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
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!
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 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’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
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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!
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 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!
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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
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
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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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!
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).
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.
That's a thing I've always wondered about. There were no tuning standard before World War I. 415 Hz is used today for most Baroque music (with the exception of French at 392 Hz), but in the actual Baroque times tunings were all over the place (sometimes even higher than 440 Hz). So, what was the experience of people born with the perception of sound that is known today as perfect pitch when perfect pitch as a concept was impossible?
That's such a good question that I'd love to know the answer to, it's a shame that there isn't much (to my knowledge) research done on this area! Maybe those who developed perfect pitch also had really really good relative pitch and transposition abilities that could override their perfect pitch?
I think this is because most people didn't travel much in the past. When you spend your whole life in one region, you get used to the local tuning (which would be the tuning of local organ).
@@karelspinka3031 Some musicians travelled, to the extent that some baroque flutes were made with interchangeable sections (corps de rechange) because just adjusting the head joints has limits, beyond which the flute is out of tune with itself too much to be lipped back into tune. Some sets had as many seven interchangeable centre joints to cope with all the princely courts that employed musicians and had their own local tuning.
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?
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 think the shift of pitch after your surgery was likely due to some sort of pressure building up around your ear. If I'm listening to music on earbuds and I have a long yawn, sometimes I'll notice the pitch shifts up just slightly (obligatory statement that I also have perfect pitch) and comes back down after I finish yawning. I do find though that my perfect pitch is generally a few cents low, 440 sounds a little sharp to me when I hear it played on a drone. On a side note, a fun thing about being a tuba player is that our sheet music is always written in concert pitch. You can use F or CC (or Eb and BBb) tubas depending on what the part needs, and you just change the fingerings depending on the instrument you play instead of reading a transposed part. I've played transposing instruments before, though I usually think of the pitches on the staff as how they sound in concert pitch. If I'm reading a horn part and I see a D in the staff, I know it sounds a concert G and reads a D, but I'll usually have to take a second to actually "read" what is written. Thank you for making this video and sharing your journey with baroque pitch! It's interesting to see how other people with perfect pitch deal with those issues.
I'm not sure weather my case is called perfect pitch or not. I play piano, clarinet and saxophone. I can name the written pitches on all instruments once I hear them. For example, I can hear it's a middle C on the piano, and I can hear it's a written middle C from a Bb clarinet or an A clarinet, though they supposed to sound a Bb and A respectively. Same case as alto sax which is in Eb. I remembered when I did dictation test from different instruments, all instruments in C were good for me, but when the teacher played a recording of a passage from a clarinet and asked us to dicate it using sounding (actual) pitch, I had to dictate the written pitches on Bb clarinet, and transposed them back to sounding pitches! I can even tell if the passage is playing on a Bb clarinet or an A clarinet! So I think what I can recognize is not the pitch itself, but the color of the note sounding on each instrument.
It's fascinating that you can identify the written pitches on different instruments even though the sounding pitches are different - I guess it's like timbre memory mixed with the written pitch of each instrument?
@@NicholasMaMusic There are particular "tells" with clarinets, namely where the break is. Third line B♭ is the uppermost note of the chalumeau register, and B♮ is the lowest note of the clarion register, and the tone quality is very different although we do our best to disguise this discontinuity. However, some B♭ clarinets have an extra "low E♭" specifically so they can play music written for clarinet in A which expects that note to be there (sometimes there's no time to switch instruments, so you just pick the one that causes you the least pain and play everything on it), in which case middle B♭ can also be played "long". In that case it would be very difficult to distinguish between a clarinet in A playing its "long B" and a B♭ clarinet playing its "extra-long B♭" because they're going to be exactly the same bore length.