Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Perfect Pitch student, what you do about it?

It should. Those are not the same intervals.

Gary, I like your definition and suggest we stick with it. However, here's a conundrum for you.

For decades, I played violin and worked with youth orchestras. I tuned the violins. I got so that I could nail A=440 dead on without use of tuner, fork, or piano. Yet, if you played A on the piano, I couldn't tell you what tone it was. It would be pure guess. On a good day, I might be able to get within 3 tones of it! But get this - one Sunday, the regular Cantor was ill, so I stepped in. The organist missed his cue, so I just started singing, and when the organist final joined in, I was dead on pitch.

So what do you call this? Relatsolute pitch?

So far the only difference I've noticed is with learning pieces purely by ear. With the Suzuki repertoire I teach it in the keys given, no trouble there. With pop songs I sometimes encourage the student to transpose, especially if it's in a challenging key and the student is not very advanced yet. Students with perfect pitch are resistant to transposing because it doesn't sound like the same piece anymore. So, we stick with the original key.

With students with perfect pitch I also make sure anything I sing to them is in the right key -- I play a reference note on the piano for myself so I'll be in the right key

When I read the first sentence, I thought you meant "key" as in "F major" (1 flat in the signature). But you mean - piano key - correct?

Recorders have an inherent problem, because pitch is not that adjustable. That is to say, part of what produces the pitch is the fingering, and part of it is breath. When you play the lowest notes then if you blow too hard, you get a squeak. So you have to blow softly, which also lowers the pitch. When you play in the upper register where you half cover the thumb hole, you have to blow extra hard, which also raises the pitch. Therefore low notes will be too flat, and high notes an octave up will be too sharp.

That is exactly what is happening in the dog training video.

You're right, they're not. So to be perfectly clear, I should have written 'When I read A-B-C, but play C-D-Eb, it doesn't sound quite as "wrong" to me as it does to my teacher'.

Anyway, the larger point still stands: for me, a note on the page has no "fixed" pitch associated with it, as long as I stay away from an instrument. For my teacher (and perhaps for other people with perfect pitch), it does.

ETA: A little birdie tells me that the fact that I could make this mistake is an indication that pitches aren't "real" to me. My point exactly. My sense of pitch recognition is so relative that I could easily do what Gary wrote above, and identify C as F#. But then after that, I would correctly identify every other pitch I heard, except that I would all identify them as an augmented fourth higher (or a diminished fifth lower, as the case may be) than they actually are.

Being able to do this (name and/or sing and/or play any pitch relative to any other pitch) strikes me as far more useful (and more susceptible to training) than being "stuck" with one and only one pitch for every conceivable written note. I don't know how people with perfect pitch play a transposing instrument, like the Cornet in Bb that I played in bands as a child. I imagine their perfect pitch would be more of a hindrance than a help in that scenario, too.

Then again, I've never actually *had* the ability to accurately identify pitches without reference, so someone who does have it may well wish to set me straight.

i notice i can pick songs out but i may not be in the right key. I simply start somewhere and pick out the intervals. Only when it just sounds.... ODD can i REALLY tell if its the wrong key. Like linus and lucy i have a hard time transposing it to C because you just can't get the right tone out of it due to how low you have to go doing it in C or how high you have to go, it just makes it sound bad IMO. (can't play it yet, just the bass line :P). It sounds much better in Ab soley due to where you can go pitch wise.

The hole locations on a recorder are a compromise;

If you play a scale being very careful to cover holes correctly and blow with very steady gentle air, many notes of that scale will be considerably out of tune;

The further away the key signature is from the C or F of that recorder, the worse it gets;

In order to really play in tune you need to adjust every note either with subtle variations in breath pressure or by placing fingers closer to open holes to "shade" them slightly;

I find this difficult to do on the fly; I know I would get better at it if i had a consort to play with regularly but I don't;

The tuner does a couple of things for me; (sorry about the semicolons, the dog ate the period key on this pc);

One is that it lets me stay at A=440; This is an incredible blessing; Nowadays everybody has a $20 electronic tuner, and this has stabilized ensemble pitch to a great extent; Formerly there was the Stroboconn at about $1200, or about the cost of a grand piano in today's dollars; Before that pitch varied widely from ensemble to ensemble, and you might have to be able to adjust a half tone or more on the fly, not that easy of a task on most instruments;

