For a while I memorized both systems. Then I lost 440 hz. I had to relearn it and, since I no longer am performing, have dropped 415 hz. Now imagine singing works you learned in one tuning in the other.
Thank you for sharing, that's very interesting about losing 440hz and having to relearn it - definitely a challenge learning to sing in another tuning indeed!
As an eastern orthodox singer I sort of think of it as how many steps I transpose up or down. Then the sheet music always makes sense. We usually think in terms of relative pitch and perfect pitch can sometimes be more of a burden. If you're leading then it can be useful since you'll always have a reference. If I can play a piece on the piano I can also transpose it on the fly up to a certain level where the new key might produce some fingering challenges.
Yeah for sure, it's interesting how most perfect pitch people today seem to only be tuned to A=440hz 12-tone equal temperament, trying to figure out other temperaments would be a whole other rabbit hole to go down!
@@jakegearhart Not necessarily. Many temperaments have slightly beating thirds ; Kirnberger, Werckmeister, Valotti, among others, and it all depends on the dominant keys they are tuned for.
As someone with relative pitch, I never knew how much of a handicap perfect pitch was until watching this video. Being able to hear intervals has always been so innate to me that it never occurred to me that slight variations in tuning can throw someone off so much. Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I often mistake G major and A-flat major for one another, or even C major and B-flat major, but I can clearly tell G or A-flat major apart from C or B-flat major. If you play a fifth, I can immediately tell it’s a fifth, and I’ll probably be able to guess the approximate key, but I often struggle to identify the exact key.
same ... with perfect pitch I always identify notes first and then figure out what chord they make. it always amazes me when people are able to identify complicated chord progressions instantly while I'm sitting there writing down notes and calculating it all out
I think it requires a lot of training to identify complicated chords. And I believe the "comparing intervals with something familiar" trick is something very intuitive that many people apply until they'r trained enough to hear intervals more instantly. So in the end it's probably more of a gray area
as someone who plays jazz where sometimes charts will just straight up say "Cmaj7" without even giving you any specific notes, it really just comes down to knowing the quality or color of the chord rather than the notes themselves. Kinda like if a maj7 chord was the color instead of the notes, which key the chord is in is just a different shade of the same color
Relative pitch is super useful when you dabble your feet into organ playing. Pipe organs are extremely sensitive to temperature and humidity and can fall into or out of tune depending on the day. It can be a struggle to play well on some organs because of their tuning issues. There are also a lot of different temperaments which can all effect the tuning of an instrument. There's a dual temperament Fisk organ at Stanford University that effectively has seventeen notes to an octave because it has a mean-tone and well-tone tuning mode. It has three normal keyboards and a fourth keyboard where you can play both tunings at the same time.
It's hilarious that I got recommend this video. When I was in HS I figured out how to change the tunings on all the practice keyboards into meantone and I told everyone about it and this guy who had perfect pitch started using it and he told me it literally destroyed his sense of pitch.
Yeah it's definitely quite disorienting with different temperaments haha, now if you did meantone plus pitch shift to A415 that would be a double slam dunk on unsuspecting perfect pitch people too!
My music professor would give dictation tests announcing a key and then playing a half step off to force perfect pitch students to develop relative pitch.
Haha same that's what my ear training prof did too - that didn't really work since I still just wrote down the shifted pitches, then manually transposed the pitches back oops
I recall my professor would play dictation extract for eg.: The same extract 3 times, but all 3 times in different keys, and then asked us to write down in another key (i assume, as I don't think I have perfect pitch) that she never played in.
This is great. As a fellow perfect pitch haver, you did a good job explaining the perfect pitch experience. Even down to the "faded colors" analogy when describing how detuned music feels. I've also had wisdom teeth removed, and I can confirm that what you describe does happen.
Haha thanks glad to hear the explanations make sense! And that's interesting hearing your account of the wisdom teeth pitch shifting as well, good to know I'm not the only one who went through this
@@NicholasMaMusic I remember I had to go under anesthesia a few years ago and realized my hearing was off when the low health sound in pokemon sounded WEIRD and then I realized everything else sounded weird too, I don't even know if I have perfect pitch or not, never checked
It is, but takes way a lot of time developing a relative pitch capable of match perfect pitch. From experience and from what I have seen, it is usually arround +2 years. And it should be noted that this is developed with exercises and constant and conscious practice, otherwise you can spend decades and never develope good relative pitch.
I also have a perfect pitch and this year I ALSO had two wisdom teeth surgeries, AND I ALSO FELT WEIRD DURING FIRST 1-2 WEEKS! It really felt like every recording was ~30hz lower than it shoud be. For me it was a funny experience and when few days went by I almost came to terms with this 'wrong' feeling. Now it's interesting to know that I'm not alone in this lol. Nice video btw
I don't have perfect pitch, just relative one and generally what you'd call "a good ear for music", and I still felt something similar after getting an inflammation in my jaw. I wouldn't say it's something universal but it's not exclusive to perfect-pitch-havers. Blood vessels and arteries that run thru your jaw also run thru your ears, when they get inflamed they can change their volume and I'm assuming that's what affects hearing. I couldn't exactly tell what was wrong, like you saying everything was 30hz lower, but I could still feel like the music was "out of tune", even tho the intervals were still correct. EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it I'm not sure if I listened to any new piece of music during that time. Maybe I only noticed the change because the pieces and songs I've been listening to were ones that I already new very well
@@NicholasMaMusic I had a similar experience, different cause but one day, it seemed I heard everything almost a full semitone higher. As a clarinetist, I asked, "Are you sure this is supposed to be played on A clarinet? Sounds like it's Bb clarinet to me!" That was for Don Juan. It was extremely weird when I found out that not only was it indeed for A clarinet, but I confirmed by listening to more music that my sense of pitch had, in fact, shifted.
When I had my wisdom teeth pulled I was dealing with unsuccessful kidney surgeries so I was uhh... On another planet lol. Literally was so out of it I wouldn't notice even if everything sounded like chipmunks. Though I have heard of this before, I believe the 2nd comment reply is mostly accurate towards what happens on physiological level. Has to be a crazy experience for people who actually realize it. Makes me feel a bit fortunate despite the circumstances back then being quite unfortunate. Already have a hard enough time with overlapping frequencies in public places after all.
I’m genuinely surprised why I haven’t found a single comment mentioning transposing instruments. Tons of Perfect pitch people play transposing instruments with no problem. You simply need to mentally “let go” and tell yourself the note you are playing is not the one you are hearing. It will help you develop relative pitch, which is a skill that needs to be independently developed aside from perfect pitch.
This! I have a long story that I want to try to keep short... I started on the flute when I was about 10 and then switched to the Bb (of course) Clarinet at about 12 or 13, can't remember exactly. I very much remember playing my first G on a clarinet and noticing instantly it wasn't a concert G, it was a concert F, and that's when my band teacher taught me about transposing instruments vs concert pitched instruments. Since then I've played on tons of different transposing instruments in Bb, Eb, A, and even F at one point (Basset Horn). All that time I didn't fret about it. I also didn't really realize I had perfect pitch until years after I transitioned to the Bb Clarinet. By then, whenever I heard a pitch, I defaulted to the C=Bb transposition first so I had to train myself to transpose everything into concert pitch. Now it takes me a little thinking to interpret a music note that I hear while still requiring no preparation or reference... Umm... what does this make me now?
Yeah I'd love to hear from people who grew up playing transposing instruments on how they deal with their perfect pitch! Never talked to anyone in this situation but I'd imagine it would be a challenge to grow up in Bb instrument tuning and have concert pitch be the "wrong pitch"? Agreed though on relative pitch, definitely something I came to a realization with in this video!
@@NicholasMaMusic I grew up playing piano and then started Bb clarinet in middle school, and nowadays I'm often a whole step off in either direction lol
Fascinating. This is the best insight I've had into what it might be like to have perfect pitch. Working out intervals by writing down the two notes then calculating the distance is so crazy to me. To me the sound of a major 6th is as distinct as the taste of strawberries. The brain is truly amazing.
Wonderful video! That perfect pitch shifting segment - thank you for that. I have experienced this in this past year and it is absolutely mind frazzling for me as a singer. It certainly causes a lot of stress in the mind of the musician. I thought I was going crazy. It’s nice to know that it is experienced by others with perfect pitch!
I may have never seen any of your videos before, but you have some of the most clear enunciation I’ve ever heard in a video essay. And I definitely appreciated your experimentation. And memes. Mostly the memes.
Thank you for mentioing the "losing" perfect pitch! I had a similar experience with mine where I had an ear blockage, which shifted my right ear up about 1 semi-tone (give or take 5 cents depending on the day). It was an awful experience especially with the seperation of tones in each ear, and I was panicking really badly through that time. I couldn't listen to any music without freaking out due to everything clashing with itself. One of the things that I have observed since then is that my pitch center drifts depending on my currently psychological state (slightly lower when in a low energy mood, and slightly higher when energetic or irratated). Fortunately, I play and upright bass, so I can adjust on the fly whenever I sound like I am "wrong". Honestly, these experiences really makes me envy people without perfect pitch, because I sometimes really wish I wasn't bound to this anchor point. Also as a side note, being primarily a bass player, I really struggle with learning most other stringed instruments, such as the guitar, because I have to think to myself about each individual note rather than "oh just play this chord shape" because what happens when I need a capo for an odd tuning??? The mandolin has been the easiest for me to pick up since I really only have to think about 4 tones at a time, but it is so brain breaking to me once you step up to the 6th string. And don't even get me started on when I self-taught myself to play an F-Tuba, and not understanding why none of the music was in the correct key lmao
The wisdom teeth surgery part was honestly kind of important to me. I have perfect pitch and, a couple of years ago, I just started hearing EVERYTHING a half-step flat for a couple of weeks. This messed me up really hard in gigs, glad to know it’s not just a me issue
I have very strong perfect pitch and, like you, also grew up exclusively in an A440 environment until I got into early music. Playing the harpsichord at A415 was difficult at first. But thankfully you don't encounter many sharps/flats in early music. It didn't take too long (months) to get my fingers and ears retrained to simple keys. Playing Messiaen on the harpsichord was still very difficult then, because my training was limited to simple keys. Another difficulty was losing track of notes when I played semiquaver runs. I'd say I got almost 100% used to A415 after a few years. I can now play and improvise in any key, sight-read music in any key, and play Messiaen and other modern music at that pitch. I can also realise figured bass, transpose, and read funny clefs. Actually, this latter set of skills come part and parcel of learning to play in A415. That painful process transformed me as a musician. I think you were kind of saying the same thing. I retuned my harpsichord to A392 in preparation for a concert, where I was realising figured bass live. I allowed myself a few months to acclimatise to it, but ultimately it wasn't as challenging as I expected it to be. I think the necessary brain rewiring already happened when I first had to readjust from A440 to A415. Going from A415 to A392 was a relatively small adjustment. During Covid lockdown, my only exposure to an instrument was to my harpsichord at home. It's tuned approximately to A415, but I mostly let it drift with the weather and the gradual loosening of the strings. Coming out of lockdown and having to perform at A440 again was a bit of a shock. My pitch definitely drifted flat during lockdown, maybe by a 1/4 tone. That too made me question my perfect pitch, or, rather, the nature of this thing we call perfect pitch. But to this day I still can't improvise with modern harmony at A415, but tonal harmony in any key is fine. Also, I struggle with German organ pitch (A466). I think it's simply down to lack of exposure. I think what we call perfect pitch isn't as permanent as we think it is. It's just an extreme form of pitch memory. I can shift between A440, A415 and A392 at will because I've had lots of exposure to these pitches. It's like I have three sets of reflexes. Temperament is also a part of this memory, I think. Playing something tuned to A415 or A392 but in equal temperament still feels very off to me (even worse if it's a piano sound), but not in a destabilising way.
Woah this is so cool, I’m glad you shared this-it’s got me thinking too now about how malleable perfect pitch can be! Good to know from your first-hand account that a few years can be enough to 100% acclimatize to A415. That's interesting how you can improvise tonal harmony fluently with A415 but not modern harmony, I wonder if sinking into only Messaien or something at 415 for a few years would allow equal proficiency at more modern harmony kinds of improv and fluency. Lots to think about, thanks for this!
@@NicholasMaMusic I have no doubt that I can gain fluency in modern harmony in A415 if I have enough exposure/practice. But this is only something I'd do for silly fun, rather than something I'd naturally do regularly, so I think I'll never get to that stage.
I’m absolutely amazed by how difficult the transition seems to be for you. I don’t have perfect pitch but developed relative pitch and something that I would describe as familiar pitch - basically you play certain pitches so frequently that you can just recall them for tuning or they pop up as a reference when you hear a sound. I once had a dentist appointment and had just played piano right before it and as soon as the drill touched the tooth I knew that I heard an A. I didn’t want or need that information, but my brain apparently was still in its reference mode from playing.
You can recall but it's hard and it's quite imprecise, the reference memorization most of times no matter how much you practice it, It usually has a margin of error, sometimes you might think it's an A but when you notice it's actually a C#. It happens to me a lot, sometimes it is very precise and other times very misleading.
This video actually brings up a really interesting concept in the way all of us learn music differently and the way we think when we're playing. I have perfect pitch, but I've never run into these kinds of transpositions as a problem. I'm mostly thinking about the fingering and relative pitch, but even though I know it's in a different key my brain (thankfully) doesn't seem to care. I think it has to do with the fact that indeed, when I was learning piano I also had an electric keyboard with a transpose function on it that I would always mess around with while practicing.
That's such a thought-provoking perspective, yeah I'd imagine learning piano while equally focusing on the transpose function while practicing would provide a more flexible path to transposition
This is insightful and motivating for anyone pushing past their boundaries and truly challenging themselves. The depth of insight from your journey seems to show how how a serious music education can broaden your appreciation of music overall.
