Why you DON'T want Perfect Pitch

so i'm going to show you a very interesting test of perfect pitch your ability to identify a note without a reference i'm going to play you two notes and i'll ask you a question ready okay here's note 1 and here is note 2. so my question for you is this which of these two notes was higher than the other this question sounds simple but statistically speaking if you have perfect pitch you are less likely to get this question correct than people like me who don't have perfect pitch because you're perceiving the pitch chroma the name of the note more readily than the relationship between the notes it's very interesting here's another one i'm going to play you two melodies this is melody one and melody two even though the melodies start on different notes the distances between the notes is the same and so we think of them as being the same melody just transposed to different keys but that isn't as immediately obvious to people with perfect pitch there's a 2002 study where musicians with perfect pitch and without perfect pitch were shown sheet music of a melody and then played that melody back in a different key they were then asked if the sheet music was the same melody as what they were hearing is this the same melody and if it isn't the same melody where does the melody change musicians with perfect pitch fared worse at perceiving the transpositional identity of the same melody than musicians without perfect pitch very interesting now don't get me wrong there are many things that people with perfect pitch can do that i can't and i am definitely jealous of what folks like june lee and jacob collier can do with their superhuman feats of ear training but there are some reasons why you might not want to have perfect pitch and your life as a musician or music lover is better without it let's get into them this video is brought to you by curiosity stream and my streaming service nebula perfect pitch or technically absolute pitch is a disease we're here with charlie charlie has a really crazy talent he has a disease that's called perfect pitch and basically he can hear notes and he knows what they are just by listening to him it's hard to know just how many people are afflicted by the malady some studies suggest that it's just one in ten thousand but the noted epidemiologist jimmy fallon pegs that number a little bit higher do you know what that is perfect pitch like less than one percent of us have this talent and my youtube algorithm breaking poll pegs that number at three percent which is a lot higher than one in ten thousand so what exactly is going on here pitch perception exists kind of on a gradient from i have no idea what's going on too you can kind of think of four categories here untrained relative pitch quasi-absolute pitch and absolute pitch and the way that we're going to talk about this is in terms of color perception because that's often how people with absolute pitch think of it as pitch chroma pitch color untrained pitch is when you just don't categorize pitch when you're listening to music it's like seeing the world in black and white you might have a very deep relationship to the objects in the scene the apple tastes just as fine to you but you aren't perceiving the pitch absolute pitch is like seeing the world in color you don't have to think about whether or not the apple is red it's just red the plant is green the note is f sharp with true absolute pitch there is no thought process and no reference the current scientific thinking suggests that the encoding occurs very early on in auditory perception people who speak tonal languages like mandarin where the pitch contour is very important in communicating information are more likely to develop absolute pitch than people who don't natively speak tonal languages as well as people who start their musical training very early on in life a full 74 of native mandarin speakers who had their musical training start before age five had developed absolute pitch in one study way more than that one in ten thousand numbers cited earlier now i know this is controversial but it's generally understood that you cannot learn perfect pitch as an adult it is something that is learned in early childhood and there's really nothing that you can do about it but you can learn something which is almost as good and that is called quasi-perfect pitch quasi-absolute pitch is kind of like looking at this grayscale image and seeing the apple and then remembering oh yeah apples are red and then same color it's not as immediate it's based on a memory but you can use that memory to your advantage there's a couple of ways that this works the first way is what's called true pitch or instrument specific absolute pitch it's when you are so familiar with the timbre of a specific note on a specific instrument because you've played it over and over again it's why many guitarists just know what the sound of the open e string of a guitar is it's that's the open e string woodwind players especially in my experience clarinet players often have this because they're such a unique tone color to every note on the instrument and they become very familiar with those unique tone colors as they relate to pitch this all adds up to the thought process of hey that's an apple and apples are red there's also something called heightened tonal memory which affects both musicians and non-musicians sometimes it's called the leviton effect where you've heard a song so often before that you can always reproduce that song in the correct key honestly you know what i go to i go to a couple things i go to green dolphin street for one so i always know where eve i know i always know where e flat is i go to the so what baseline so i always know where it's a good one yeah that's a real and i go to an f blues interesting okay some people might think i have perfect pitch if i'm quick enough at picking out those anchor points using relative pitch to figure out whatever the note you just played was um but that's not what's happening it's actually just i'm just bouncing it off of a memory uh that i have as like an anchor and then using relative pitch to to figure it out like for me unfortunately uh the song that the leviton effect is most lodged in my brain is the last chorus to don't stop believing by journey that's that's an e by the way that truck because the last chorus of don't stop believing goes don't stop which is an a and g sharp and then that's down to an e i'm not even gonna check but i don't have perfect pitch i just have that tonal memory so deep in my brain because of cover gigs relative pitch is the final category and it's probably the most useful for musicians it's what we're trained in it's the ability to identify notes and scales and chords and melodies and intervals and the relationships between them so if you played this for a trained musician they'd probably be able to tell you oh yes that's a two minor seven a five seven flat nine and a one major seven they wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you the names of the notes but they could tell you the relationships between them so that if you gave a reference like you said the first chord began on the note g they could calculate out the rest of the notes in the