmonizers songwriters composers or improvisers and i'm super not jealous of these people at all why would i be jealous anyway let's just move along to the next section this next section is an interesting group because they're trained musicians with weak ears they may play their instrument very well but somehow never developed very strong oral skills like singing improvisation composition or playing by ear every musician has their strengths and weaknesses but the number of people who fit this exact profile is probably pretty small because training and practice tend to increase musical intuition and oral skills if by no other mechanism than through sheer exposure which brings us to the final section trained musicians with good ears who have honed their technical and oral skills through structured training study and practice of course perfect pitch and good musical intuition can manifest regardless of training but just like the idea that an artist can study color theory and learn to identify subtle differences in shades musicians study music theory and amass a great vocabulary to learn and describe all kinds of things about melody harmony and rhythm one aspect of this study is called ear training which is the study of learning to identify a wide variety of musical qualities by ear and apply specific labels to them this includes interval recognition when a trained musician hears this they don't just know that the note went up twice and then down twice they can identify the specific intervals between those notes and if they know the starting note was a c they can infer all the other notes from those relationships this is commonly known as relative pitch the ability to hear relationships between notes and chords without actually being able to identify the pitches by name relative pitch is a bit like when you go visit your friend in an unfamiliar city and you know that in relation to your friend's place the grocery store is four blocks over the subway is three blocks up and the pizza place is here but you have no idea what the address or even the street names are of any of those places but when you notice that the streets are numbered and it's a grid system you just need to know that you're at 24th and 5th to know that 35th and 6th is 11 up and 1 over relative pitch is like having a map in your head perfect pitch is like having built-in gps but relative pitch is still very powerful people with great relative pitch often describe thinking in numbers when they hear a scale or they may assign the words which is known as movable do solfege and if you hear this note you can easily identify that it's the fifth note of the scale and when you hear a melody you start to hear the context of each note and will mentally convert it to numbers and then if you get a reference note possibly from your instrument you can find out which note is one and easily figure out all the other notes in relation to that reference note the great thing about relative pitch is that it's a skill that you can actually develop it does take effort and practice but it is possible to acquire if we were to think of perfect pitch as a superpower it's probably a power that superman has he has so many powers already anyway but batman's powers are all acquired through training and effort and some gadgets but he definitely taught himself to have impeccable relative pitch and there's another way to level up this skill with something called pitch memorization this is the ability to remember or identify specific pitches with a high level of accuracy even if you don't have perfect pitch there's a good chance you can sing certain musical phrases or jingles in the correct key just because of repeated exposure not to mention certain songs you've heard a million times before too musicians often develop pitch memory related to their instrument or specific musical context for instance most orchestras tune to the note a and after thousands of rehearsals and performances that always start with that specific tuning note many orchestral musicians will be able to sing or identify that specific note an a on command many instrumentalists also report pitch memorization related to their specific instruments because some notes are just so fundamental to their daily musical experiences this can be incredibly useful because if you know one note and you have decent relative pitch you can find or identify any note let's say you're trying to sing an f and you happen to have the note a memorized from many years of orchestra rehearsals just sing a scale from a down to f and there's a pretty good chance you're pretty close to f now as powerful as relative pitch is there's no question the perfect pitch is quicker and more reliable but it's worth noting that perfect pitch is not without its downsides some people with perfect pitch struggle to play transposing instruments which have a different sounding pitch from what is written on the page for instance the saxophone is generally either pitched in e flat or b flat that means that when they play a written c either an e flat or a b flat is actually the sounding pitch if you don't have perfect pitch it probably doesn't bother you very much to see a c written but hear a different note but if you do it can be a bit confusing or uncomfortable it's a bit like trying to identify a color that's been labeled incorrectly your brain reads the word quickly but is then confused when the label doesn't match the color this is a bit like how people with perfect pitch experience transposed music it's just kind of confusing finally it seems that perfect pitch doesn't always last forever it can actually drift with age usually downward you might hear what you think is an a but it turns out to be a g sharp this is still a lot closer than most of us can hope for but it can be a bit unsettling for people who are used to hearing things accurately fortunately it doesn't seem to drift much more than a semitone in most cases so you can learn to adjust for that so perfect pitch is the ability to identify and produce pitches by name on command relative pitch is the ability to hear relationships between notes and chords and pitch memorization is the ability to remember or identify specific pitches based on context and exposure so unless you already have perfect pitch figure out if you happen to have any notes already burned into your memory to use as a reference and get working on your ear training be sure to like comment share and subscribe and check my channel in the description for more videos thanks for watching you

Channel: Brad Harrison Music

Views: 643,851

Keywords: music, music ed, music education, music lesson, lesson, music theory, theory, materials of music, how to not fail music class, made easy, for dummies, help, band class, efficient practice, practice, scales, fun, perfect pitch, absolute pitch, relative pitch, pitch memory, pitch memorization

Id: TCOiHPXA-O8

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022