The other is that it lets me check pitch of individual notes; every instrument has ideosyncracies, and if you play them long enough without occasionally recalibrating your ear they start to sound right;

Playing with a drone (a steady note on one pitch) is how I work on actually playing consistently in tune; We never knew about drone work when I was young, but I've found it incredibly useful; I have some commercial drone sets and some I've made myself; I started working on a quarter tone drone set but have yet to finish that project; Anyway, when you're confident you're playing beatless unisons, you expanded it to all degrees of the scale;

The tuner calibrates your ear to ET, and most of the time with a drone you will be pulled towards just, but it still increases the skill to play in tune with an external pitch source;

Just wondering here.

If it's a given gift (from God, DNA, nature, whoever) then there's no training needed to actually make this gift better. It is what it is: One can listen to pitches with extreme ease.

The point, rather, is to help the student understand how to use this gift and help him/her to do better, on understanding intervals, rhythmic notions (where one may be lacking, despite their perfect pitched ear...), etc...

I know several musicians with perfect pitch. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. Having PP may not translate into good fingering technique and touch. Those are 2 separate things.

Where it comes in handy is learning songs on the fly, or modern music if you need to arrange.

There was a pianist for our church worship band who had PP, she could play all those songs without sheet music.

I think relative pitch is a more useful tool than PP. Recognizing one pitch means nothing if you can't relate it to a melody or the broader piece of music.

And I have yet to know one person who developed PP to the level where some people are just born with it.
I couldn't for the life of me sing a C or Bb tone with no prompting. But I can play most pop melodies by ear using relative pitch and no sheet music.

Nikolas, not being sarcastic here, I'm serious:

What is perfect pitch for you? I gave several ways of thinking about it. I got zero response.

What is perfect pitch?

When I hear something on the radio, normally I know the key instantly. If a student comes into my room and plays any key, before I have heard a pitch, I know where it is and can prove it.

My seat-belt has a pitch. I hear it before I start the engine.

My alarm goes off with an E. I pre-hear that..

But I do not have perfect pitch. I believe AZN has something much closer to what I think of as close to perfect pitch.

I repeat: I do not have it. Most people think I do.

So for me this whole topic is nonsense.

I know the limitations of my perfect pitch, and I've been around enough perfect-pitch kids to realize that there's this huge range of abilities that are lumped together as "perfect pitch." Discovering a kid has perfect pitch is just the tip of the iceberg. Discouraging its development is a crime.

It just irks me that, every time this topic pops up, a bunch of people who have NO CLUE what they are talking about keep on dishing out idiotic advice. Once I was even told that people like me should not be teaching piano at all. Now, that's utter nonsense.

I taught one kid who has such a well-developed relative pitch (and awesome aural memory), he makes my other students with perfect pitch look bad on a dictation quiz. Yet this kid with RP can never develop PP, no matter how hard he tried.

And I have another student whose PP developed over the years. At first she could only hear one note at a time. Now she can hear three, on a good day. This girl's PP comes and goes like some elusive mystery.

And I have taught another student whose PP is even better than mine--he has synesthesia. This kid's musical abilities are off the charts. Now why would I not want to take this kid's musical abilities to the next level?

For me perfect pitch is when one, usually, has the talent to recognize pitches no matter what and where. While listening to a new work for piano on the radio, (s)he's never heard before going CEF#GBAFD etc...

More severe cases would include the person having perfect pitch shivering with any detuned instrument!

But I have been able to do that all my life. I don't have perfect pitch. Do I need to explain?

Again, my extreme irritation here is not at you but at the fact that people insist on answering topics before even considering what has been said.

The example you have given is truly simple. If your student gets the first note as C, the rest is mostly diatonic, kind of the typical "fantasy scale" sound we hear from Disney, with the raised 4th.

Now, if your example student can recognize that first note as C, he/she can get the rest instantly from relative pitch. Furthermore, on most modern instruments that will either be a C, or a B, but nothing in between.