rest of the chords the implications of this are kind of weird when you apply the color analogy here it's like seeing this image in grayscale and then being told that the plant is green therefore the apple must be red it's like you're perceiving the wavelengths of the green and then calculating out the redness of the apple having relative pitch is kind of like being colorblind and then working out what colors are based on context color analogy breaks down a little bit here but it's still kind of useful in understanding how other people might experience pitch you know when you assign words like red to some kind of color experience you're assigning a category to that experience it's called categorical perception and that categorical perception is very much dependent on the language with which you speak so for example in russian there are multiple words for what in english we might just call like blue like there are multiple words for this what's interesting is that studies of perfect pitch and absolute pitch have really just dealt with one kind of category and that is 12 tone equal temperament people who are trained in 12 tone equal temperament are more likely to assign their perception to the notes of the piano i'd be really fascinated to see if that translates to different kinds of tuning systems and different cultures that didn't have 12 tone equal temperament as the default but there haven't been any studies on that so we shall see so to recap we have four ways of experiencing pitch we have absolute pitch we have quasi-absolute pitch we have relative pitch and then we have the untrained ear so with all that in mind why possibly would a musician not want to have absolute pitch why wouldn't we want to see the world in color that seems strange well i have some unfortunate news for the people with perfect pitch watching this video and it comes from the great concert pianist abby simon if you have absolute pitch perfect pitch if you live long enough you will lose it rick beatto did a video recently on people who lose their perfect pitch and it seems to be that this is something that happens universally across the board after a certain age like if you have it you only have a short window to enjoy it and use it before it goes away so your perfect pitch has visited it no it's it's it's gone down the tube a study from 2012 found that 16 out of 20 people tested with absolute pitch over the age of 45 had their absolute pitch shifted by a semi-tone or more this was corroborated by another study in 2016 which also found that this perfect pitch shift had nothing to do with the mechanical hearing loss that normally comes with aging and the society for music theory listserv researcher david huron asked the question if there were any examples of people over the age of 60 who didn't experience this pitch shift none were given the great jazz vibraphonist gary burton has talked frequently about his loss of perfect pitch like on this interview from adam tan's youtube channel well it was interesting uh it was confusing i lost the perfect pitch in 2011 it was something i had gotten used to and kind of depended on as a you know a sense of always kind of knowing where everything is suddenly discovered that you know that piece of information was no longer available to me in her master's thesis understanding and dealing with the loss of absolute pitch as one ages mary el bianco catalogues correspondents with older musicians who have lost their absolute pitch the experience was annoying often getting in the way of my enjoyment of music i am sad to have lost something that felt very special to me what was occurring was truly jolting to my sense of musicality and my sense of self another account reads around the time i got my first pair of reading glasses my sense of absolute pitch started to waver i got c's and b's mixed up and to be honest this was a surprisingly alarming development a whole dimension of my existence seemed to fade away the thing to me that's most frightening about this is not just that the perfect pitch goes away like you're now seeing the world in black and white when you used to see it in color because it sounds like that's not really what's happening to people with perfect pitch as they age instead it's like everybody's still seeing the world in color but it's all wrong it's like all of a sudden you wake up and the world looks like this all weird and hue shifted but the apple still is red in reality and the entire world acts as if it's red and you remember it being red at one point but you just can't see it that way it's like musical reality is trying to gaslight you into thinking that your own ears are wrong you have to perform the feat of pretending that the apple is red day in and day out in your musical life but to you no matter how hard you try it isn't [Music] so with lots of anecdotal evidence and some limited research to suggest that if you have perfect pitch you will eventually lose it and feel like a stroke patient who has to fight to force his limbs to work again oh god i i'm not sure if i really want perfect pitch i i'm happy having relative pitch and just existing in my own uh black and white world thank you very much [Music] i talked a lot about pitch perception with fellow youtuber and memester charles cornell in a recent conversation on perfect pitch there's a channel um hilarious super talented voice actor pro zd did you ever see the video that he put out that was i can recite every line from peter pan yep i'll run him through oh take that did you notice what was going on there that was very very interesting from a musical perspective you can watch more of our conversation over on the extended version of this video which is available exclusively on nebula nebula is a creator-owned streaming service where you can watch many of youtube's favorite creators and also watch bonus content like the extended version of this video with charles cornell it features many of your favorite youtube educators and creators including lindsay ellis legal eagle charles cornell 12 tone thomas frank wendover productions and many many more this video and nebula are supported by the sponsor of today's video curiosity stream the go-to source for the very best documentaries on the internet with thousands of titles to choose from including the very excellent documentary on frank sinatra alleged perfect pitch haver frank sinatra or america's golden age if you sign up to curiosity stream using either the link in the description or curiositystream.com adamnelly you'll also get a subscription to nebula for free what's more is that if you sign up now you can get a year of both curiosity stream and nebula for just 14.7 it's a 26 discount cha-ching by signing up to this curiosity stream nebula bundle with the link in the description or curiositystream.com adam neely you're not only helping to support this channel but also the broader community over at nebula as we create content that aims to engage in the world in a deeper and meaningful way thanks so much everybody for watching charles cornell and i are going to be working on some things in the future so definitely stay tuned for that very exciting what we have cooking up and uh yeah leave a comment like subscribe do the thing youtube