I was searching for such a video for years, since the time I became a huge fan of Baroque music. My ear is also a A-440 one, and I even asked somewhere on RUclips how harpsichordists with perfect pitch live their lives 😊😊 Your video is uplifting and saddening at the same time. that basically means that, although I'm used to listening to those interesting tunings, I can't play them unless I do practice a lot. I live in Strasbourg, and here we have two Baroque organs in nearby churches, one tuned to A-465 (German tuning) and another tuned to A-392 (French tuning). I imagine my face when sitting in those churches listening to a concert, it must be like a face of a school student solving a math problem 😊😊. Like: Oooo-kaaayyy, he is playing in G minor, I'm in St. Thomas, so the piece must be notated in A minor really. Also, I too always explain what is perfect pitch by comparing it with color (and I'm blind from birth, so I do have perfect pitch but don't see any colors). Like, imagine you were always told grass is blue, and you used to call this blue and instinctively percept this frequency as blue. And then you're told that no, it's actually green. It's just the same with pitches.
I love learning about different tunings and this is VERY enlightening and entertaining. A lot of musicians find this sort of thing too esoteric and pedantic but I can't get enough. Cheers
My ear training teacher made me do all the homework and exams in differnt key because I have perfect pitch, so when she played a melody in D minor for example I had to write the melody in G minor. Thanks to her I developed much better relative pitch and it helped me massively to understand chord progressions and hear them better. Now I understand that all the years before that I kind of "cheated" with my perfect pitch to get by but developing that relative pitch is much more important.
Fascinating video! As a kid, I had (very slightly flat) perfect pitch but it wasn't a big deal - and I had very good relative pitch. I had the ability to believe people that if people said that a particular pitch was a particular note, I would believe them. The way I rationalized it, a lot of the issues are unique to keyboard or fixed-pitch instruments. On woodwind instruments, each named pitch has a unique fingering; on stringed instruments, you get a slight sympathetic resonance from the open strings, which means that an A415 on a Baroque violin has a different sound quality to a G#415 on a modern "A440" violin. We tend to think of perfect pitch as a modern A440 Equal Temperament phenomenon, but I suspect that people have had perfect pitch throughout history including in Baroque times, and with quarter-comma meantone - so their ideas of "out of tuneness" would be very different to modern ideas. I also think that there may be multiple types of perfect pitch, like there are multiple types on synaesthesia (I also believe that perfect pitch may well be a kind of synaesthesia). With my kind of perfect pitch, I might occasionally confuse A with D or E (a perfect 5th away) but never confuse A with Ab - so sharp/flat sensitive. I was also fascinated to hear your observations about how you react to notes that aren't a 12TET pitch, and how within limits that you can persuade yourself that it IS a 12TET chromatic note, including a notw that is halfway between A and G#... Incidentally, that pitch is logarithmic with respect to Hertz, so midway between 415Hz and 440Hz is not 427.5Hz, but something closer to 427.31Hz I'd recommend using "cents" or even "midicents" rather than Hertz when talking about pitches
Thank you for your insights! You're right that perfect pitch does seem to be a spectrum, and it's fascinating how most with perfect pitch seem to be locked into 12TET - I'd be very curious to hear the perspective of a perfect pitch person who wasn't brought up in our equal tempered 12 tone environment!
Professional french horn player with perfect pitch here. When I started playing horn the F transposition drove me nuts. I learned to re read the F parts and name the notes differently as I continued to hear in regular pitch. The result was I have developed the ability to transpose any key into concert pitch and play it on the horn. Useful when playing horn parts transposed into C D Eb E F G Bb B etc. I am 66 years and my perfect pitch remains constant. Transpositions are difficult for most brass players. Not so much for me.
Woah that's amazing that you've been able to retrain your brain to do this, I've always been wondering how professional transposing instrument players with perfect pitch are able to adapt!
very interesting and insightful video! Thank you for sharing your journey! i do sometimes wish i had perfect pitch, especially since i transcribe a lot of orchestral music and i´d imagine having perfect pitch could come in handy at times, but in most cases i don´t miss not having been born with that superpower :D i do believe your journey to being able to play on different pitches would have been smoother if you had access to well tuned instruments more often :D that out of tune harpsichord at 13:32 for example was like fingernails on a blackboard!
I have perfect pitch, which was originally set to A = 440 Hz with no tolerance for deviation. Then at some point in my middle school time (back in the mid-late 1970s), my parents got this (vinyl) record "Historic Instruments in Performance" of 2 Mozart sonatas for violin and fortepiano. Unfortunately, the fact of use of A = 415 Hz was a single mention buried somewhere in the liner notes, so despite reading the liner notes as intently as I could, I missed it. I really liked the sound quality of the instruments, but thought "no way is this sonata in E minor; it sounds like E flat minor -- the record must have been recorded at the wrong rotational speed." So for the first fairly large number of times I listed to that record, I would adjust the phonograph turntable speed up to get A = 440 Hz. Then finally I noticed what I had missed the first time (I think because of hearing mention of A = 415 Hz somewhere else), and stopped adjusting it. It still sounded good, so I just got used to historically informed performances sounding a semitone flat. My like of the way Baroque and Classical historical instruments sounded exceeded any disturbance from the pitch being flat, so I got historically informed performance recordings whenever I could, eventually exclusively choosing these as much as possible, and I really liked the music of that period. Meanwhile, I still listened to a decent amount of music from Beethoven onwards, which was usually performed with A = 440 Hz -- recordings of Beethoven on historic instruments are now easily available, but back in the 1980s, not so much. So I developed the ability to set perfect pitch to A = 415 Hz through 440 Hz, although the occasional recording in something like A = 409 Hz would throw me for a loop. Eventually I got enough range of acceptable pitch standard that my hearing can accept A = 400 Hz(*) up to A = 453 Hz(**), although still defaulting to A = 415 Hz. (*)Boeing USSLRV electronic chopper frequency and aircraft interior mains frequency; also easily heard as a somewhat sharp G.. (**)This is the A that you get by stepping down a 12EDO semitone (12th root of 2) from B♭ if you take North American mains frequency 60 Hz to be B♭ and then step up by 3 octaves. Currently I still can't adjust all the way down to A = 392 Hz (a common French Baroque quasi-standard) or all the way up to A = 466 Hz (a quasi-standard German Choirton) -- for those, my hearing kicks over to whichever pitch standard within its range results in transposition by a whole tone from the advertised pitch, and I just live with it. If I played an instrument, I would just have to transpose accordingly, on the fly. I ALSO have relative pitch, which I am currently trying to train to work properly with (microtonal/xenharmonic) intervals other than the standard 2nd, 3rd, and 4th roots of 2 (12EDO tritone, major third, and minor third, respectively) and corresponding but not equal just intonation intervals (take your pick of 99/70 or 140/99, 5/4, and 6/5, respectively). Learning to hear other intervals as sounding good when used properly was the easy part, which worked almost immediately upon hearing good music written with them (for starters, I highly recommend anything from mid-2021 onwards on Norokusi's channel); but I haven't yet gotten my brain to store them properly, no matter how good they sound.
That's fascinating, thank you for this detailed account of how your perfect pitch has adapted over time! Especially intriguing with how you can shift between a specified range, I see how going further than a whole tone would seem like just a transposition.
@@NicholasMaMusic Actually even a single whole tone seems like a transposition. Not so sure about all of the larger intervals feeling that way -- keep in mind that although equal temperaments (mainly 12, but also others) did exist back in the Baroque era, 12EDO didn't really catch on (with the possible exception of lute/viol groups that didn't have a keyboard instrument) until the 1800s, and its dominance wasn't complete even then. So shifting by a minor second OR third, for instance, also shifts the temperament and thus the feel of the music.
Really great watch! I've always been really confused at how people with PP experience playing an instrument since sometimes they make really weird mistakes (like asking them if a C5 is higher or lower than an A4 and most will say the A4 is higher). Really fascinating to see your insight!
Hahahaha I used to cheese all of my aural tests as well. I have like a weird pseudo-perfect pitch that only works within a certain range for certain timbres. Great video!
I am so glad you talked about the way you hear pitch changing! This happened to me too. I don’t have perfect pitch, but growing up I’d always had a pretty good ear. One day I came back from vacation and turned my laptop on and realized the Windows opening sound was flat. I thought my computer was broken. But when I went to play my violin, my ears tuning was not the same as the tuner. Everything sounded flat. This was like sophomore year of high school btw. I actually cried and told my mom about it and it felt so scary at first, but I just got used to it over time and it’s normal now. Of course, she didn’t understand what I was going through and was not reassuring at all and basically told me to get over it. My right ear hears pitches about 4hz lower on top of that too. I think my left ear hears 440hz where it originally is, but I’m also not sure if that’s just because I adjusted over time and it’s actually more like 435hz in my left ear and 431hz in my right. But yes! It sucks at first!
That sounds like a really wild experience, I can imagine how frustrating it must've been for it to be so sudden, and on top of the difference between ears too!
This is interesting! I just did a cover of Fallen Down from Undertale in 432hz because it’s closer to the original, and after uploading it I listened to a cover I did a couple years prior that was in 440 and the difference in colour was shocking. I’ve never thought about it and this video was very informative
I don't have perfect pitch, but I noticed some shortcomings it can cause very quickly in music theory classes. It was very obvious that a few people were not putting any effort into understanding the lessons because they could get the right answers a different way. It made me feel like perfect pitch is not much more than a party trick. I didnt know people could lose perfect pitch though, thats wild.
Haha yep your observations are indeed aligned with what I came to realize while filming the video, relative pitch is quite a useful skill to have and train!
@@NicholasMaMusic ultimately I feel like people with perfect pitch tend to be the best musicians. But since there's so much ability to hear things accurately, it also turns into a crutch. Just because you are more naturally able to climb a mountain doesn't mean you can ignore the technique. It's sort of a Messi/Ronaldo situation. Messi has perfect pitch and a well developed relative pitch, Ronaldo has developed his perhaps better relative pitch to the point where many people disagree on who is the better player. (I think it's Messi but having tools doesn't inherently make you better than knowing how to use them)
I like to trick people and say, “this is a (note) at 442… and this is at 440, and 415 etc.” But, I’ve gotten to a point to where I can indeed gage other tunings, but by relative pitch… TBH… I do the exact same thing… Seeing, or hearing the notes in different tuning as a filter is sooooo much easier. And I DID THE SAME THING IN AURAL SKILLS 😂… I like the play around with the transposition option on keyboards. It’s very fun. I used to not like it, but, I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s more of like a doctrine of affections thing for me now 🙌!
You should try to learn relative pitch for microtonal music/scales. Brendan Byrnes is a pop-ish artist that makes microtonal music in a few different tunings. There are other microtonal artists you should definitely check out, but it’s a lot to list.
As someone with perfect pitch that also plays the harpsichord, the different tuning definitely took me some time to get used to. eventually it did click for me after listening to lots of baroque music with A = 415. It’s a good thing I didn’t know about other tuning methods at the time like 1/4 comma or I may have gone insane. Congrats on getting through your harpsichord exams!
I have relative pitch. I'm an instrumentalist first but I run into this same issue if you give me a vocal score but then accompany me in a different key. Apparently a lot of singers can do this because they can't read sheet music. But for me I read C on the score and I know generally where that is in my voice range. So if you transpose the piano down three half steps, I won't be able to sing in tune at all. If I wasn't reading the score I could do it. But if I'm sight reading the melody it ain't happening. My prof asked if I'm perfect pitch.
Amazing to see your documentation of the process! I grew up listening to more Baroque music (as well as Renaissance music as well as music outside the 12-tone system), before any formal music training, and so the "sound" of A = 440 Hz felt very different for me. But as a relative-pitch user, the difference in temperament was and remains way more salient for me (those major thirds!). The analogous situation with colour I have lived through - my eyes have had shifted towards the red side of the visible light spectrum after lens replacement surgery.
Strange analogy for speed cubers, it's essentially like swapping the green and yellow face on a speed cube, so when you are doing OLL and PLL on the green side, you keep screwing up because it's not yellow
Please do explain what colours microtones feel like with sound-colour synaesthesia! I don't know how to describe it, but for me pitches have innate feelings that are just always there, so when I hear certain microtones, they just have different feelings as well. Like, the note A is inherently sombre to me, regardless in which context I hear it, like there's a sort of weight carried by that pitch that is not carried at all by say, the note F (that's not a very accurate way of describing my experience but it's the best I can do). So when I hear a microtone such as Half sharps/half flats, they just feel like a different emotion and it is widely different, the same way E feels very different to F, E half sharp feels very different to the both too. So I'd love to hear what you see when you hear certain microtones - although it might be difficult for me to understand, I'm also colourblind 💀
@@NicholasMaMusic It *is!* Discovering this type of music after working with only 12edo all my life was like going from a retro 16 color system to 16 *million*. I will never forget how trippy that was!
@@aidanc. I don't even know how to begin to describe it tbh, there's so much going on and I barely understand *regular* music theory 😭 But I can tell you that A Major is purple and tastes/smells like chocolate, and F Major is warm and green like a sunny forest clearing. As for microtones... I gave up on trying to learn theory, and just compose by color. I can tell you that a song is in the key of orange, but that's it really 🤣
I have perfect pitch and I experienced that pitch shift before when I was around 12/13. I don't really remember what happened before the pitch shift, all I knew was that the 440 tuning just sounded flat to me. As a violinist, I moved my fingers to a higher position to match the new pitch in my brain. Practicing alone is rather fine (although it's still problematic), I can always tune down, but it's disastrous when I played in orchestra, where I was literally sitting at the concertmaster's seat and being the only person who was out of tune. I couldn’t stop thinking the new pitch instead of focus and relying on my muscle memory. It made me so self conscious and I was not able to press on the strings without doubting and referring to what my stand partner played. Thankfully it only lasted for a few days, and I am glad to see someone also had this experience
Apparently, I heard from a friend that perfect pitch shifts when you first wake up in the morning. Congratulations on making personal growth with relative pitch! Sadly, I don't have perfect pitch, though I've kind of stumbled through music using relative pitch, haha. As in, I never really learnt to read sheet music quickly, and would just use relative pitch/what I remembered from recordings to play pieces for orchestra lol. Anyhow, really nice video! :3
That's so interesting about the morning pitch shift, I'll have to pay attention next time I wake up haha. And yeah relative pitch seems way more useful especially from what you're describing too!
