Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Absolute pitch as result of many years of transcriptions

Somewhat strange question: who of the participants, who constantly makes transcriptions from recordings , at some stage found at himself an absolute hearing, although he hadn't it before? So it happened to me at the age 34 , and it can not be that I'm the only one.

I have a tin ear ... so bad that I couldn't even hold my part in a choir. Years of solfege mere discouraged me. And my first choir appearance was edited at the last moment by the choir director who told me to "move your mouth without sound" ... In those days the term "lip sync" wasn't common lingo..

About a year ago I bought a beautiful Kawai digital piano ... after a few months I noticed a dramatic improvement in my ear and my ability to quickly transcribe from keyboard to score without leaping up every two minutes to "check" the accuracy. Being biased in favor of physics and any scientific answer to just about any question, I obviously feel it's the absolutely accurate tuning. 420 Hz is 420Hz ... without variance.

Or maybe the ear matures with age and experience ...??

There is a need to add internationally agreed definitions of perfect pitch and of false PP .

The ability to correctly name (passive PP) and to sing (active PP ) correctly any musical note that you hear without help .
Characteristic features of PP:
Low prevalence;
Detection in childhood;
A fast reaction to Identification ;
Presence of 12 standards (from any pitch).

In these features IMO only the last item is agreed upon, the rest are under the question mark :
the statistics are unclear, varies from the general population to category of musicians, from European peoples to Eastern peoples with tonal languages. It is between 1 per 10,000 population in relation to more than 50% of the population. I apologize, such statistics is impossible to take seriously.
A fast reaction to recognition: question - how fast? Sometimes it takes me a second - one and a half second, sometimes immediately.
There are additional signs: the Identification of pitches of non-musical sources - sound of flowing water from water faucet , blow on the table , etc. For example, just now my smartphone informed by bell sound that there was a message from post office. I immediately correctly identified - A, which I couldn't do until the age of 34 (maybe because I didn't have a smartphone? )

I would agree with you that years of transcriptions and awareness of notes relative to pitches has given you a fine sense of pitch.

I had the great fortune to be employed at the age of 14 as the organist at the local synagogue (I also had a job as organist at the Methodist church. It was a small town.) I would go the rabbi's house every Wednesday and he would chant the service to me (I'm not a Jew, so I was ignorant of the tradition). I would transcribe it and provide accompaniment as required on Friday night. He didn't have a piano so I just learned to know the correct pitch. I would call this absolute pitch and I still have it 53 years later. It is very useful when playing the theremin.

prout, perhaps you have what is called " a pseudo-absolute pitch" , which is based on the memory of degree of vocal muscles tension . However, with this definition there is a problem if you get acquainted with article from 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3769680/

If my wife sings a popular song from our past (neither of us is young!) she will almost always start it in the original key.

I think that's a restricted type of perfect pitch. You could not ask her to sing an A, but if you wanted a Karen Carpenter song that included an A she could do it.

It seems to me that maybe transcribing would force you to focus on the pitch more precisely and make this kind of recall more secure.

Wow, there's such a thing?

I don't understand people's fixation on perfect pitch.

Well, the ability I have is to know the starting pitch on a theremin for any piece, and it will be in tune with the piano when my wife starts playing the piano a few measures later. The theremin is an instrument that you do not touch, and has no absolute position for a given pitch at a given moment, since the pitch is affected by your body, the position of the theremin in your room and the instantaneous position of your body relative to the theremin. Also, each of my theremin is a different design and they each responds differently to hand position.

I do not have perfect pitch. I can easily shift my pitch reference on demand to 415hz or 392Hz as the occasion requires. I think you probably have this same skill or you would find transposition intolerable.

edit: AZNpiano - I am not talking about perfect pitch. Having the ability to know a pitch is very useful. You might try it yourself. Having 'perfect pitch', whatever that is, is a one-trick pony.

But I am talking about perfect pitch. I have perfect pitch, as do a whole bunch of my students, past and present. It is not a "one-trick pony." Rather, it is a different way of perceiving pitch. At the end of the day, my job is helping each individual student in his/her unique way. If the student has perfect pitch, I need to adjust my teaching.

What I don't understand is people's seemingly constant fixation on perfect pitch, like it's some magical plateau of musical understanding. On the other extreme, I also don't get why some people continually bash perfect pitch as something useless and irrelevant.

So you can, on demand, sing for me an 440.00Hz tone or a 439.67Hz tone? For me, that is perfect pitch. Anything else is pretty good pitch.

Even a single A4 piano string doesn't have perfect pitch. After being struck, it's pitch wanders all over the place. If you can't hear that wandering, you don't have perfect pitch.

And, as for it being a one-trick pony, explain to me the many ways you use your perfect pitch to aid your music making.

I come very close to 440, if not spot on. You can call it whatever you want.


Microtonal awareness and perfect pitch are two different things. Hello?!


I have, quite successfully, used perfect pitch in my teaching in numerous ways. But since you don't have perfect pitch, you won't really know what I am describing. It's like telling a blind person how big and hot and radiant the sun is, but, unless you see the sun for yourself, words are just words.

I am truly humbled in the presence of such hubris.

I can't keep quiet anymore. The post by AZNpiano included

and to this he was told he should prove how he uses pp in his "music making".
This forum is about teaching, and it is primarily for piano and music teaching. I know that even when two experienced music teachers try to understand each other's teaching, it takes a lot of back and forth, ideally visiting each other's studios to observe, probably over weeks or longer to really get a handle on what is complex and intricate process. Yet you want this to be justified in a single forum post, to your satisfaction? The sarcastic statement about "hubris" is very unpleasant to read. I have a high respect for this teacher, the quality of whose work I do have some idea about. Nobody should have their character attacked like this.