In Bach's time that C could be nearly 50 cents sharp or flat according to the local pitch in city A, B or C.

If your example students says:

"That first note is around 432, about 30 cents low to standard", then I will say, "Yup. He's got it." That student would not have to know that it is 30 cents low, but the student must know that the pitch is less than 1/4 step low.

I can't do that.

Can you? Who here can? I think I know one person in PW who can.

I just know that a note tuned to A440 must be either A, or Ab or A#. If you play a C, and it's too high, it's a C#. If it's too low, it's a B.

But that is NOT perfect pitch.

There are such people. Those are the people who to my mind have what most people wrongfully call perfect pitch.

So... our definition of perfect pitch differs then.

Even if wikipedia is not an academic tool, still it provides an idea of what I'm talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch



The lack of a reference tone is what makes the difference I think.

Now if you are able to tell the first note, but memory, because you have heard various works in the same pitch, and then use relative pitch based to that very first note... then that's cheating!

Can you share any specifics of what you do differently in teaching these kids and how you foster that talent to the next level? I find this and every other discussion I have read on PP to be utterly frustrating when it develops into a debate over what is perfect pitch. That is not what was asked originally and how does debating semantics add anything to the question that the original poster asked.

I had hopes that I might glean some advice that might help in continuing to foster the profound gift my kids were given. When I see the kinds of crazy things my son can do with just about any instrument, I am constantly questioning if we have him with the right teachers. Learning excellent technique and diligence in practice are certainly important goals right now but I fear there is so much more that he is capable of that is being swept under the rug.

Not just in Bach's time.

While A=440 has been a standard for some time, in real life if you played with different groups you had to float all over the place and catch the pitch of the band. It was almost like playing pool - you had to go with the local bar rules.

That has only changed in very recent past. The ubiquitous cheap electronic tuner has changed the landscape. It's stabilized the pitch center to where anybody who tries can reach it - some instruments can't be adjusted past a certain point and in the old days occasionally you were out of luck.

It's also produced a group of musicians players who keep a tuner on the stand and insist they are right and everybody else is wrong. That is very annoying to those who "listen with big ears," but I'm not so sure that group played in tune before tuners either.

I have "it," for what it is. I haven't mentioned it before because it didn't really matter, but now we're talking about personal experiences with it, how it helps and hinders music learning, and my personal experience may be helpful.

1) Does it make it harder to transpose? Not on piano, really. It's more of a mental exercise than an ear exercise anyway. Something related that was a major challenge at first was related to singing, not piano. Sometimes, in a choir, we will sing pieces that have been transposed for range or whatever, but the choir gets the original, untransposed music. Most people don't notice or care, but it's a major hurdle to me sight-singing the music. I have to either get the transposed score or else transpose every note in my head from what's written to what we're actually singing. So if it's transposed a whole step up, or something, I have to tell myself, "That's not an F sharp; it's a G sharp. Don't sing F#, don't sing F#, don't sing F#." I've gotten better at it through practice, but it's still hard.

2) I do not share Gary D's experience with knowing notes instantly on the radio, or random sounds. If it's not right on pitch, I usually don't have much more than a general sense of what it is. So, 440, definitely, I know that's A. 335? I know it's middle treble, maybe A, maybe B flat, maybe even G. I don't know why that is. It's like it breaks down and I have to rely on relative pitch. The radio is bad because things aren't on the absolute right pitches on the radio because of the recording process. It doesn't make things sound bad to me, but it hampers my ability a lot.

3) I wish someone had taught me how to learn songs by ear. Mostly, I wish someone had strengthened my ability to remember a series of notes, especially multiple notes at a time. I know what they are as they pass, but I forget them so quickly! I'm working on flexing this muscle on my own, but I'm older now, and maybe I could have been better at it if I'd started with a younger brain. I had a student with perfect pitch, and I worked with him, and after a year or two, he was far better at fleshing out a song, picking up more than just a few chords or a short lick. In the process, I got better at it too.

4) Several people have suggested using theory to teach the PP student how to use intervals in connection with PP to audiate, sight-sing, transpose, whatever. This is one area where the PP student shines, but the theory may be lacking to really allow them to run with it.