How fascinating to hear of your experiences and experiment. What drew me to this video was this afternoon (Christmas Eve) tuning into the Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King's College Cambridge, which opens with "Once in David's City", a carol I have sung and played many many times. But something didn't sound quite normal today, and I discovered that they were singing it in Gb major (or was it F# major!?) rather than the usual G major. I would not say I've ever had perfect pitch, though have developed decent relative pitch as a singer, choir leader and keyboard player, but I can't reliably pluck an A=440 out of thin air. However it was clear "Once in Royal" was different to usual, somehow 'warmer' (I've always felt Gb major to be a warm, cosy key!). So fascinating to search and find out a bit more, and perhaps to re-evaluate my own relationship with perfect/relative pitch. (I've often wondered how instrumental players on a Bb instrument cope with perfect pitch.)
@ Another article to read and term to learn but fascinating, thanks! Pitched it perfectly again when I tried to sing it out of thin air yesterday, but then today I tried and I was way out!
The wisdom teeth thing wasn't just me?! I also have perfect pitch, and when I got my wisdom teeth removed 4 years ago, for a couple days after surgery, everything sounded ~25 cents flat, it was jarring. I'm also into microtonal music, which can really mess with perfect pitch at first, but you can get accustomed to predictable tunings. I could probably identify a note in 31 tone equal temperament, but I would likely be off by a step for notes that aren't spelled the same as a 12 TET note. (Your perfect pitch analogies with color were also spot-on with how I'd describe it!)
Yeah glad to hear a pitch shift down seems like it's a common (and thankfully temporary) phenomenon post wisdom teeth surgery. Glad the analogies came across well too!
I myself play the organ and in Europe you have like very different pitches. So for instance there are some organs which are just normal in 440Hz, but also some that are on like 462Hz or even 473Hz and of course there are also Baroque organs that are on 415Hz (and even different temperaments) or something around that. I do have perfect pitch, but I have learned over the years to just adjust that to where I'm playing, but I can imagine it being very hard for someone who isn't used to it. I think you dealt great with it! Great job!
Lot of organists in the comments. I used to be an organ tuner/builder and tuned by ear. I don't have perfect pitch, but I do have very good relative pitch. As most of the organs I tuned here in the UK were in churches to accompany worship, tuning wasn't a huge issue. If the centre octave bearings on the 4' stop sounded ok I would simply tune the organ to itself, using that octave as reference for the rest of the ranks. Occasionally, I would have to re-lay the bearing on the centre octave first but very rarely would I touch 4' middle C. So up and down the country are organs tuned to 523.3, but also anywhere from 511ish to 535ish! This vid was an interesting insight from a perfect pitch ear.
I guess, after this video I don't envy people with perfect pitch anymore. At least not as much as before. What a relief! I am able to play piano in one key, while it being transposed to any other. I thought it was a drawback not to be able to tell the note just from listening. Thank you!
Thank you for your wonderful insights on this fascinating topic! I don't have PP, so to survive ear training tests in music school I simply HAD to learn relative pitch. I have always been envious of those that do, however. As a singer, I have acquired a different sort of pitch memory: you might have heard about the 'passagio' for singers: the pitch area where the voice pivots from chest to head voice (describing this with a very broad brush here). This happens automatically. Also the various vocal co-ordinations vary from pitch to pitch. I am thrown off when my church organist switches key because it's too high for most of the congregation-I'm a soprano, so high notes are my happy hunting ground-or transposes a piece in D flat to D by playing on white keys, and sharping the naturals. I'm not aware of the actual pitches while I'm singing, but I feel a general unease because my entire vocal mechanism feels out of whack. Before panic sets in, I find to my relief later on what had really happened. I'd love to hear from singers with or without PP and how they'd navigate singing in Baroque tuning, or A=432 for that matter.
Thank you! Fascinating about the passagio and vocal mechanisms. I'd imagine perfect pitch singers would struggle more with other tunings but have more advantage in A440 atonal music
@@NicholasMaMusic You're right! Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire or Berg's Lulu, for example, would be a nightmare for non-PP singers to learn, but for those with PP it would be a breeze, with no tonality/relative pitch issues to deal with.
No perfect pitch on my side, but a well trained relative pitch. What I really learned from this video - and for the very first time in my life - is the different approach to playing a keyboard instrument. I've always associated a note on the paper with a *POSITION* on the keyboard. Done. That note, this key. I was absolutely fascinated to find out that people with perfect pitch (or at least our young Nicholas) associate the note on the paper with a tone, not with a fixed key (= position) and would actually automatically play a different key (= position) if the instrument had a different tuning. Wow, I had *never* even considered that. As a trumpet player, I've had to do lots of transposing and can transfer that somewhat to the keyboard, but it was still positional thinking, just translating the notes to the desired key (= tonal). Also as a singer, relative pitch was paramount and perfect pitch actually detrimental, depending on the tuning. Holding a tuning in acapella singing without going flat can be difficult but achievable with lots of experience. And btw, I've always known that the perfect pitch people "cheated" at solfeggio/Gehörbildung while the rest of us suffered. 😅
This video explains perfect pitch in such detail that it completely changed my perception of the whole phenomenon. I think I have a good ear for pitch myself, but it is completely relative. If someone sneaked in here at night, and transposed all my keyboards -2 or +3 semitones I wouldn't notice at all. As long as the intervals are correct, I'm fine. Would I even want perfect pitch? I'm not even sure. I sort of like being immune to transpose buttons and LPs running at the wrong speed.
bro this makes sense, i had perfect pitch my whole life and i would always go to my grandmas house to play on her piano and it was so out of tune that the entire thing was a semitone down, essentially mimicking baroque tuning i suppose, but i was super young and i knew that wasnt right 💀 edit: oh my god i thought it was just me. i had wisdom teeth surgery and for the next TWO WEEKS everything sounded like 50 cents flatter and as worrisome as it was i actually thought it was kinda cool cuz i could hear music in a new way for once, but i really thought that was just me 😭😭
Yeah it's interesting how a bunch of other commenters also noted their post-wisdom surgery can lead to sounding flatter for a while too, good to know we're not the only ones who have experienced this weird shift phenomenon!
@@NicholasMaMusic I've read the comment section for over an hour now, but I cannot see anyone mention sound traveling through bone vs sound traveling through air. It really seems like perfect pitch has to do with sound traveling through bone/jaw/teeth instead of air, or perhaps just the combination of the two. You know why your voice sounds different on a recording then when you hear yourself speak in reality? It also has to do with that. Sound travels faster through bone/teeth than air. Now I'm also suspecting that people with perfect pitch noticing the shift at older age has to do with teeth removal and/or ear growth. Either way it's interesting to read the comments and know how wide the perfect pitch spectrum is, I had always thought people with perfect pitch could all indentify notes the same way and that it wasn't limited to for example A=440 tuning.
This is the first time i'm grateful for not having perfect pitch, especially after the section on relative pitch. For the last 3 years, i've just started to learn stuff or play along by ear, and i could also hear like the voicings of the chords, so i started thinking that i may have perfect pitch. But your video make me realize that i've just been "faking it" by just being really good at hearing intervals, qualities, and the tension-consonance pull of notes.
even without perfect pitch when you play a piece for months on normal instruments and suddenly play at an instrument that is tuned higher or lower it sounds wrong, confusing and is very difficult to play (speaking from experience, i don't have perfect pitch) i am not able to say which notes they are, but having played a piece for hundreds of hours just engraves how it should sound into your brain and when the instrument is tuned differently you can tell it's all wrong despite pressing the correct keys lok
Thank you for sharing! I've heard of instrumentalists memorizing the timbre of their instrument's pitches to obtain this kind of effect, that's cool you have it!
Hello Nicholas. I have no idea why the RUclips algorithm coughed up your presentation but I'm very glad it did. I have perfect pitch and good relative pitch but, at 58, I've noticed for some time now that my pitch seems to have shifted to around 432 classical. While I've never quite been as disoriented as you seem to have been whenever I hear classical or baroque tuning, I find anything above 440 really annoying - including the pitch change when I watch a movie in PAL which was filmed in NTSC. I'm sorry your pitch shift happened so forcefully. For me, I'm just relieved that I don't appear to be losing my marbles after all. The comments on here are wonderfully geeky. I may have to subscribe. 😂
That's fascinating, thank you for sharing your experience and it's good to know there are other people out there who have noticed pitch shifts. Seems to be that the pitch shifts described by people always happen downwards, interesting to note!
The exact same thing happened to me a few months ago when I had appendicitis and had surgery to remove my appendix. All music sounded sharp for at least a week afterwards, it's normal now. I also cheesed my way through ear training in college. My relative pitch is not great. Very relateable video, thank you!
Also, I am a Trombone/Euphonium/Tuba player, and your struggle in the video is similar to trying to play on a C tuba for me. Its like because I started on Bb euphonium, and have only ever spent serious time on Bb instruments, my brain is wired to associate certain fingerings with certain notes, when playing C tuba its shifted by a whole step and i can hardly even play a scale without messing up. Even worse is the F and Eb instruments where it's shifted by a perfect fourth or fifth, because some of the notes have the same fingerings, but the next partial down or up will be different
I had no idea about the sliding blocks on the harpsichord! Thanks ... this will be such a cool detail in my historical novel about (among other things) a music master in 1720s Sweden.
about losing perfect pitch: i don't have perfect pitch (or at least i haven't trained it to recognize the notes, i only know when something is 'wrong'), but i do have a really good memory that i use to save pitches in my head. at some point my head pitch shifted a semitone down, and listening to songs i hadn't listened to in years felt very very very bad (i felt like my whole musical life was a lie). i don't know when or how it happened, but it has hurt me a lot when singing. it's my fault that i learned to sing using this technique but i think i can say that i relate somewhat to what you felt
Thank you for sharing your head pitch shift experience, that sounds very disorienting indeed - hope you're finding ways around it or new pieces to memorize!
I have good pitch but I wouldn't call it perfect ... but if I learn a piece in one key and hear it in another, it can REALLY throw me. It's worse if I'm singing and the choir loses pitch, I basically have to "throw away" the original tuning if I want to match the others (after struggling a while to keep them on key).
I have perfect pitch, and my initial experience with baroque violin was tough because of the necessity to transpose. I can't remember how long it took, but my "ear" now goes back and forth between 440 and 415 based on the quality of the sound, since gut strings used for baroque violin sound different than modern strings. It also helps greatly that "open" strings (strings without a finger being depressed) sound different than strings that have fingers pushed down on them. The sound of open strings also helps to lock in my sense of pitch. My older daughter also has perfect pitch, and my playing baroque violin shifted her perfect pitch to A 415, almost certainly because she heard the open strings even though she was not looking at the music while I was playing. My ability to work with relative pitch is not good, because, as Nicholas Ma says, when you see a note on the page, you hear that pitch in your head. When I sing in a choir I still have to mentally transpose if a piece is not being sung in the printed key. It is a challenge if there are lots of sharps or flats.
Thank you for sharing your baroque violin thought process, that's a unique perspective to hear about using open strings to lock in the type of reference you're in, as well as the gut string timbre!
I also have perfect pitch and have experienced exactly what you explain about it *shifting* sometimes, I'd be humming a melody in my mind and then suddenly realize that I've been out of tune, flat the whole time, somewhere around A=430hz and had to re-tune my mindset to A=440hz by singing a note tuned to A=440hz, it can be any note but it has to be under the standard tuning, I guess it's something that will keep on happening, but would definitely love to stop experiencing it and stay in tune, only time will tell. Also about intervals and identifying them.. I do exactly what you explain in this video, I hear the different individual notes and kind of compare it to a mental "cheat sheet" of intervals, which looks kinda like: C-G= a perfect 5th, C-F= 4th... and so on with Every key, the same for chords, I hear every individual note and resort to theory to know what kind of chord those notes make so I can properly name the chord, overtime this process has become a second nature to me and I'm able to do it on the spot, but that's how it works inside my mind. Also it's Much easier to play the chord or sing the notes, than to name the chord. It's really interesting to read about everybody and their experiences with perfect pitch!
As someone with good relative pitch (I can sing an A about 75% of the time without a reference pitch), the difference between 415 and 440 Hz doesn't affect me much, it's just a semitone. What I find much harder is adjusting to pitches that are more in the ballpark of A=440 like early Classical period A=432 or Berlin Philharmonic A=445.
That's interesting to hear, I find it the opposite where a bit off sounds out of tune but still can sort of hear the intended note, a semitone or more and it's hard to hear as anything other than a different note
When I was playing in the orchestra a lot, I could usually hit an a' on the button by imagining the sound of an oboe in my head playing the tuning note before a rehearsal. But that wore off later when I was no longer playing. But I still get to within about a second up or down.
I’m a full time baroque violinist with perfect pitch. If listening I can with a little bit of effort shift it at will between 440, 415 and 392. 415 seems to be my default. If playing violin or viola I latch to the correct tuning immediately. Other pitches like 430 and 466 seem to fade if I haven’t used them recently, I need to practice them for a few days to regain them. My aural training teacher in college was amazing and she helped me develop my relative pitch by making us “feel” harmonies rather than analyse them. I still listen to intervals through a sort of muscle memory of what the fingering pattern would look like on the violin. Learning viola and alto clef also helped with relative pitch.
Very interesting smart analysis and courageous experience, TY. If since the day you're born you see blue bananas, it will have shaped your visual perception of colors, similarly if you have always heard an A at 415 it will shape your "perfect pitch". In the baroque era as you mention, there was practically one A per city! very high in Italy (the cornettos are often at 460) and very low in France for the 2nd half of the 17th century (385 Hz). It was the flutes and the oboes that actually determined the A. All this to say that this notion of "perfect pitch" that some claim to be born gifted with... is "learned" and not "innate". Before the Renaissance, the notion of fixed A did not even exist, we had scales of 6 notes (hexachords) movable (solmization)... if the singer started a scale with tonic on an F, it was called C. So the A is a very floating concept ! Finally, I think that piano players will always have a hard process to feel unequal temperaments, almost "against nature" for their ears. And that"s a pity because playing, say, the JS Bach partitas on equal temperament is like eating food without pepper, salt! Conversely, I play the lute, an instrument whose harmonics, very strong and rich, with long sustain, only sing (open strings sound by sympathy) when set in unequal temperament - mine is in "arranged" werckmeister -, and with a tuning at the 20th tone (As per ClearTune)... If I had to tune my lute with a piano, it would sound like a big board of wood.