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Pianist with perfect pitch here, studied fortepiano and am studying harpsichord, beginner in organ. You get used to 415 pitch. Now sometimes if I hear music in specific keys, say C major, G major in 415, I really do hear them as C major and G major, but sometimes I hear them at 440, as C# and F#. I have no idea what exactly switches the systems in my brain 😅 Partially, I think for 415, I may have that type of perfect pitch where it depends on the instruments making the sound - if I hear harpsichord, my brain usually plugs in 415, but that happens also in pieces wo harpsichord… Before, and now too, I hear all tuned instruments at 440, if I happen to hear music at 415 now, it applies. We have an original 1820 fortepiano tuned to 415 due to static problems, in the beginning I heard 440, but gradually got used to it. But up to my 3rd year, playing chromatic stuff (like Chopin’s Berceuse) on it was a nightmare, although other stuff were ok. To be fair I don’t play all that much on that instrument. Our 1790 fortepiano replica was at 430, and I heard and still hear 440 with a particular ‘colour’ there. When I started harpsichord in my 2nd fortepiano year, 415 wasn’t that strange any more. We had transposable harpsichords/continuo organ which could do 392 and 466Hz - those were quite disconcerting 😅 But we really heardly use those so I reckon it’s just a matter of getting used to it. Been playing historical instruments for 7yrs and for modern instruments, so far I haven’t lost 440 (yet), I don’t think I’ll lose it as long as I continue playing all the instruments :) I also used to hear chords as individual notes stuck together, but since I started continuo, the coherence has just skyrocketed. I can hear the progressions (in up to early romantic music) as progressions, with figured bass numbers 😂 As a side note, I love continuo and the creative freedom it offers. Maybe the ‘transposing brain’ in early music may be complemented with reading music in all types of clefs (C-clefs, F-clefs on all lines of the system, including 7 line keyboard tablature) - no idea... But there is a certain ‘switch off’ in the brain needed for both, especially in the beginning, at least that’s how it felt for me. It could be a different way of thinking and hearing things in the beginning, perhaps also with the baroque short octave too.
Thank you for sharing these detailed experiences - good to know it's possible to develop a more fluid switch and that A440 still remains even after 7 years of historical instruments
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.
My own sense of absolute pitch has always had latency associated with it. I can identify a pitch without much effort, but it takes about a second. No amount of effort changes this, that's just as fast as that particular circuit can operate. Because of that, I've _also_ had to develop relative pitch, and relating a note to a degree of the scale is _much_ lower latency, like 100 _milliseconds_ or so. My perfect pitch was never good enough to use as a crutch, but it's just good enough to be useful in a quiet setting. Honestly I'm glad, as I was more annoyed and inconvenienced when it shifted rather than worried. If it never came back, I'd have managed.
Haha yeah it's interesting you mention that - I actually tried doing that for a bit too, but writing something in C major as B major would just have me playing B major on the keyboard (which would then sound like Bb major) so didn't really work - it might be just me with my piano background so would be interesting to see if others could do this strategy!
What I have to do where A-415 is the pitch is to call that pitch Ab or G#. In other words, I subtract a half step from the nominal A-415 pitch to get the equivalent A-440 pitch.
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!
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!
My piano teacher, María Teresa Ramírez, a famous Mexican pianist, use to have perfect pitch. At the end of her life she was very confused, since she started to hear half tone lower sometimes.
i don't have perfect pitch, but sometimes I have a similar problem. when I grab my bass and play there are days I love what I play, but very rarely it just sounds off. I tune several times, I check the eq settings but nothing seems to help and everything sounds shitty. a day later its fine, without touching any settings :D the human mind is mysterious
I've had a few sicknesses that have altered my pitch tuning up or down a semitone. I had to rely on my transposition skills when playing, but I usually try to focus more on the key of a piece than the actual pitches so I can rely more on my relative pitch in those scenarios. In a few sicknesses there was a pitch imbalance between 2 ears. Once I head an ear infection in my right ear. My left ear heard A as A but my right ear started hearing A as Ab and later as A#. It was weird but fortunately my left ear was my dominant ear so I could focus more on what it heard over my right.
I think relative pitch is the only thing that makes sense to have and that theres no reason to be obsessed with a single A hz just that whatever you decide on is in tune with itself.
I had the same!!! I had surgery and for a week or so my pitch was also flat. I noticed it as soon as I woke up from surgery. I also notice my pitch getting sharper when having a migraine. I didn't know anyone else experienced this!
Interesting about the migrane causing a sharper pitch, haven't heard that precedent before - seems like a common thing with other commenters too though about surgery rendering a temporary flatter pitch perception though!