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 673,157

Rating: 4.9589257 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: QRaACa1Mrd4

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Zushef]

Oooh that’s so sad and now I totally want Brandon to do something with this information in a Warbreaker sequel!

[u/MagusUmbraCallidus]

He says that people with perfect pitch often think of it as pitch chroma and see/think of it like colors... this could easily sync with Sanderson's system. I wonder how in depth his reasearch was for pitch, color, etc with the biochromatic system.

The video also mentions that people with perfect pitch have trouble recognizing the same melody if the pitch/notes have been shifted.

I wonder if this means that those with the second heightening will be unable to (RoW spolier ahead) make the anti-tones (at least without an instrument) since they are supposed to sound just like their original Tone but somehow be different. Or maybe it will affect their ability to make harmonized Tones like Warlight and Tower light require.

Edit: Spoiler for Rhythm of War

[u/Kelsierisevil]

This was super interesting.

[u/RisKQuay]

Huh. Interesting.

[u/Bigtuna3972]

With the power wouldn't they be able to use it like a power, as in turn it on and off?? Or perceive using perfect pitch in choosing. Since you wouldn't immediately have the heightening unless Returned? Thus you'd be able to use “quasi” perfect pitch? It'd be like, riding a bike or driving a car, or walking.

[u/Xais56]

I suspect Investiture derived perfect pitch is different from natural perfect pitch. There's the implication of the connection between tone and Investiture charged to different shards, my guess is that people of the second heightening are detecting the spiritual connection between sound and power, with the side effect that they are better at perceiving sound.

[u/Kingsdaughter613]

Well, one reason is that I can tell that keyboard is not very good. It gives me a headache because I can hear the jaggedness of the notes.

I may have quasi-pitch for the piano. I can’t necessarily remember the key names, but I recognize the notes. Not well enough to play by ear though, but then I don’t hear many pure piano pieces. But I do know when a note sound wrong, like with the notes played at the beginning. And, interestingly, while I can tell which note is higher, I couldn’t tell that the two melodies were the same.

[u/kelsier24]

This video was super cool and interesting!! So funny he used a relation to colors

[u/DianaSoreil]

I actually have it and not only is everything in this video true, but you will know exactly how out of tune every noise is forever. and I don’t just mean music. I mean things like someone tapping their fingers on a desk, a car alarm, a screaming baby.... and you can never turn the “wow, this is off key!” sense off no matter what you do. It’s super annoying and I honestly don’t enjoy it.