I love Harpsichord's sound ❤ I wish they were still on sell. Like an electric Harpsichord, like an piano electric because it's a big instrument for an small apartment😂😂 Well, but first I need to learn to play piano. I'm gonna start next year 🎹😍 Perfect Pitch guy, don't worry about it. You need to think "415hz it's a new language, new language means new sounds". I think that will make it more easy. I'll hope you'll learning Harpsichord music in the future, because I really wsh to listen more of that music in your channel ❤
@@Anne_Mahoney Hi, thanks to tell me!! They're soooo big, imagine moving witht that sfuff? It's like an traditional piano 😂"If it doesn't fit on a elevetor I don't buy it"😆. That's my motto of life LOL Also, not in my country😅I'm not American, there's many intruments that you can't buy here. If it's not "traditional" one, you can't buy it and buy it from Amazon is really expensive and dangerous because intruments are fragile, probably it'll end up broken. Maybe in Europe is easier to buy it, because there's a lot of old harpsichord out there. Thanks and have a nice dayy!!😘😘
Thank you. I enjoyed your video. I would love to see you doing a video on keys (C maj/min, Bb maj/min, A maj, etc) relative to COLOUR that you "hear". Since I was a little kid, I "hear" colours - I do have "relative pitch", but my "hearing" of colours are much stronger than my hearing of actual pitch. From the colour that I "hear", I identify the pitch.
I've listened during all my life mostly baroque music, so I have perfect pitch at A 415. It's strange, because I always have to do a calculus of more or less one semitone up when listening to A 440.
Wow that's so intriguing hearing your experience being the other way having to shift up instead to reach 440, I wonder if it's the same with people who play transposing instruments too - thank you for sharing this!
RUclips recommended me this video. Fascinating journey! I don't have perfect pitch, so this is new to me. I used to read Bach pieces and try to transpose them and play them in a different key (on piano). Have you ever done that? I guess that would mess with your brain because you have such a strong association between notes and pitches! But maybe it would help you strengthen your relative pitch skill.
Yeah I tried doing that and it was like a tongue twister, as you say I have such a strong association between the note on a keyboard verses the pitch. Definitely something worth trying more if it may help relative pitch!
Yup. Everytime I'm sick I have down-shifted pitch perception. Also, I'm losing the acuity with age: strangely I always get things embarrassingly wrong by a 4th or a 5th. It makes a lot of sense from a physics standpoint, but it's especially weird if you're used to just falling in line. My handicaps are *worst* when quickly "ear-scanning" a song to accompany someone who plays that in a different key. Because my transposition skill may be pretty good, it's nigh impossible for me to refer back to the original song from the "other key". They live in completely separate "planes" and I have to cerebrally, consciously remember some changes, but also remember whether that mental note was in the original key or the transposed key. Anyways, this is only a problem when accompanying people "on the spot" which usually happens in informal settings (pupil recital).
A couple of years ago, I was doing a transcription practice in school. The piece to be transcripted was an excerpt of something by Vivaldi (can't recall what) but it sounded out of tune to me.. I asked my teacher why it all sounded so off and he said that it was in baroque tuning, and then asked me if I have perfect pitch... I actually don't, but I do have a decent relative pitch. Interesting to learn that this is a common phenomenon among people with perfect pitch
Congratz on your introduction to continuo. It can be quite difficult especially when doing it on a different instrument. Imo, I think thinking in relative pitch is almost omnipresent in Baroque music whether it be partimenti where you want to hear the movement of the cantus or in continuo where your right hand needs to prepare in advanced for the next interval shift. Especially if you decide to start doing repertoire, a lot of music will start being in other clefs which will further reinforce sight reading based on intervals. I’ve had teachers who went out of their way to learn every clef to the same familiarity and those who play based off of interval changes much like an unfigured bass. In terms of the continuo I’m not sure what your teacher’s philosophy is regarding it but imo you should roll every chord and control the speed of the roll based on the pulse of the meter to differentiate chord changes. It will help control where you want to “sound” quieter and where you are louder.
I don’t have perfect pitch. But when I tune my violin or viola to 415, I unconsciously start creeping up the fingerboard trying to get back to 440. It takes a while to stay where I need to be.
Well yeah, that’s what we are trained to do. If a string slips out of tune, we have to compensate. I’ve never played under anything but 440, but I can see how would drive you nuts.
I had one of my molars removed about five years ago and the next morning I stepped into an elevator, noticed something wasn't right, and frantically searched online if the perfect pitch would return. It returned in a few days but A very jarring experience
When I was a teenager, I was in a bunch of amateur choirs, and the fact that the rest of the singers would lower their pitch over time without a reference drove me crazy. Now, I’m transcribing a lot of tango recordings that vary in pitch between 430 and 450 Hz. It still drives me crazy, but I’ve learned to put myself in that "blurry" state to rely on my fragile relative pitch. Baroque tuning is a much bigger jump-I think I’m not ready for it yet. Really nice experiment, man. Also, I’m afraid of losing my perfect pitch as I age. A similar detuning of my ears happened a few times after attending really loud stadium rock concerts.
Fun fact: the pitch drift in choirs is caused by the fact that, in Just Intonation (Just Intonations is a tuning system that uses whole-number ratios to express intervals), there are more than one way to hit a note, and there will be small discrepancies between the results of these methods, and these discrepancies are called "commas". Slowly, these commas will accumulate, and the pitch will drift, a phenomenon known as "comma drift".
I have a very strong relative pitch, and I guess what I would call "key pitch", where if I hit a piano note and it isn't tuned correctly, I can probably tell. It has this strange, like, growl to it that I can't really describe accurately, but when i hear it I know something's wrong. I have a digital piano at home and can detune it up to 99 cents up and down, and I can still improvise and do things despite it, but it will sound strange to me, especially if it's in between two semitones, like B and C for example. Sometimes I detune things on purpose, because like how you said you listen to it and it sounds "sepia" or "faded", to me it sounds like new colors and new emotions that 440 doesn't or struggles to depict. For example, the first arpeggio of Moonlight Sonata sounds way more aggressive and dark in 420 rather than 440.
That's an interesting perspective, perhaps it's something related to memorizing the timbre of the instrument too? I know it's a thing for other instrumentalists like string players memorizing open string timbres to pitches, but wasn't sure if the situation for piano existed like in your case, that's cool!
Very, very interesting. After your experience, it looks like absolute pitch is not a gift, but an adaptation of people who have not relative pitch to be able to make music. Those who can identify notes, then, can play and sing. You could not imagine how a 415 Hz was an A. I have relative pitch, not absolute, and I can’t imagine not to have it. Intervals are natural, no matter the frequency.
It's actually interesting how your perception of pitch switched just like that after your surgery. I had pretty good relative pitch (I was really good at isolating A), and in 2023 I had the misfortune of being involved in an accident where I had severe head brain trauma. Blah blah, sob story. Anyway, after my accident I realized A = 440 sounded severely sharp, almost like you said, 455-460. Only when I listened to baroque music recordings, it sounded "in" tune, even though I knew it was in 415. It's interesting how the brain and ears work, I guess mine could just not ring at that rate because of the circumstances. Anyway, after 6 months it eventually went back to normal, but I struggle now with my relative pitches. (But hey, at least I'm suing, and will receive compensation for my troules 😜)
There has been increasing academic research over the last couple of decades (e.g., at San Francisco State University, SFSU) into people’s absolute pitch shifting, especially in one’s late 50’s. Us older folks lose our absolute pitch, and, in the process, a given frequency seems sharper (e.g., an A4 at 440 Hz sounds like a Bb4 or even a B4). If I hear a piece on the radio in Bb major it feels like C major. This has been happening to me over a decade (I’m now in my 70’s). It’s a very strong effect. On a number of occasions, I have been practicing my viola (always tuned to A4 = 440 Hz) for half an hour, say, and then only a few minutes later I ask myself to sing an A or some other note. I now almost invariably come out singing a semi-tone flat! (This is not due to errors in pitch matching - if I play a note on the piano and record myself singing it immediately, I am accurate to +/- just a few cents.) You would think that I could sing the right note by consciously singing a semitone sharper than I think it is, but my whole body strongly resists doing this. I still have some residual absolute pitch. Up until a decade ago, if I were singing in a choir and it went more than half a semi-tone flat I would transpose the music. Now I can’t tell if the choir has gone flat. However, if the choir is restarted at the correct pitch, it is much easier for me to find my notes. It just feels better. Incidentally, we have a young tenor (mid-20s) in our church choir who keeps singing at A4 = 440 Hz when the rest of the choir starts to go flat. I don’t think he realized he had absolute pitch until we told him.
None of this seemed that difficult to me. I transpose music all the time do accompany singers. I definitely have developed my relative pitch though from playing my whole life. Interesting the different challenges we face. I also play chording on with a Melody line on the fly. That's pretty standard for people who read lead sheets. Though there must be a lot of benefits from having true perfect pitch. Awesome video! Thank you for posting. This was very interesting.
Interesting video. This reminds me of an experiment that was done with vision. Special glasses were constructed to invert the image seen by the wearers. Volunteers wore these glasses continuously over weeks. At first everything they saw was upside down, but then, after about two weeks, if I recall correctly, the brain suddenly learned how to see properly and everything looked right side up. They continued wearing the glasses like this for a while and then removed them. When removing the glasses, everything seemed upside down at first, but the brain quickly compensated after just a few minutes. After that, the volunteers could see normally with or without the glasses after only a few minutes time to get used to it. I suspect something similar is happening when switching from 440 to 415. Hazarding a guess, though, I bet shifting one Hz at a time probably didn't help.
I did a continuo masterclass for two weeks with Hank Knox years ago. He's incredibly good at continuo. Enjoy! I haven't played from continuo much since then, but when I play from chords I still try to avoid parallel fifths because of this experience! On the other hard, I have relative pitch, so the closest I could think of is trying to transpose at sight or trying to switch between an Alto or Tenor/Soprano recorder. The Alto/Bass recorders are tuned in F but recorder players tend to learn "alto fingering" instead of thinking about transposing. Then, once in a while, they end up playing a piece with the wrong fingering during a rehearsal and we need to restart a piece after a couple bars. For anyone who's unaware, the key to good sounding recorder music is never having two recorders try to play in unison because they're so difficult to tune precisely. Four recorders each playing their own part tends to sound pretty good, especially with a different recorders for SATB.
So I have perfect pitch but I absolutely can’t complain about any problems regarding pitch. It doesn’t bothers me at all hearing music recorded at A=415 Hz, in fact I find it very refreshing or just nice to hear a variation from 440 Hz concert pitch. Also playing on Harpsichord or organs with altered tuning is no problem for me, I do notice that for example playing the keys in d minor and hearing C# minor is off by one semitone but I can ignore that fact and still play flawlessly by muscle memory. I really don’t get why it’s such a big deal for others with perfect pitch, for me this problem is less disturbing than more enjoyable to hear a variation or even a more traditional version of the music I love. How are others experiences with this?
Yeah exactly. I feel the exact same, I actually love playing pieces in a different tunes/different scale. I really don't understand why all of them are complaining lol
Fascinating how your perfect pitch is comfortable at any tuning - that opens a lot to think about! A majority of perfect pitch people I've talked to would find such shifts jarring, perhaps there are degrees of sensitivity or openness in absolute pitch perception?
For a while I memorized both systems. Then I lost 440 hz. I had to relearn it and, since I no longer am performing, have dropped 415 hz. Now imagine singing works you learned in one tuning in the other.
Thank you for sharing, that's very interesting about losing 440hz and having to relearn it - definitely a challenge learning to sing in another tuning indeed!
Playing any transposing instrument 💀
Same with me
As an eastern orthodox singer I sort of think of it as how many steps I transpose up or down. Then the sheet music always makes sense. We usually think in terms of relative pitch and perfect pitch can sometimes be more of a burden. If you're leading then it can be useful since you'll always have a reference. If I can play a piece on the piano I can also transpose it on the fly up to a certain level where the new key might produce some fingering challenges.
Dropped to 415hz is still a good thing to hear, I was perfect before my relative pitch training started and relearning 440hz is like an endless task
A=415 is only half the story, proper baroque tuning also has spicy temperaments like quarter-comma meantone.
Yeah for sure, it's interesting how most perfect pitch people today seem to only be tuned to A=440hz 12-tone equal temperament, trying to figure out other temperaments would be a whole other rabbit hole to go down!
@@NicholasMaMusic I posted a standalone comment about this, but your harpsichord at 13:22, 13:30, and 17:43 is tuned to quarter-comma meantone.
@@jakegearhart Those pure major 3rds are just way too recognizable
@@jakegearhart what is quarter comma meantone?
@@jakegearhart Not necessarily. Many temperaments have slightly beating thirds ; Kirnberger, Werckmeister, Valotti, among others, and it all depends on the dominant keys they are tuned for.
As someone with relative pitch, I never knew how much of a handicap perfect pitch was until watching this video. Being able to hear intervals has always been so innate to me that it never occurred to me that slight variations in tuning can throw someone off so much. Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I often mistake G major and A-flat major for one another, or even C major and B-flat major, but I can clearly tell G or A-flat major apart from C or B-flat major. If you play a fifth, I can immediately tell it’s a fifth, and I’ll probably be able to guess the approximate key, but I often struggle to identify the exact key.
Yeah for sure, having a good relative pitch does seem to be the more useful skill in most musical situations!
@@NicholasMaMusic I don't know a single person with absolute pitch who will give it up for relative pitch.
same ... with perfect pitch I always identify notes first and then figure out what chord they make. it always amazes me when people are able to identify complicated chord progressions instantly while I'm sitting there writing down notes and calculating it all out
Yeah exactly! I definitely came to a realization while filming the video that relative pitch had to be somehow trained separately
I think it requires a lot of training to identify complicated chords. And I believe the "comparing intervals with something familiar" trick is something very intuitive that many people apply until they'r trained enough to hear intervals more instantly. So in the end it's probably more of a gray area
as someone who plays jazz where sometimes charts will just straight up say "Cmaj7" without even giving you any specific notes, it really just comes down to knowing the quality or color of the chord rather than the notes themselves. Kinda like if a maj7 chord was the color instead of the notes, which key the chord is in is just a different shade of the same color
Relative pitch is super useful when you dabble your feet into organ playing. Pipe organs are extremely sensitive to temperature and humidity and can fall into or out of tune depending on the day. It can be a struggle to play well on some organs because of their tuning issues. There are also a lot of different temperaments which can all effect the tuning of an instrument. There's a dual temperament Fisk organ at Stanford University that effectively has seventeen notes to an octave because it has a mean-tone and well-tone tuning mode. It has three normal keyboards and a fourth keyboard where you can play both tunings at the same time.
