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On fresh ears, before I begin playing, when I close my eyes and randomly play notes on the keyboard of my perfectly in tune digital piano, I'm able to correctly identify the note.

Does this mean I have perfect pitch?

Or that your mind's eye is "seeing" where you put your finger

There are dozens of "absolute pitch" tests on the Internet.

http://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_abspitch.php

being one of them. Give it a try!

I scored 0/10 twice, so I guess that's "no"!

Lovely! I got 2/10

A lot of people seem to want it but the few I've met who've had it tend to see it as much as a curse as a blessing. It makes transposing harder and they can have difficulty singing with a choir with has a tendency, hmm hmm, to drift a little from exact pitch when singing A Capella.

I wouldn't need to take a test to know I don't have it!

I don`t think many pianos have it either. Even the digital ones . . .some o` the notes on mine could do wi pulling up a bit!

Well that was humbling.

An autistic savant named Derek Paravicini has perfect pitch, and he can identify notes of a train changing tracks. Scary!

Agreed. More of a cool trick than a useful skill.

By the way, I decided to take the test for fun. I got them all and don't have perfect pitch. If you can remember just one pitch (I tend to know where A is because of an orchestra tuner that blared it out through much of my life), you can use relative pitch to know where the other notes are. So I expected to get all 10 or zero. If the test had sharps and flats, it may have been harder to identify the half steps. Sometimes I think a note is an F and it's F# or even G, but I'm usually close. For the most part, I've developed my sense of relative pitch to the point where, if you know one note, you've got a good sense of all the others. Something you can definitely work on.

woohoo, 1 of 10, statistically same as zero I would think. lol

Official tin ear

2 out of 10....even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then!

Like Brian, I have a combination of very good pitch memory and strong relative pitch/interval recognition, so it's hard to know whether i have perfect pitch or not. On a piano, I can name pitches no problem, but if they are played on an instrument that I'm not as familiar with, I have a tough time.

That being said, I think perfect pitch can be manifested in different ways -- it doesn't seem to be the same from person to person.

After playing only C once, After the test I got 8/10

Well that's really good, but at the moment you play a reference note it becomes an exercise in relative pitch.

4/10 I made some good guesses, I guess. Otherwise, I was clueless.

Perfect pitch is not innate, it is learned, so that even adults can acquire it by memorizing pitches. At least according to the author of Fundamentals of Piano Practice.

I don't need to take this test to know that I don't have perfect pitch. But I know some people who do have perfect pitch, and as Andy Platt said, to them it's more of a curse than a blessing.

My music theory teacher has perfect pitch, and she tells me she can't really listen to music (on the radio or wherever) when she's tired. If she does, her brain is constantly busy identifying pitches in the background -- kind of like when you see a string of text on a billboard along the highway, you can't *not* read it, even though you might not consciously want to read it. Once you've learned to read, you automatically identify letters, words and sentences even when you'd perhaps prefer not to. She even 'hears' the pitch the refrigerator's motor is humming at, and hates it (because the refrigerator and the central heating system are in constant dissonance with each other).

Knowing that, I much prefer having good relative pitch -- which is, indeed, a learned skill. And much more useful, in terms of musical hearing, than hearing random pitches in daily life.

For those who want to train themselves in having good relative pitch: you can do it by having someone else (or an app, maybe?) play random series of notes for you, and writing them down. You start with just three or four notes, identify the first note, and restrict the jumps to one step up or down. Then you listen for higher, lower, or same.

After you get that down, introduce bigger jumps (first thirds, then fourths and fifths and eighths within the base chord of the scale you're working in, then jumps that are not within the base chord, and so on). At first, you identify the jumps by 'singing', in your head, the notes that go in-between, and simply counting. After a while you will easily recognize certain intervals at first blush. An octave is pretty easy, for example, and so is a fifth.

Then get yourself some more music theory background, and you will be able to write down most music you hear on the radio, just based on what you know about chord progressions -- even if you can't pick out every single pitch of every single note in the song. Your transcription may end up not being perfect, but it will be pretty close.

Saranoya, there is an excellent program for developing relative pitch. It's called "Ear Master" and great for ear training. I know I sound like a cheap infomercial but it helped/helps me a lot and I wanted to share. I even have problems identifying if two notes are ascending or descending. There is a "melodic dictation" training and application plays a simple melody with 5 quarter notes. First note of melody is already given, you write the notes on the staff and then you compare your answer against the melody. I believe you can increase the hardness but I haven't tried any, since even basic dictation is too hard for me. I know, in time, I'll get better. It just takes time and persistence.

+1 on Ear Master. It's great; has a classical as well as a jazz section.
http://www.earmaster.com/