Perfect Pitch – Part II

This post is a bit “technical”, but very interesting.  If you wade through it, though, there’s some fun at the end.

Wikipedia: Absolute pitch, or perfect pitch, is “the ability to identify the frequency or musical name of a specific tone, or, conversely, the ability to reproduce a frequency, frequency level, or musical pitch without comparing the tone with any objective reference tone, i.e., without using relative pitch.”

Naming/labeling of notes need not be verbal. AP can also be demonstrated by other codes such as auditory imagery or sensorimotor responses such as reproducing a tone on an instrument. Therefore if a musician is from an aural tradition, unfamiliar with musical notation they can still show AP if allowed to reproduce a sounded note. (see Jimi Hendrix in last post)

Possessors of absolute pitch exhibit the ability in varying degrees. Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of the following abilities:

• Identify and name individual pitches (e.g. A, B, C#) played on various instruments
• Name the key of a given piece of tonal music
• Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass
• Sing a given pitch without an external reference
• Name the pitches of common everyday noises such as car horns

Individuals may possess both absolute pitch and relative pitch ability in varying degrees.

Both relative and absolute pitch work together in actual musical listening and practice, although individuals exhibit preferred strategies in using each skill.

The distinction between the abilities to name the pitch of a note without reference to another note, and to sing a named note without reference to a previously sounded note, has long been acknowledged.

Dr. Robert Zatorre’s research results support that absolute pitch possessors have a number of different encoding strategies that may be used concurrently, for example verbal labeling of tones. Absolute pitch possessors are able to match pitches of tones to some fixed internal scale allowing then to give the corresponding label of the tone. However, they can also effect the match without recourse to the verbal label and can make use of what they know about the pitch of the tone, provided that the tone matches their individual internalized template.

ENOUGH!   Let’s have some fun.   Do you have Perfect Pitch?

You can find out right now by clicking HERE and testing your ability online. Don’t worry. No one has to know how well you do.

Don’t touch that dial!  In my next post, I have a BIG SURPRISE…