That sounds like a fascinating organ to play on, that must be quite a tongue-twister equivalent for the mind and ears!
It's hilarious that I got recommend this video. When I was in HS I figured out how to change the tunings on all the practice keyboards into meantone and I told everyone about it and this guy who had perfect pitch started using it and he told me it literally destroyed his sense of pitch.
That’s insane to think about!!!
Yeah it's definitely quite disorienting with different temperaments haha, now if you did meantone plus pitch shift to A415 that would be a double slam dunk on unsuspecting perfect pitch people too!
Hey Stephen,
Do you have perfect pitch, and if so, did you develop it for specific microtonal tunings?
My music professor would give dictation tests announcing a key and then playing a half step off to force perfect pitch students to develop relative pitch.
Haha same that's what my ear training prof did too - that didn't really work since I still just wrote down the shifted pitches, then manually transposed the pitches back oops
Thats awesome because people with perfect pitch have an advantage
I recall my professor would play dictation extract for eg.: The same extract 3 times, but all 3 times in different keys, and then asked us to write down in another key (i assume, as I don't think I have perfect pitch) that she never played in.
This is great. As a fellow perfect pitch haver, you did a good job explaining the perfect pitch experience. Even down to the "faded colors" analogy when describing how detuned music feels. I've also had wisdom teeth removed, and I can confirm that what you describe does happen.
Haha thanks glad to hear the explanations make sense! And that's interesting hearing your account of the wisdom teeth pitch shifting as well, good to know I'm not the only one who went through this
@@NicholasMaMusic I remember I had to go under anesthesia a few years ago and realized my hearing was off when the low health sound in pokemon sounded WEIRD and then I realized everything else sounded weird too, I don't even know if I have perfect pitch or not, never checked
As much as perfect pitch is cool, good relative pitch is definitely more useful and versatile. Luckily, as you've shown, it's something you can learn.
It is, but takes way a lot of time developing a relative pitch capable of match perfect pitch.
From experience and from what I have seen, it is usually arround +2 years. And it should be noted that this is developed with exercises and constant and conscious practice, otherwise you can spend decades and never develope good relative pitch.
I also have a perfect pitch and this year I ALSO had two wisdom teeth surgeries, AND I ALSO FELT WEIRD DURING FIRST 1-2 WEEKS! It really felt like every recording was ~30hz lower than it shoud be. For me it was a funny experience and when few days went by I almost came to terms with this 'wrong' feeling.
Now it's interesting to know that I'm not alone in this lol.
Nice video btw
I don't have perfect pitch, just relative one and generally what you'd call "a good ear for music", and I still felt something similar after getting an inflammation in my jaw. I wouldn't say it's something universal but it's not exclusive to perfect-pitch-havers. Blood vessels and arteries that run thru your jaw also run thru your ears, when they get inflamed they can change their volume and I'm assuming that's what affects hearing.
I couldn't exactly tell what was wrong, like you saying everything was 30hz lower, but I could still feel like the music was "out of tune", even tho the intervals were still correct.
EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it I'm not sure if I listened to any new piece of music during that time. Maybe I only noticed the change because the pieces and songs I've been listening to were ones that I already new very well
Thank you! And glad to hear we're not alone in our post-wisdom teeth pitch shift experiences, seems like it's more common than we thought
@@NicholasMaMusic I had a similar experience, different cause but one day, it seemed I heard everything almost a full semitone higher. As a clarinetist, I asked, "Are you sure this is supposed to be played on A clarinet? Sounds like it's Bb clarinet to me!"
That was for Don Juan. It was extremely weird when I found out that not only was it indeed for A clarinet, but I confirmed by listening to more music that my sense of pitch had, in fact, shifted.
When I had my wisdom teeth pulled I was dealing with unsuccessful kidney surgeries so I was uhh... On another planet lol. Literally was so out of it I wouldn't notice even if everything sounded like chipmunks. Though I have heard of this before, I believe the 2nd comment reply is mostly accurate towards what happens on physiological level.
Has to be a crazy experience for people who actually realize it.
Makes me feel a bit fortunate despite the circumstances back then being quite unfortunate.
Already have a hard enough time with overlapping frequencies in public places after all.
I went to Nashville to record and cried in my room because I thought the keyboard I brought was broken. HAHA.
I’m genuinely surprised why I haven’t found a single comment mentioning transposing instruments. Tons of Perfect pitch people play transposing instruments with no problem. You simply need to mentally “let go” and tell yourself the note you are playing is not the one you are hearing. It will help you develop relative pitch, which is a skill that needs to be independently developed aside from perfect pitch.
This! I have a long story that I want to try to keep short...
I started on the flute when I was about 10 and then switched to the Bb (of course) Clarinet at about 12 or 13, can't remember exactly. I very much remember playing my first G on a clarinet and noticing instantly it wasn't a concert G, it was a concert F, and that's when my band teacher taught me about transposing instruments vs concert pitched instruments. Since then I've played on tons of different transposing instruments in Bb, Eb, A, and even F at one point (Basset Horn). All that time I didn't fret about it.
I also didn't really realize I had perfect pitch until years after I transitioned to the Bb Clarinet. By then, whenever I heard a pitch, I defaulted to the C=Bb transposition first so I had to train myself to transpose everything into concert pitch. Now it takes me a little thinking to interpret a music note that I hear while still requiring no preparation or reference... Umm... what does this make me now?
Yeah I'd love to hear from people who grew up playing transposing instruments on how they deal with their perfect pitch! Never talked to anyone in this situation but I'd imagine it would be a challenge to grow up in Bb instrument tuning and have concert pitch be the "wrong pitch"? Agreed though on relative pitch, definitely something I came to a realization with in this video!
I lost my perfect pitch completely when I went from playing the flute to Playing bass guitar
@@NicholasMaMusic I grew up playing piano and then started Bb clarinet in middle school, and nowadays I'm often a whole step off in either direction lol
@@381delirius ... those are both concert pitched instruments...
Fascinating. This is the best insight I've had into what it might be like to have perfect pitch. Working out intervals by writing down the two notes then calculating the distance is so crazy to me. To me the sound of a major 6th is as distinct as the taste of strawberries. The brain is truly amazing.
Thank you! Agreed, it's fascinating indeed how some people learn the same musical concepts so differently
bro i love the overdosage of memes XD
Thank you! My computer was fighting for its life constantly crashing while editing all the memes haha
the meme reference add humor to the video
Wonderful video! That perfect pitch shifting segment - thank you for that. I have experienced this in this past year and it is absolutely mind frazzling for me as a singer. It certainly causes a lot of stress in the mind of the musician. I thought I was going crazy. It’s nice to know that it is experienced by others with perfect pitch!
I may have never seen any of your videos before, but you have some of the most clear enunciation I’ve ever heard in a video essay. And I definitely appreciated your experimentation. And memes. Mostly the memes.
Thank you for your kind words, I'm glad you found the video (and the memes) both informative and entertaining!
Thank you for mentioing the "losing" perfect pitch! I had a similar experience with mine where I had an ear blockage, which shifted my right ear up about 1 semi-tone (give or take 5 cents depending on the day). It was an awful experience especially with the seperation of tones in each ear, and I was panicking really badly through that time. I couldn't listen to any music without freaking out due to everything clashing with itself.
One of the things that I have observed since then is that my pitch center drifts depending on my currently psychological state (slightly lower when in a low energy mood, and slightly higher when energetic or irratated). Fortunately, I play and upright bass, so I can adjust on the fly whenever I sound like I am "wrong". Honestly, these experiences really makes me envy people without perfect pitch, because I sometimes really wish I wasn't bound to this anchor point.
Also as a side note, being primarily a bass player, I really struggle with learning most other stringed instruments, such as the guitar, because I have to think to myself about each individual note rather than "oh just play this chord shape" because what happens when I need a capo for an odd tuning??? The mandolin has been the easiest for me to pick up since I really only have to think about 4 tones at a time, but it is so brain breaking to me once you step up to the 6th string. And don't even get me started on when I self-taught myself to play an F-Tuba, and not understanding why none of the music was in the correct key lmao
That's fascinating about the pitch center drifting depending on mood, hadn't considered this a possibility - thanks for sharing!
The wisdom teeth surgery part was honestly kind of important to me. I have perfect pitch and, a couple of years ago, I just started hearing EVERYTHING a half-step flat for a couple of weeks. This messed me up really hard in gigs, glad to know it’s not just a me issue
I have very strong perfect pitch and, like you, also grew up exclusively in an A440 environment until I got into early music.
Playing the harpsichord at A415 was difficult at first. But thankfully you don't encounter many sharps/flats in early music. It didn't take too long (months) to get my fingers and ears retrained to simple keys. Playing Messiaen on the harpsichord was still very difficult then, because my training was limited to simple keys. Another difficulty was losing track of notes when I played semiquaver runs.
I'd say I got almost 100% used to A415 after a few years. I can now play and improvise in any key, sight-read music in any key, and play Messiaen and other modern music at that pitch. I can also realise figured bass, transpose, and read funny clefs. Actually, this latter set of skills come part and parcel of learning to play in A415. That painful process transformed me as a musician. I think you were kind of saying the same thing.
I retuned my harpsichord to A392 in preparation for a concert, where I was realising figured bass live. I allowed myself a few months to acclimatise to it, but ultimately it wasn't as challenging as I expected it to be. I think the necessary brain rewiring already happened when I first had to readjust from A440 to A415. Going from A415 to A392 was a relatively small adjustment.
During Covid lockdown, my only exposure to an instrument was to my harpsichord at home. It's tuned approximately to A415, but I mostly let it drift with the weather and the gradual loosening of the strings. Coming out of lockdown and having to perform at A440 again was a bit of a shock. My pitch definitely drifted flat during lockdown, maybe by a 1/4 tone. That too made me question my perfect pitch, or, rather, the nature of this thing we call perfect pitch.
But to this day I still can't improvise with modern harmony at A415, but tonal harmony in any key is fine. Also, I struggle with German organ pitch (A466). I think it's simply down to lack of exposure. I think what we call perfect pitch isn't as permanent as we think it is. It's just an extreme form of pitch memory. I can shift between A440, A415 and A392 at will because I've had lots of exposure to these pitches. It's like I have three sets of reflexes.
Temperament is also a part of this memory, I think. Playing something tuned to A415 or A392 but in equal temperament still feels very off to me (even worse if it's a piano sound), but not in a destabilising way.
Woah this is so cool, I’m glad you shared this-it’s got me thinking too now about how malleable perfect pitch can be! Good to know from your first-hand account that a few years can be enough to 100% acclimatize to A415. That's interesting how you can improvise tonal harmony fluently with A415 but not modern harmony, I wonder if sinking into only Messaien or something at 415 for a few years would allow equal proficiency at more modern harmony kinds of improv and fluency. Lots to think about, thanks for this!
@@NicholasMaMusic I have no doubt that I can gain fluency in modern harmony in A415 if I have enough exposure/practice. But this is only something I'd do for silly fun, rather than something I'd naturally do regularly, so I think I'll never get to that stage.
I’m absolutely amazed by how difficult the transition seems to be for you. I don’t have perfect pitch but developed relative pitch and something that I would describe as familiar pitch - basically you play certain pitches so frequently that you can just recall them for tuning or they pop up as a reference when you hear a sound. I once had a dentist appointment and had just played piano right before it and as soon as the drill touched the tooth I knew that I heard an A. I didn’t want or need that information, but my brain apparently was still in its reference mode from playing.
Yeah this pitch reference memorization strategy is a good one!
You can recall but it's hard and it's quite imprecise, the reference memorization most of times no matter how much you practice it, It usually has a margin of error, sometimes you might think it's an A but when you notice it's actually a C#. It happens to me a lot, sometimes it is very precise and other times very misleading.
This video actually brings up a really interesting concept in the way all of us learn music differently and the way we think when we're playing. I have perfect pitch, but I've never run into these kinds of transpositions as a problem. I'm mostly thinking about the fingering and relative pitch, but even though I know it's in a different key my brain (thankfully) doesn't seem to care. I think it has to do with the fact that indeed, when I was learning piano I also had an electric keyboard with a transpose function on it that I would always mess around with while practicing.
That's such a thought-provoking perspective, yeah I'd imagine learning piano while equally focusing on the transpose function while practicing would provide a more flexible path to transposition
This is insightful and motivating for anyone pushing past their boundaries and truly challenging themselves. The depth of insight from your journey seems to show how how a serious music education can broaden your appreciation of music overall.
Thank you for your kind words!
I was searching for such a video for years, since the time I became a huge fan of Baroque music. My ear is also a A-440 one, and I even asked somewhere on RUclips how harpsichordists with perfect pitch live their lives 😊😊
Your video is uplifting and saddening at the same time. that basically means that, although I'm used to listening to those interesting tunings, I can't play them unless I do practice a lot.
I live in Strasbourg, and here we have two Baroque organs in nearby churches, one tuned to A-465 (German tuning) and another tuned to A-392 (French tuning). I imagine my face when sitting in those churches listening to a concert, it must be like a face of a school student solving a math problem 😊😊. Like: Oooo-kaaayyy, he is playing in G minor, I'm in St. Thomas, so the piece must be notated in A minor really.
Also, I too always explain what is perfect pitch by comparing it with color (and I'm blind from birth, so I do have perfect pitch but don't see any colors). Like, imagine you were always told grass is blue, and you used to call this blue and instinctively percept this frequency as blue. And then you're told that no, it's actually green. It's just the same with pitches.
Wow that's fascinating to hear from your "color" perspective, that's a unique angle to unpack. Thanks for sharing!
I love learning about different tunings and this is VERY enlightening and entertaining. A lot of musicians find this sort of thing too esoteric and pedantic but I can't get enough. Cheers
Thank you, appreciate the support!
My ear training teacher made me do all the homework and exams in differnt key because I have perfect pitch, so when she played a melody in D minor for example I had to write the melody in G minor.
