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Holy crap, seriously, 1-2 years ago I was tone-deaf. I couldn't sing a note for crap. In fact, I still can't sing for crap. My relative pitch also sucks ass, even now.
Anyway, a week ago I was humming "yellow" by coldplay and one of my roommates who has perfect pitch commented that I was humming in tune (which was meant to be funny, because I can't sing for crap). Somehow we started talking about perfect pitch and I realized that I never bothered to test if I had it, because I always assumed that I didn't.
So since then, I've been detuning my guitar before sleeping and then tuning it by ear in the morning (using the first D in "yellow" to tune, by singing it in my head). When I first started, I was always off, but I was never off by more than a half-step. Now after about a week of practice, I've gotten fairly consistent. I still tune slightly sharp according to my tuner, but apparently it's close enough to qualify as perfect pitch (it's off by less than half a semitone).
Anyway, this whole thing has blown my fucking mind. I've never considered myself musically talented in any way, especially since I had absolutely zero music training until I was 18 (and even then, it was just me teaching myself guitar for fun). I've always heard that you have to play piano or something from a young age to develop perfect pitch, but apparently that's not true.
Back to reality though, my perfect pitch is extremely broken right now. The way it works for me is that I hear a pitch, and then I think about the first note in "yellow" (or some other song) and then compare the interval between those notes, and finally figure out what the original note was. It literally takes me 30 seconds sometimes to figure out a note, and every once in a while I even get the pitch wrong because my relative pitch sucks. Hopefully, I'll eventually learn a song for every note so I won't have to do all the mental work to figure out pitches.
So far here's the notes that I've memorized
D - (first note in "yellow")
B - (that song from juno, I have no idea why I still know it)
E - ("fuwa fuwa time" from K-On!, please don't judge me)
G - (first note in prechorus of john mayer's "why georgia")
...but yeah, wow, I'm still a bit shocked
  
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no idea what you are talking about at all, but the songs are gay!
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That's pretty epic, I'm jealous. And I'm quite sure that you can't develop perfect pitch. There have studies that report it as being genetic.
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genetic? lies... you can develop it with hardwork for sure
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what you describe is not quite perfect pitch yet
in any case, honestly, perfect pitch is pretty overrated; if one practices an instrument (which hopefully is in tune) long and devotedly enough, eventually your brain will begin to memorize the pitches
at some point, your brain should be able to recall these pitches even when you are away from your instrument...unless you have a decidedly unmusical brain
at least that is how i developed my perfect pitch. now i can even tell what pitch a clap, a voice, or a knock on wood corresponds to
but i do not consider that an inherent gift or even musical talent; it's acquired simply from repetition and (subconscious) brain training.
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Is this really considered perfect pitch? I thought that was when you could name the note almost instantly. Tuning by ear for instruments isn't as impressive as i think it is. If i am wrong about the definition of perfect pitch then sorry, but i don't think this is considered it.
^Oh darn someone beat me to it 
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I thought perfect pitch was being able to hear any sound and naming it (like f sharp or whatever). Wouldn't this just be singing in tune?
I can always tell if a note is off key, but I can't name which is which.
You can train yourself to have perfect pitch by playing notes on the piano and memorizing them or something, but some people are born with this ability.
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On September 05 2009 09:43 phosphorylation wrote:
what you describe is not quite perfect pitch yet
in any case, honestly, perfect pitch is pretty overrated; if one practices an instrument (which hopefully is in tune) long and devotedly enough, eventually your brain will begin to memorize the pitches
at some point, your brain should be able to recall these pitches even when you are away from your instrument...unless you have a decidedly unmusical brain
at least that is how i developed my perfect pitch. now i can even tell what pitch a clap, a voice, or a knock on wood corresponds to
but i do not consider that an inherent gift or even musical talent; it's acquired simply from repetition and (subconscious) brain training.
yeah, I agree. It's overrated, but it's definitely a very nice skil to have.
If you're majoring in music or playing an intrument professional it may be useful but otherwise it's kinda like a "stupid human trick" (no offense meant to anyone at all... I wish I had perfect pitch!).
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yeah when i think of perfect pitch i think of one of my friends who can identify pitches in all sorts of random sounds and not only tones produced by instruments or voices
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Actually "perfect pitch" is quite common among piano players. The exams here we have to do something called Ear Training, where they play a chord, cadence, and intervals and you have to name them. There is also melody playback where they play the melody of a song and you have to play it back.
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i really doubt people are born with this ability
they all had to develop it somehow; some just develop it much faster than others
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On September 05 2009 09:46 ghostWriter wrote:
I thought perfect pitch was being able to hear any sound and naming it (like f sharp or whatever). Wouldn't this just be singing in tune?
I can always tell if a note is off key, but I can't name which is which.
You can train yourself to have perfect pitch by playing notes on the piano and memorizing them or something, but some people are born with this ability.
When I say tune my guitar, I mean I can get the pitches exactly right (EADGBE), it's not just in tune to itself. If you are able to do that consistently without hearing any known pitches beforehand, then supposedly you have perfect pitch of some kind (there are various degrees of perfect pitch apparently)
@phosphorylation - can you really name the pitch of a clap or knock on wood? I thought its impossible to do that, since those kinds of things don't really resonate? I have a hard enough time figuring out the pitches of a 2-note harmony, when I hear a clap or knock on wood I don't even hear a pitch at all
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yep, i can
the difficulty arises from the fact that these sounds usually produce unusual harmonics (which defines the timbre of a note)
plus they usually have very "wide" pitch (for example might produce primarily A but with a little bit of Ab and A#). But I can tell which note is the center pitch usually
and there are many people with better sense of relative/perfect pitch than i am at my college (im double music/bio major)
they can transcribe a four part music passage (maybe 10 bars of music), note by note, almost perfectly after hearing it 3-4 times; i can't quite do that unforunately
needless to say, after dealing with this kind of ear training, figuring out what a single pitch is seems trivial
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I thought this thread was gonna be about selling techniques. Then I was thinking, yea maybe some youtube baseball video. Instead I got this crap.  sadpanda
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Some people can even tell what the pitch is, which comes from their tires when they drive on the highway or something.
I can get the pitches perfect too when I tune a string instrument, but I never thought that this was some kind of special talent.
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Canada7170 Posts
This isn't perfect pitch. It's some sort of relative pitch. If you have to compare notes to songs or some other memory aid, it's relative pitch.
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if it takes you 30 seconds to figure out a pitch then you don't have perfect pitch. perhaps "good" pitch haha
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perfect pitch.
time to become famous.
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On September 05 2009 10:05 ghostWriter wrote:
Some people can even tell what the pitch is, which comes from their tires when they drive on the highway or something.
I can get the pitches perfect too when I tune a string instrument. I never thought that this was some kind of special talent.
If you can tune without using any external tools (a tuner, a piano, etc.) then you have it too. The only way you can tune a string to E, for example, is if you can produce the sound of an E note in your head and know that it is an E.
If you know just 1 note in your head, then you at least have quasi-perfect pitch. You can use that 1 note to figure out any other note, using relative pitch
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EPT