Ok, I feel like different people use the term "perfect pitch" differently, because of the word "perfect" thrown in there. This is why I generally don't follow the threads about perfect pitch on this forum, because they seem to always take a turn towards Hz ...... and that's not what concerns me as a teacher. Prout I think your understanding of the term "perfect pitch" is completely different from what the music world in general considers the definition of perfect pitch, which is outlined in Nahum's post in bold and also books like Henny Kupferstein's book Perfect Pitch in the Key of Autism. What AZN has, I consider perfect pitch, and most others in the music education world I believe would, as well. Now, pseudo-perfect pitch, that's something I haven't heard of!

I do not have perfect pitch. What I mean is, if you play a note for me on the piano, I will not have the foggiest idea what it is. No zero clue. Is it a C, D, E, F, Fsharp, G... nope, don't know. Give me a piano that is tuned half a step, and I would not know. The ones who do have what is generally considered perfect pitch will know, and they will be thrown off by it. The ones who are even better will hear a flushing toilet, and tell me what note it is. The perfect pitch realm is a spectrum, but outside of that realm, there are us who simply do not have it. I do not have it. I have tried to acquire it, but I am convinced that I simply do not have whatever assets are needed to hold memory of a sound in my head, no matter how many times I hear it. I believe this is the general belief today, unless it gets proved otherwise and I think that would be difficult to do. I have downloaded apps. They were of no avail. But I will perhaps keep trying. Maybe. My relative pitch has improved through training though. Perfect pitch is not what I would describe as a one-trick pony. It would be very useful in singing, when you are simply handed a paper and asked to sing and if there was no piano around. When I was in chorale, I hesitated to practice outside of being around a piano, because I couldn't be sure I was singing in the right key. Those were times when I wished I had perfect pitch.

At a non-theoretical level, I found out one of my students has what Nahum has described "passive perfect pitch". I didn't even know this was possible but I did discover it today when I tried to ask her to sing "C" and she paused and had no idea. Bells went off in my head, "right, I don't actually know if she can do this!" Ok, so now that I've confirmed that she indeed cannot do it, my question is, can one who has passive perfect pitch develop active perfect pitch?
I think it is generally considered impossible for those who do not already have perfect pitch or perhaps latent perfect pitch to develop it anew (although Nahum's initial post seems to indicate possibly to the contrary), but what about passive to active?

No fixation; only inquisitiveness of teacher, to insert another brick in the tower of knowledge about the surrounding world.


prout , I was born and raised in Soviet Union, and is familiar with this actually the first synthesizer (termenvox) since childhood ; is an old Russian patent from 1920. The idea of sound comes probably from saw playing .

Russian theoretician and acoustician Nikolai Garbuzov developed a theory on zonal nature of musical ear, which was proved experimentally.
https://books.google.co.il/books?id...ure%20of%20musical%20hearing&f=false
- page 148 - after 2.

I will add from myself that this principle applies to all our senses: at which point we cease to feel simple pressure on the arm and begin to feel pain; or at what point the pink color turns to red?


I meant a specific process, without glorifications and curses.


It is interesting!

Okay, to add to your tower of knowledge: Did you know that there are gradations of perfect pitch? I've taught one super genius whose sense of pitch was augmented by his synesthesia. I've had one student who, after studying with me for six years, suddenly surprised me with his newfound sense of perfect pitch--one that wobbles between hearing 4 notes at a time correctly and hearing 1 single note incorrectly!! And I've witnessed one student's progress in perfect pitch, starting from one note at a time, to now over 3 notes at a time.

When you work with as many students with perfect pitch as I have, you start to notice things.

Though my daughter is no genius, she also has a perfect pitch and synesthesia. Her first composition at age 3 was written in colorful waves. She said that is what she sees when she hears music.

Learning music comes very easily to her. I am not sure how helpful her pitch awareness is but the down side is when someone is singing or playing off pitch, she is brutal.

I expect answers also from those having experience analogous to OP. Transcriptions from records are make not only jazzers , but also classical conductors.

My kids also have a very hard time when pitch is off. Several years ago we were interviewing new piano teachers and there were some with pianos that were out of tune. I had no idea, but when we left it was the first thing my kids had to say. Needless to say, we did not go with those teachers.

AZNpiano, I always appreciate when you share insight into perfect pitch. It helps me understand my kids better!

Some things to think about:

The term "perfect pitch" is imperfect itself.

We would be better off talking about +- errors in hearing.

For example, from conversations I have had with AZN I'm pretty sure his "error" is much smaller than mine, and I'm pretty accurate.

To explain: A440 can be A440.000001 or A339.999999.

At this point errors go beyond measurement because nothing can be tuned that accurately.

For reference, if something is tuned 1/2 step flat, here is that pitch:

440*2^(11/12)/2=415.3047

We can conveniently use 415.

1/2 step sharp is 440*2^(13/12)/2 or 466.16376

We can conveniently use 466.

When looking at these numbers it looks as though anything tuned that far off would be horribly out of tune.

But history tells us that pitch most likely varied that much in Bach's time, so that something we hear today as A minor might have sounded as high as Bb minor or as low as Ab minor.

Therefore the assumption that being extremely atuned to "right pitch" as an advantage is situational.