Thanks to her I developed much better relative pitch and it helped me massively to understand chord progressions and hear them better.
Now I understand that all the years before that I kind of "cheated" with my perfect pitch to get by but developing that relative pitch is much more important.
Absolutely agreed, relative pitch does seem to be the more important skill to develop
Fascinating video! As a kid, I had (very slightly flat) perfect pitch but it wasn't a big deal - and I had very good relative pitch. I had the ability to believe people that if people said that a particular pitch was a particular note, I would believe them.
The way I rationalized it, a lot of the issues are unique to keyboard or fixed-pitch instruments. On woodwind instruments, each named pitch has a unique fingering; on stringed instruments, you get a slight sympathetic resonance from the open strings, which means that an A415 on a Baroque violin has a different sound quality to a G#415 on a modern "A440" violin.
We tend to think of perfect pitch as a modern A440 Equal Temperament phenomenon, but I suspect that people have had perfect pitch throughout history including in Baroque times, and with quarter-comma meantone - so their ideas of "out of tuneness" would be very different to modern ideas.
I also think that there may be multiple types of perfect pitch, like there are multiple types on synaesthesia (I also believe that perfect pitch may well be a kind of synaesthesia). With my kind of perfect pitch, I might occasionally confuse A with D or E (a perfect 5th away) but never confuse A with Ab - so sharp/flat sensitive.
I was also fascinated to hear your observations about how you react to notes that aren't a 12TET pitch, and how within limits that you can persuade yourself that it IS a 12TET chromatic note, including a notw that is halfway between A and G#...
Incidentally, that pitch is logarithmic with respect to Hertz, so midway between 415Hz and 440Hz is not 427.5Hz, but something closer to 427.31Hz
I'd recommend using "cents" or even "midicents" rather than Hertz when talking about pitches
Thank you for your insights! You're right that perfect pitch does seem to be a spectrum, and it's fascinating how most with perfect pitch seem to be locked into 12TET - I'd be very curious to hear the perspective of a perfect pitch person who wasn't brought up in our equal tempered 12 tone environment!
Professional french horn player with perfect pitch here. When I started playing horn the F transposition drove me nuts. I learned to re read the F parts and name the notes differently as I continued to hear in regular pitch. The result was I have developed the ability to transpose any key into concert pitch and play it on the horn. Useful when playing horn parts transposed into C D Eb E F G Bb B etc. I am 66 years and my perfect pitch remains constant. Transpositions are difficult for most brass players. Not so much for me.
Woah that's amazing that you've been able to retrain your brain to do this, I've always been wondering how professional transposing instrument players with perfect pitch are able to adapt!
very interesting and insightful video! Thank you for sharing your journey!
i do sometimes wish i had perfect pitch, especially since i transcribe a lot of orchestral music and i´d imagine having perfect pitch could come in handy at times, but in most cases i don´t miss not having been born with that superpower :D
i do believe your journey to being able to play on different pitches would have been smoother if you had access to well tuned instruments more often :D that out of tune harpsichord at 13:32 for example was like fingernails on a blackboard!
I have perfect pitch, which was originally set to A = 440 Hz with no tolerance for deviation. Then at some point in my middle school time (back in the mid-late 1970s), my parents got this (vinyl) record "Historic Instruments in Performance" of 2 Mozart sonatas for violin and fortepiano. Unfortunately, the fact of use of A = 415 Hz was a single mention buried somewhere in the liner notes, so despite reading the liner notes as intently as I could, I missed it. I really liked the sound quality of the instruments, but thought "no way is this sonata in E minor; it sounds like E flat minor -- the record must have been recorded at the wrong rotational speed." So for the first fairly large number of times I listed to that record, I would adjust the phonograph turntable speed up to get A = 440 Hz. Then finally I noticed what I had missed the first time (I think because of hearing mention of A = 415 Hz somewhere else), and stopped adjusting it. It still sounded good, so I just got used to historically informed performances sounding a semitone flat.
My like of the way Baroque and Classical historical instruments sounded exceeded any disturbance from the pitch being flat, so I got historically informed performance recordings whenever I could, eventually exclusively choosing these as much as possible, and I really liked the music of that period. Meanwhile, I still listened to a decent amount of music from Beethoven onwards, which was usually performed with A = 440 Hz -- recordings of Beethoven on historic instruments are now easily available, but back in the 1980s, not so much. So I developed the ability to set perfect pitch to A = 415 Hz through 440 Hz, although the occasional recording in something like A = 409 Hz would throw me for a loop. Eventually I got enough range of acceptable pitch standard that my hearing can accept A = 400 Hz(*) up to A = 453 Hz(**), although still defaulting to A = 415 Hz.
(*)Boeing USSLRV electronic chopper frequency and aircraft interior mains frequency; also easily heard as a somewhat sharp G..
(**)This is the A that you get by stepping down a 12EDO semitone (12th root of 2) from B♭ if you take North American mains frequency 60 Hz to be B♭ and then step up by 3 octaves.
Currently I still can't adjust all the way down to A = 392 Hz (a common French Baroque quasi-standard) or all the way up to A = 466 Hz (a quasi-standard German Choirton) -- for those, my hearing kicks over to whichever pitch standard within its range results in transposition by a whole tone from the advertised pitch, and I just live with it. If I played an instrument, I would just have to transpose accordingly, on the fly.
I ALSO have relative pitch, which I am currently trying to train to work properly with (microtonal/xenharmonic) intervals other than the standard 2nd, 3rd, and 4th roots of 2 (12EDO tritone, major third, and minor third, respectively) and corresponding but not equal just intonation intervals (take your pick of 99/70 or 140/99, 5/4, and 6/5, respectively). Learning to hear other intervals as sounding good when used properly was the easy part, which worked almost immediately upon hearing good music written with them (for starters, I highly recommend anything from mid-2021 onwards on Norokusi's channel); but I haven't yet gotten my brain to store them properly, no matter how good they sound.
That's fascinating, thank you for this detailed account of how your perfect pitch has adapted over time! Especially intriguing with how you can shift between a specified range, I see how going further than a whole tone would seem like just a transposition.
@@NicholasMaMusic Actually even a single whole tone seems like a transposition. Not so sure about all of the larger intervals feeling that way -- keep in mind that although equal temperaments (mainly 12, but also others) did exist back in the Baroque era, 12EDO didn't really catch on (with the possible exception of lute/viol groups that didn't have a keyboard instrument) until the 1800s, and its dominance wasn't complete even then. So shifting by a minor second OR third, for instance, also shifts the temperament and thus the feel of the music.
There are microtonals in traditional Teochew music too.
All the best
Really great watch! I've always been really confused at how people with PP experience playing an instrument since sometimes they make really weird mistakes (like asking them if a C5 is higher or lower than an A4 and most will say the A4 is higher). Really fascinating to see your insight!
Thank you!
Great experiment! You are completely right about your findings.
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!
You make complete sense bro ❤. Thanks for posting this video.
Glad this made sense with you, appreciate the support!
Hahahaha I used to cheese all of my aural tests as well.
I have like a weird pseudo-perfect pitch that only works within a certain range for certain timbres.
Great video!
Thank you! Quasi perfect pitch is definitely a thing developed by memorizing timbres with pitches, that's great you have it!
Found this fascinating. Thanks for your video!
I am so glad you talked about the way you hear pitch changing! This happened to me too.
I don’t have perfect pitch, but growing up I’d always had a pretty good ear. One day I came back from vacation and turned my laptop on and realized the Windows opening sound was flat. I thought my computer was broken. But when I went to play my violin, my ears tuning was not the same as the tuner. Everything sounded flat. This was like sophomore year of high school btw.
I actually cried and told my mom about it and it felt so scary at first, but I just got used to it over time and it’s normal now. Of course, she didn’t understand what I was going through and was not reassuring at all and basically told me to get over it.
My right ear hears pitches about 4hz lower on top of that too. I think my left ear hears 440hz where it originally is, but I’m also not sure if that’s just because I adjusted over time and it’s actually more like 435hz in my left ear and 431hz in my right. But yes! It sucks at first!
That sounds like a really wild experience, I can imagine how frustrating it must've been for it to be so sudden, and on top of the difference between ears too!
what a fantastic idea for a video and excellent execution, loved it q:
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!
That flute playing is beautiful! Goes great with your harpsichord playing.
Great video Nicholas, I'm glad for what you achieved buddy!! Regards from Brasil!
Terrific video, so interesting and well explained. As a lowly relative pitch-er, this was fascinating
This is interesting! I just did a cover of Fallen Down from Undertale in 432hz because it’s closer to the original, and after uploading it I listened to a cover I did a couple years prior that was in 440 and the difference in colour was shocking. I’ve never thought about it and this video was very informative
This was really interesting, especially your experience with the shift due to surgery
Thank you! Yeah it was certainly quite surprising and unsettling, very interesting this would happen in hindsight
I don't have perfect pitch, but I noticed some shortcomings it can cause very quickly in music theory classes. It was very obvious that a few people were not putting any effort into understanding the lessons because they could get the right answers a different way. It made me feel like perfect pitch is not much more than a party trick. I didnt know people could lose perfect pitch though, thats wild.
Whoops. I did the thing where I commented before finishing the vid
Haha yep your observations are indeed aligned with what I came to realize while filming the video, relative pitch is quite a useful skill to have and train!
@@NicholasMaMusic ultimately I feel like people with perfect pitch tend to be the best musicians. But since there's so much ability to hear things accurately, it also turns into a crutch. Just because you are more naturally able to climb a mountain doesn't mean you can ignore the technique. It's sort of a Messi/Ronaldo situation. Messi has perfect pitch and a well developed relative pitch, Ronaldo has developed his perhaps better relative pitch to the point where many people disagree on who is the better player. (I think it's Messi but having tools doesn't inherently make you better than knowing how to use them)
Great vid dude. Very cool and interesting to hear as a relative pitch buff. Good job getting through your struggles
Thank you, definitely was quite the experience!
I like to trick people and say, “this is a (note) at 442… and this is at 440, and 415 etc.” But, I’ve gotten to a point to where I can indeed gage other tunings, but by relative pitch… TBH… I do the exact same thing… Seeing, or hearing the notes in different tuning as a filter is sooooo much easier. And I DID THE SAME THING IN AURAL SKILLS 😂…
I like the play around with the transposition option on keyboards. It’s very fun. I used to not like it, but, I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s more of like a doctrine of affections thing for me now 🙌!
The filter tuning strategy seems to be the way forward indeed!
You should try to learn relative pitch for microtonal music/scales. Brendan Byrnes is a pop-ish artist that makes microtonal music in a few different tunings. There are other microtonal artists you should definitely check out, but it’s a lot to list.
Incredible video. Thank you for sharing!
As someone with perfect pitch that also plays the harpsichord, the different tuning definitely took me some time to get used to. eventually it did click for me after listening to lots of baroque music with A = 415. It’s a good thing I didn’t know about other tuning methods at the time like 1/4 comma or I may have gone insane. Congrats on getting through your harpsichord exams!
Thank you! It's definitely a challenge to get used to, good to hear you got it figured out eventually!
I have relative pitch. I'm an instrumentalist first but I run into this same issue if you give me a vocal score but then accompany me in a different key. Apparently a lot of singers can do this because they can't read sheet music. But for me I read C on the score and I know generally where that is in my voice range. So if you transpose the piano down three half steps, I won't be able to sing in tune at all. If I wasn't reading the score I could do it. But if I'm sight reading the melody it ain't happening. My prof asked if I'm perfect pitch.
Amazing to see your documentation of the process! I grew up listening to more Baroque music (as well as Renaissance music as well as music outside the 12-tone system), before any formal music training, and so the "sound" of A = 440 Hz felt very different for me. But as a relative-pitch user, the difference in temperament was and remains way more salient for me (those major thirds!).
The analogous situation with colour I have lived through - my eyes have had shifted towards the red side of the visible light spectrum after lens replacement surgery.
wonderful video, keep it up!
Thank you!
Strange analogy for speed cubers, it's essentially like swapping the green and yellow face on a speed cube, so when you are doing OLL and PLL on the green side, you keep screwing up because it's not yellow
This is an entertaining video to watch as a microtonalist with sound-color synesthesia 🤣
Oh man microtones are a whole other can of worms, that in combination with synaesthesia too must be so cool!
Please do explain what colours microtones feel like with sound-colour synaesthesia! I don't know how to describe it, but for me pitches have innate feelings that are just always there, so when I hear certain microtones, they just have different feelings as well. Like, the note A is inherently sombre to me, regardless in which context I hear it, like there's a sort of weight carried by that pitch that is not carried at all by say, the note F (that's not a very accurate way of describing my experience but it's the best I can do). So when I hear a microtone such as Half sharps/half flats, they just feel like a different emotion and it is widely different, the same way E feels very different to F, E half sharp feels very different to the both too. So I'd love to hear what you see when you hear certain microtones - although it might be difficult for me to understand, I'm also colourblind 💀
Oh hi jumble, didn't expect to see you here
@@NicholasMaMusic It *is!*
Discovering this type of music after working with only 12edo all my life was like going from a retro 16 color system to 16 *million*. I will never forget how trippy that was!
@@aidanc. I don't even know how to begin to describe it tbh, there's so much going on and I barely understand *regular* music theory 😭
But I can tell you that A Major is purple and tastes/smells like chocolate, and F Major is warm and green like a sunny forest clearing.
As for microtones... I gave up on trying to learn theory, and just compose by color. I can tell you that a song is in the key of orange, but that's it really 🤣
0:49 LOW TAPER FADE
I have perfect pitch and I experienced that pitch shift before when I was around 12/13. I don't really remember what happened before the pitch shift, all I knew was that the 440 tuning just sounded flat to me. As a violinist, I moved my fingers to a higher position to match the new pitch in my brain. Practicing alone is rather fine (although it's still problematic), I can always tune down, but it's disastrous when I played in orchestra, where I was literally sitting at the concertmaster's seat and being the only person who was out of tune. I couldn’t stop thinking the new pitch instead of focus and relying on my muscle memory. It made me so self conscious and I was not able to press on the strings without doubting and referring to what my stand partner played. Thankfully it only lasted for a few days, and I am glad to see someone also had this experience
Apparently, I heard from a friend that perfect pitch shifts when you first wake up in the morning. Congratulations on making personal growth with relative pitch! Sadly, I don't have perfect pitch, though I've kind of stumbled through music using relative pitch, haha. As in, I never really learnt to read sheet music quickly, and would just use relative pitch/what I remembered from recordings to play pieces for orchestra lol. Anyhow, really nice video! :3
I have perfect pitch and I can confirm that at the morning everything sounds lower but it doesn't happen very often.
happens to me after swiming as well... dunno why
That's so interesting about the morning pitch shift, I'll have to pay attention next time I wake up haha. And yeah relative pitch seems way more useful especially from what you're describing too!
How fascinating to hear of your experiences and experiment. What drew me to this video was this afternoon (Christmas Eve) tuning into the Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King's College Cambridge, which opens with "Once in David's City", a carol I have sung and played many many times. But something didn't sound quite normal today, and I discovered that they were singing it in Gb major (or was it F# major!?) rather than the usual G major. I would not say I've ever had perfect pitch, though have developed decent relative pitch as a singer, choir leader and keyboard player, but I can't reliably pluck an A=440 out of thin air. However it was clear "Once in Royal" was different to usual, somehow 'warmer' (I've always felt Gb major to be a warm, cosy key!). So fascinating to search and find out a bit more, and perhaps to re-evaluate my own relationship with perfect/relative pitch. (I've often wondered how instrumental players on a Bb instrument cope with perfect pitch.)
Thank you! And interesting, perhaps you were experiencing the Levitin Effect of pitch memory!
@ Another article to read and term to learn but fascinating, thanks! Pitched it perfectly again when I tried to sing it out of thin air yesterday, but then today I tried and I was way out!
The wisdom teeth thing wasn't just me?! I also have perfect pitch, and when I got my wisdom teeth removed 4 years ago, for a couple days after surgery, everything sounded ~25 cents flat, it was jarring. I'm also into microtonal music, which can really mess with perfect pitch at first, but you can get accustomed to predictable tunings. I could probably identify a note in 31 tone equal temperament, but I would likely be off by a step for notes that aren't spelled the same as a 12 TET note.
(Your perfect pitch analogies with color were also spot-on with how I'd describe it!)
Yeah glad to hear a pitch shift down seems like it's a common (and thankfully temporary) phenomenon post wisdom teeth surgery. Glad the analogies came across well too!
I myself play the organ and in Europe you have like very different pitches. So for instance there are some organs which are just normal in 440Hz, but also some that are on like 462Hz or even 473Hz and of course there are also Baroque organs that are on 415Hz (and even different temperaments) or something around that. I do have perfect pitch, but I have learned over the years to just adjust that to where I'm playing, but I can imagine it being very hard for someone who isn't used to it. I think you dealt great with it! Great job!
Thank you!
Lot of organists in the comments.
I used to be an organ tuner/builder and tuned by ear. I don't have perfect pitch, but I do have very good relative pitch. As most of the organs I tuned here in the UK were in churches to accompany worship, tuning wasn't a huge issue.
If the centre octave bearings on the 4' stop sounded ok I would simply tune the organ to itself, using that octave as reference for the rest of the ranks.
Occasionally, I would have to re-lay the bearing on the centre octave first but very rarely would I touch 4' middle C.
So up and down the country are organs tuned to 523.3, but also anywhere from 511ish to 535ish!
This vid was an interesting insight from a perfect pitch ear.
This was a fascinating video. :)
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Hello. Another perfect pitch musician. I feel proud of you.
I guess, after this video I don't envy people with perfect pitch anymore. At least not as much as before. What a relief! I am able to play piano in one key, while it being transposed to any other. I thought it was a drawback not to be able to tell the note just from listening. Thank you!
Thank you for your wonderful insights on this fascinating topic!
I don't have PP, so to survive ear training tests in music school I simply HAD to learn relative pitch. I have always been envious of those that do, however.
As a singer, I have acquired a different sort of pitch memory: you might have heard about the 'passagio' for singers: the pitch area where the voice pivots from chest to head voice (describing this with a very broad brush here). This happens automatically. Also the various vocal co-ordinations vary from pitch to pitch. I am thrown off when my church organist switches key because it's too high for most of the congregation-I'm a soprano, so high notes are my happy hunting ground-or transposes a piece in D flat to D by playing on white keys, and sharping the naturals. I'm not aware of the actual pitches while I'm singing, but I feel a general unease because my entire vocal mechanism feels out of whack. Before panic sets in, I find to my relief later on what had really happened.
I'd love to hear from singers with or without PP and how they'd navigate singing in Baroque tuning, or A=432 for that matter.
Thank you! Fascinating about the passagio and vocal mechanisms. I'd imagine perfect pitch singers would struggle more with other tunings but have more advantage in A440 atonal music
@@NicholasMaMusic You're right! Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire or Berg's Lulu, for example, would be a nightmare for non-PP singers to learn, but for those with PP it would be a breeze, with no tonality/relative pitch issues to deal with.
I didn't know I needed to see this video until I saw it.
No perfect pitch on my side, but a well trained relative pitch. What I really learned from this video - and for the very first time in my life - is the different approach to playing a keyboard instrument. I've always associated a note on the paper with a *POSITION* on the keyboard. Done. That note, this key. I was absolutely fascinated to find out that people with perfect pitch (or at least our young Nicholas) associate the note on the paper with a tone, not with a fixed key (= position) and would actually automatically play a different key (= position) if the instrument had a different tuning. Wow, I had *never* even considered that. As a trumpet player, I've had to do lots of transposing and can transfer that somewhat to the keyboard, but it was still positional thinking, just translating the notes to the desired key (= tonal). Also as a singer, relative pitch was paramount and perfect pitch actually detrimental, depending on the tuning. Holding a tuning in acapella singing without going flat can be difficult but achievable with lots of experience. And btw, I've always known that the perfect pitch people "cheated" at solfeggio/Gehörbildung while the rest of us suffered. 😅
This video explains perfect pitch in such detail that it completely changed my perception of the whole phenomenon. I think I have a good ear for pitch myself, but it is completely relative. If someone sneaked in here at night, and transposed all my keyboards -2 or +3 semitones I wouldn't notice at all. As long as the intervals are correct, I'm fine.
Would I even want perfect pitch? I'm not even sure. I sort of like being immune to transpose buttons and LPs running at the wrong speed.
Relative pitch does seem to be the more useful and applicable ability indeed!
bro this makes sense, i had perfect pitch my whole life and i would always go to my grandmas house to play on her piano and it was so out of tune that the entire thing was a semitone down, essentially mimicking baroque tuning i suppose, but i was super young and i knew that wasnt right 💀
edit: oh my god i thought it was just me. i had wisdom teeth surgery and for the next TWO WEEKS everything sounded like 50 cents flatter and as worrisome as it was i actually thought it was kinda cool cuz i could hear music in a new way for once, but i really thought that was just me 😭😭
Yeah it's interesting how a bunch of other commenters also noted their post-wisdom surgery can lead to sounding flatter for a while too, good to know we're not the only ones who have experienced this weird shift phenomenon!
@@NicholasMaMusic I've read the comment section for over an hour now, but I cannot see anyone mention sound traveling through bone vs sound traveling through air. It really seems like perfect pitch has to do with sound traveling through bone/jaw/teeth instead of air, or perhaps just the combination of the two. You know why your voice sounds different on a recording then when you hear yourself speak in reality? It also has to do with that. Sound travels faster through bone/teeth than air.
Now I'm also suspecting that people with perfect pitch noticing the shift at older age has to do with teeth removal and/or ear growth.
Either way it's interesting to read the comments and know how wide the perfect pitch spectrum is, I had always thought people with perfect pitch could all indentify notes the same way and that it wasn't limited to for example A=440 tuning.
This is the first time i'm grateful for not having perfect pitch, especially after the section on relative pitch. For the last 3 years, i've just started to learn stuff or play along by ear, and i could also hear like the voicings of the chords, so i started thinking that i may have perfect pitch. But your video make me realize that i've just been "faking it" by just being really good at hearing intervals, qualities, and the tension-consonance pull of notes.
Haha still it’s good to know you’re actually training up a really important musical skill!
even without perfect pitch when you play a piece for months on normal instruments and suddenly play at an instrument that is tuned higher or lower it sounds wrong, confusing and is very difficult to play (speaking from experience, i don't have perfect pitch)
i am not able to say which notes they are, but having played a piece for hundreds of hours just engraves how it should sound into your brain and when the instrument is tuned differently you can tell it's all wrong despite pressing the correct keys lok
Thank you for sharing! I've heard of instrumentalists memorizing the timbre of their instrument's pitches to obtain this kind of effect, that's cool you have it!
Hello Nicholas. I have no idea why the RUclips algorithm coughed up your presentation but I'm very glad it did. I have perfect pitch and good relative pitch but, at 58, I've noticed for some time now that my pitch seems to have shifted to around 432 classical. While I've never quite been as disoriented as you seem to have been whenever I hear classical or baroque tuning, I find anything above 440 really annoying - including the pitch change when I watch a movie in PAL which was filmed in NTSC. I'm sorry your pitch shift happened so forcefully. For me, I'm just relieved that I don't appear to be losing my marbles after all. The comments on here are wonderfully geeky. I may have to subscribe. 😂
That's fascinating, thank you for sharing your experience and it's good to know there are other people out there who have noticed pitch shifts. Seems to be that the pitch shifts described by people always happen downwards, interesting to note!
The exact same thing happened to me a few months ago when I had appendicitis and had surgery to remove my appendix. All music sounded sharp for at least a week afterwards, it's normal now. I also cheesed my way through ear training in college. My relative pitch is not great. Very relateable video, thank you!
Also, I am a Trombone/Euphonium/Tuba player, and your struggle in the video is similar to trying to play on a C tuba for me. Its like because I started on Bb euphonium, and have only ever spent serious time on Bb instruments, my brain is wired to associate certain fingerings with certain notes, when playing C tuba its shifted by a whole step and i can hardly even play a scale without messing up. Even worse is the F and Eb instruments where it's shifted by a perfect fourth or fifth, because some of the notes have the same fingerings, but the next partial down or up will be different
I had no idea about the sliding blocks on the harpsichord! Thanks ... this will be such a cool detail in my historical novel about (among other things) a music master in 1720s Sweden.
Careful: The possibility to shift the keyboard is a MODERN invention!
"My piano is baroque - can you fix it?"
"If you can't fix it, better to have well tempered my expectations beforehand"
“Certainly, problem with the action?”
“No, just intonation”
about losing perfect pitch: i don't have perfect pitch (or at least i haven't trained it to recognize the notes, i only know when something is 'wrong'), but i do have a really good memory that i use to save pitches in my head. at some point my head pitch shifted a semitone down, and listening to songs i hadn't listened to in years felt very very very bad (i felt like my whole musical life was a lie). i don't know when or how it happened, but it has hurt me a lot when singing. it's my fault that i learned to sing using this technique but i think i can say that i relate somewhat to what you felt
Thank you for sharing your head pitch shift experience, that sounds very disorienting indeed - hope you're finding ways around it or new pieces to memorize!
I have a few friends with perfect pitch and I am absolutely not jealous of them.
I have good pitch but I wouldn't call it perfect ... but if I learn a piece in one key and hear it in another, it can REALLY throw me. It's worse if I'm singing and the choir loses pitch, I basically have to "throw away" the original tuning if I want to match the others (after struggling a while to keep them on key).
I have perfect pitch, and my initial experience with baroque violin was tough because of the necessity to transpose. I can't remember how long it took, but my "ear" now goes back and forth between 440 and 415 based on the quality of the sound, since gut strings used for baroque violin sound different than modern strings. It also helps greatly that "open" strings (strings without a finger being depressed) sound different than strings that have fingers pushed down on them. The sound of open strings also helps to lock in my sense of pitch. My older daughter also has perfect pitch, and my playing baroque violin shifted her perfect pitch to A 415, almost certainly because she heard the open strings even though she was not looking at the music while I was playing. My ability to work with relative pitch is not good, because, as Nicholas Ma says, when you see a note on the page, you hear that pitch in your head. When I sing in a choir I still have to mentally transpose if a piece is not being sung in the printed key. It is a challenge if there are lots of sharps or flats.
Thank you for sharing your baroque violin thought process, that's a unique perspective to hear about using open strings to lock in the type of reference you're in, as well as the gut string timbre!
I also have perfect pitch and have experienced exactly what you explain about it *shifting* sometimes, I'd be humming a melody in my mind and then suddenly realize that I've been out of tune, flat the whole time, somewhere around A=430hz and had to re-tune my mindset to A=440hz by singing a note tuned to A=440hz, it can be any note but it has to be under the standard tuning, I guess it's something that will keep on happening, but would definitely love to stop experiencing it and stay in tune, only time will tell.
Also about intervals and identifying them.. I do exactly what you explain in this video, I hear the different individual notes and kind of compare it to a mental "cheat sheet" of intervals, which looks kinda like: C-G= a perfect 5th, C-F= 4th... and so on with Every key, the same for chords, I hear every individual note and resort to theory to know what kind of chord those notes make so I can properly name the chord, overtime this process has become a second nature to me and I'm able to do it on the spot, but that's how it works inside my mind. Also it's Much easier to play the chord or sing the notes, than to name the chord.
It's really interesting to read about everybody and their experiences with perfect pitch!
As someone with good relative pitch (I can sing an A about 75% of the time without a reference pitch), the difference between 415 and 440 Hz doesn't affect me much, it's just a semitone. What I find much harder is adjusting to pitches that are more in the ballpark of A=440 like early Classical period A=432 or Berlin Philharmonic A=445.
That's interesting to hear, I find it the opposite where a bit off sounds out of tune but still can sort of hear the intended note, a semitone or more and it's hard to hear as anything other than a different note
When I was playing in the orchestra a lot, I could usually hit an a' on the button by imagining the sound of an oboe in my head playing the tuning note before a rehearsal. But that wore off later when I was no longer playing. But I still get to within about a second up or down.
I’m a full time baroque violinist with perfect pitch. If listening I can with a little bit of effort shift it at will between 440, 415 and 392. 415 seems to be my default. If playing violin or viola I latch to the correct tuning immediately. Other pitches like 430 and 466 seem to fade if I haven’t used them recently, I need to practice them for a few days to regain them. My aural training teacher in college was amazing and she helped me develop my relative pitch by making us “feel” harmonies rather than analyse them. I still listen to intervals through a sort of muscle memory of what the fingering pattern would look like on the violin. Learning viola and alto clef also helped with relative pitch.
Fascinating to hear, seems like developing relative pitch helps a lot indeed in all these tunings you've described!
dude achieved baroque pitch dao and ascended to and enlightened baroque perfect relative mastery
a successful tribulation breakthrough indeed
Im tired and I somehow read the title as "Can Perfect Fish Survive Baroque Tuning?" And my brain just accepted it. I think thats my queue to sleep...
I guess you could say something's fishy here with the title
Very interesting smart analysis and courageous experience, TY.
If since the day you're born you see blue bananas, it will have shaped your visual perception of colors, similarly if you have always heard an A at 415 it will shape your "perfect pitch".
In the baroque era as you mention, there was practically one A per city! very high in Italy (the cornettos are often at 460) and very low in France for the 2nd half of the 17th century (385 Hz). It was the flutes and the oboes that actually determined the A. All this to say that this notion of "perfect pitch" that some claim to be born gifted with... is "learned" and not "innate". Before the Renaissance, the notion of fixed A did not even exist, we had scales of 6 notes (hexachords) movable (solmization)... if the singer started a scale with tonic on an F, it was called C.
So the A is a very floating concept !
Finally, I think that piano players will always have a hard process to feel unequal temperaments, almost "against nature" for their ears. And that"s a pity because playing, say, the JS Bach partitas on equal temperament is like eating food without pepper, salt! Conversely, I play the lute, an instrument whose harmonics, very strong and rich, with long sustain, only sing (open strings sound by sympathy) when set in unequal temperament - mine is in "arranged" werckmeister -, and with a tuning at the 20th tone (As per ClearTune)... If I had to tune my lute with a piano, it would sound like a big board of wood.
I love Harpsichord's sound ❤
I wish they were still on sell. Like an electric Harpsichord, like an piano electric because it's a big instrument for an small apartment😂😂 Well, but first I need to learn to play piano.
I'm gonna start next year 🎹😍
Perfect Pitch guy, don't worry about it. You need to think "415hz it's a new language, new language means new sounds". I think that will make it more easy. I'll hope you'll learning Harpsichord music in the future, because I really wsh to listen more of that music in your channel ❤
Thanks for the encouragement! Hopefully one day I’ll be able to play the A415 harpsichord with as much fluency as I can with the A440 piano haha
You can certainly buy a harpsichord if you really want to -- there are a lot of makers. Not cheap, though: they cost more than a sturdy upright piano.
@@Anne_Mahoney Hi, thanks to tell me!! They're soooo big, imagine moving witht that sfuff? It's like an traditional piano 😂"If it doesn't fit on a elevetor I don't buy it"😆. That's my motto of life LOL
Also, not in my country😅I'm not American, there's many intruments that you can't buy here. If it's not "traditional" one, you can't buy it and buy it from Amazon is really expensive and dangerous because intruments are fragile, probably it'll end up broken.
Maybe in Europe is easier to buy it, because there's a lot of old harpsichord out there. Thanks and have a nice dayy!!😘😘
Thank you. I enjoyed your video. I would love to see you doing a video on keys (C maj/min, Bb maj/min, A maj, etc) relative to COLOUR that you "hear". Since I was a little kid, I "hear" colours - I do have "relative pitch", but my "hearing" of colours are much stronger than my hearing of actual pitch. From the colour that I "hear", I identify the pitch.
I've listened during all my life mostly baroque music, so I have perfect pitch at A 415. It's strange, because I always have to do a calculus of more or less one semitone up when listening to A 440.
Wow that's so intriguing hearing your experience being the other way having to shift up instead to reach 440, I wonder if it's the same with people who play transposing instruments too - thank you for sharing this!
RUclips recommended me this video. Fascinating journey! I don't have perfect pitch, so this is new to me. I used to read Bach pieces and try to transpose them and play them in a different key (on piano). Have you ever done that? I guess that would mess with your brain because you have such a strong association between notes and pitches! But maybe it would help you strengthen your relative pitch skill.
Yeah I tried doing that and it was like a tongue twister, as you say I have such a strong association between the note on a keyboard verses the pitch. Definitely something worth trying more if it may help relative pitch!
Yup. Everytime I'm sick I have down-shifted pitch perception. Also, I'm losing the acuity with age: strangely I always get things embarrassingly wrong by a 4th or a 5th. It makes a lot of sense from a physics standpoint, but it's especially weird if you're used to just falling in line. My handicaps are *worst* when quickly "ear-scanning" a song to accompany someone who plays that in a different key. Because my transposition skill may be pretty good, it's nigh impossible for me to refer back to the original song from the "other key". They live in completely separate "planes" and I have to cerebrally, consciously remember some changes, but also remember whether that mental note was in the original key or the transposed key. Anyways, this is only a problem when accompanying people "on the spot" which usually happens in informal settings (pupil recital).
Yeah agreed trying to do audiation by scanning a score on the spot must be a challenge with the pitch shift or transposing too!
A couple of years ago, I was doing a transcription practice in school. The piece to be transcripted was an excerpt of something by Vivaldi (can't recall what) but it sounded out of tune to me.. I asked my teacher why it all sounded so off and he said that it was in baroque tuning, and then asked me if I have perfect pitch... I actually don't, but I do have a decent relative pitch. Interesting to learn that this is a common phenomenon among people with perfect pitch
Yeah definitely a common phenomenon indeed, cool how you can also hear something is off!
I always thought having perfect pitch was a leg up, but you make a good argument for it being a disability. ;D nice memes throughout. keep having fun
Congratz on your introduction to continuo. It can be quite difficult especially when doing it on a different instrument. Imo, I think thinking in relative pitch is almost omnipresent in Baroque music whether it be partimenti where you want to hear the movement of the cantus or in continuo where your right hand needs to prepare in advanced for the next interval shift. Especially if you decide to start doing repertoire, a lot of music will start being in other clefs which will further reinforce sight reading based on intervals. I’ve had teachers who went out of their way to learn every clef to the same familiarity and those who play based off of interval changes much like an unfigured bass.
In terms of the continuo I’m not sure what your teacher’s philosophy is regarding it but imo you should roll every chord and control the speed of the roll based on the pulse of the meter to differentiate chord changes. It will help control where you want to “sound” quieter and where you are louder.
i loooooved this video!!!!!!!
Thank you!
I don’t have perfect pitch. But when I tune my violin or viola to 415, I unconsciously start creeping up the fingerboard trying to get back to 440. It takes a while to stay where I need to be.
Well yeah, that’s what we are trained to do. If a string slips out of tune, we have to compensate. I’ve never played under anything but 440, but I can see how would drive you nuts.
I had one of my molars removed about five years ago and the next morning I stepped into an elevator, noticed something wasn't right, and frantically searched online if the perfect pitch would return. It returned in a few days but A very jarring experience
When I was a teenager, I was in a bunch of amateur choirs, and the fact that the rest of the singers would lower their pitch over time without a reference drove me crazy. Now, I’m transcribing a lot of tango recordings that vary in pitch between 430 and 450 Hz. It still drives me crazy, but I’ve learned to put myself in that "blurry" state to rely on my fragile relative pitch. Baroque tuning is a much bigger jump-I think I’m not ready for it yet. Really nice experiment, man. Also, I’m afraid of losing my perfect pitch as I age. A similar detuning of my ears happened a few times after attending really loud stadium rock concerts.
Yeah pitch drift in a cappella choirs must be quite disorienting!
Fun fact: the pitch drift in choirs is caused by the fact that, in Just Intonation (Just Intonations is a tuning system that uses whole-number ratios to express intervals), there are more than one way to hit a note, and there will be small discrepancies between the results of these methods, and these discrepancies are called "commas". Slowly, these commas will accumulate, and the pitch will drift, a phenomenon known as "comma drift".
I have a very strong relative pitch, and I guess what I would call "key pitch", where if I hit a piano note and it isn't tuned correctly, I can probably tell. It has this strange, like, growl to it that I can't really describe accurately, but when i hear it I know something's wrong.
I have a digital piano at home and can detune it up to 99 cents up and down, and I can still improvise and do things despite it, but it will sound strange to me, especially if it's in between two semitones, like B and C for example. Sometimes I detune things on purpose, because like how you said you listen to it and it sounds "sepia" or "faded", to me it sounds like new colors and new emotions that 440 doesn't or struggles to depict.
For example, the first arpeggio of Moonlight Sonata sounds way more aggressive and dark in 420 rather than 440.
That's an interesting perspective, perhaps it's something related to memorizing the timbre of the instrument too? I know it's a thing for other instrumentalists like string players memorizing open string timbres to pitches, but wasn't sure if the situation for piano existed like in your case, that's cool!
Very, very interesting. After your experience, it looks like absolute pitch is not a gift, but an adaptation of people who have not relative pitch to be able to make music. Those who can identify notes, then, can play and sing.
You could not imagine how a 415 Hz was an A. I have relative pitch, not absolute, and I can’t imagine not to have it. Intervals are natural, no matter the frequency.
I have perfect pitch too and hearing Baroque music tuned like that freaks me out because I KNOW ITS FLAT!!!!!
Haha yeah it's quite disorienting at first indeed
It's actually interesting how your perception of pitch switched just like that after your surgery. I had pretty good relative pitch (I was really good at isolating A), and in 2023 I had the misfortune of being involved in an accident where I had severe head brain trauma. Blah blah, sob story. Anyway, after my accident I realized A = 440 sounded severely sharp, almost like you said, 455-460. Only when I listened to baroque music recordings, it sounded "in" tune, even though I knew it was in 415. It's interesting how the brain and ears work, I guess mine could just not ring at that rate because of the circumstances. Anyway, after 6 months it eventually went back to normal, but I struggle now with my relative pitches.
(But hey, at least I'm suing, and will receive compensation for my troules 😜)
There has been increasing academic research over the last couple of decades (e.g., at San Francisco State University, SFSU) into people’s absolute pitch shifting, especially in one’s late 50’s. Us older folks lose our absolute pitch, and, in the process, a given frequency seems sharper (e.g., an A4 at 440 Hz sounds like a Bb4 or even a B4). If I hear a piece on the radio in Bb major it feels like C major. This has been happening to me over a decade (I’m now in my 70’s). It’s a very strong effect. On a number of occasions, I have been practicing my viola (always tuned to A4 = 440 Hz) for half an hour, say, and then only a few minutes later I ask myself to sing an A or some other note. I now almost invariably come out singing a semi-tone flat! (This is not due to errors in pitch matching - if I play a note on the piano and record myself singing it immediately, I am accurate to +/- just a few cents.) You would think that I could sing the right note by consciously singing a semitone sharper than I think it is, but my whole body strongly resists doing this.
I still have some residual absolute pitch. Up until a decade ago, if I were singing in a choir and it went more than half a semi-tone flat I would transpose the music. Now I can’t tell if the choir has gone flat. However, if the choir is restarted at the correct pitch, it is much easier for me to find my notes. It just feels better.
Incidentally, we have a young tenor (mid-20s) in our church choir who keeps singing at A4 = 440 Hz when the rest of the choir starts to go flat. I don’t think he realized he had absolute pitch until we told him.
None of this seemed that difficult to me. I transpose music all the time do accompany singers. I definitely have developed my relative pitch though from playing my whole life. Interesting the different challenges we face. I also play chording on with a Melody line on the fly. That's pretty standard for people who read lead sheets. Though there must be a lot of benefits from having true perfect pitch. Awesome video! Thank you for posting. This was very interesting.
Thank you! That's cool to hear your perspective too on transposition and relative pitch - glad you enjoyed the video!
Interesting video. This reminds me of an experiment that was done with vision. Special glasses were constructed to invert the image seen by the wearers. Volunteers wore these glasses continuously over weeks. At first everything they saw was upside down, but then, after about two weeks, if I recall correctly, the brain suddenly learned how to see properly and everything looked right side up. They continued wearing the glasses like this for a while and then removed them. When removing the glasses, everything seemed upside down at first, but the brain quickly compensated after just a few minutes. After that, the volunteers could see normally with or without the glasses after only a few minutes time to get used to it. I suspect something similar is happening when switching from 440 to 415. Hazarding a guess, though, I bet shifting one Hz at a time probably didn't help.
I did a continuo masterclass for two weeks with Hank Knox years ago. He's incredibly good at continuo. Enjoy!
I haven't played from continuo much since then, but when I play from chords I still try to avoid parallel fifths because of this experience!
On the other hard, I have relative pitch, so the closest I could think of is trying to transpose at sight or trying to switch between an Alto or Tenor/Soprano recorder. The Alto/Bass recorders are tuned in F but recorder players tend to learn "alto fingering" instead of thinking about transposing. Then, once in a while, they end up playing a piece with the wrong fingering during a rehearsal and we need to restart a piece after a couple bars. For anyone who's unaware, the key to good sounding recorder music is never having two recorders try to play in unison because they're so difficult to tune precisely. Four recorders each playing their own part tends to sound pretty good, especially with a different recorders for SATB.
So I have perfect pitch but I absolutely can’t complain about any problems regarding pitch. It doesn’t bothers me at all hearing music recorded at A=415 Hz, in fact I find it very refreshing or just nice to hear a variation from 440 Hz concert pitch. Also playing on Harpsichord or organs with altered tuning is no problem for me, I do notice that for example playing the keys in d minor and hearing C# minor is off by one semitone but I can ignore that fact and still play flawlessly by muscle memory.
I really don’t get why it’s such a big deal for others with perfect pitch, for me this problem is less disturbing than more enjoyable to hear a variation or even a more traditional version of the music I love.
How are others experiences with this?
Yeah exactly. I feel the exact same, I actually love playing pieces in a different tunes/different scale. I really don't understand why all of them are complaining lol
Fascinating how your perfect pitch is comfortable at any tuning - that opens a lot to think about! A majority of perfect pitch people I've talked to would find such shifts jarring, perhaps there are degrees of sensitivity or openness in absolute pitch perception?