I never felt worried about relative or perfect pitch. I grew up playing the piano, dropped my pianist career at age 9 and lived happily ever after. Today I am clinical psychologist and keep playing various instruments as an amateur. Since I heard about this thing „perfect pitch“ I sometimes challenge while hearing a piece by going to the piano and trying to hit a note I have in mind. It sometimes works and that is fun. It works way better, when I have been practising more recently. And it does not work, when I have been away from the keyboard for some days. So, is perfect pitch the ability to recognise a specific colour? Is it a question of training? Why should something called „A“ defined at 440 Hz be „hardwired“ for some people? As a psychologist I do not see any reasonable explanation. I know that gifted and highly gifted persons are tremendously fast in their cognitive abilities. Good memory can allow to have a whole concerto stored in muscle (and musical) memory. The latter being possibly close to speech memory. So, are some individuals tricked in perceiving perfect pitch by their own memory plus calculation speed?
About your question about why A is hardwired to 440hz for certain people, it's probably a factor of exposure growing up in environments that are 440hz based (aka most Western/tonal music nowadays), so those who are predisposed to perfect pitch "learn" that tuning, eventually becoming hardwired. These are some interesting points you raise for sure!
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!!😘😘
Congratulations on your accomplishments! When you got oral surgery, it changed the resonance of your skull suddenly, and your brain had to adapt. People don't realize that we hear not just from the ear canals, but from our entire head. (Our ear structure evolved from primitive jaw bones.) Orthodontia can do the same thing because it changes the way the teeth resonate against each other, and can be a real problem for wind-instrument players, aside from just screwing up one's embouchure. I was lucky because the "base" for my relative pitch has been G4 my whole life, and doesn't get in the way. That "Baroque tuning" (A = 415 Hz [The 'H' is capitalized because it's taken from Heinrich Hertz's name.]) you're working with is a modern convention; and "period accurate" playing is also a modern conceit. Reference pitch varied widely across Europe during the Baroque Period, with that in Venice being very high (close to A440's B4), and that in parts of Germany being lower. In fact, Bach's cousin, Johann Gottfried Walther (and the mathematician Leibniz) said that reference A should be 392 Hz, the equivalent of G4 in A440. Of course, there is also the issue of variations in actual tuning of each note in the scale for Renaissance and Early Baroque or Late Baroque music, ranging from _meantone_ to _well temperament_ to _equal temperament._ Any music before the time of J.S. Bach (even Buxtehude) should be played on an instrument with meantone temperament, if one is aiming for a "period" performance.
@ thanks lol! I must congratulate you on your playing, I’ve also watched the video on why you don’t want perfect pitch, and although I’m a non-perfect pitch person myself, I can really feel how off everything was for you. Really well done!
9:16 I had similar experience, exept it was just one ear. I heard all sounds nearly a semitone lower in the left ear, while the right one was hearing normal. Thankfully it was just for 2 days. And I wonder what was the reason (I didn't have my wisdom teeth removed at that time).
I'm surprised you didn't mention the experience of playing with different temperaments. The harpsichord you're playing at 13:22, 13:30, and 17:43 is tuned to Quarter-Comma Meantone. It's especially easy to tell at 17:45, the major third in C# Major in Meantone are extremely wide (the root and fifth are closer to C-half-sharp and G-half-sharp which makes an F natural very out of tune). Was the "blurring" you described preventing you from noticing this somehow, or was it just too complex of a topic to also address in the video?
When I was playing on that harpsichord knew it "sounded out of tune" (not pure 12 tone equal temperament), but identifying which temperament it was (or if it was just a wonky harpsichord that hadn't been tuned in years) is a skill I have yet to learn haha, especially when multitasking with the A415 "blurring" hearing method when playing. I'd love to hear the experiences of a perfect pitch person who can fluently identify temperaments in different A tunings!
I had the same experience "losing" my perfect pitch. I had a tongue surgery and a few days later I got out my cello and at first thought it was just really flat, but then I realized through things like sounds from my refrigerator that it was actually my ears. I don't know what about the surgery caused this, but since you said it was a wisdom teeth that caused it I think it has something to do with mouth surgeries.
For me, the air wiggles 425 times a second but playing on an instrument with a different tuning like my two organs that are tuned to 450hz and 435hz, I have an easy time just picking it up and playing the same but the notes are about a semi tone apart. Same goes when my untunable piano quickly drops in pitch getting closer to baroque tuning because the pins are loose. I thought it was normal to be able to just jump to an instrument with a substantially different tuning since I can do it in the basic learning stage where I can't even read sheet music yet.
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
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?
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!
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’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...
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
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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
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
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
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!
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!
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
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!
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!
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!
Great experiment! You are completely right about your findings.
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!
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!
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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
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!
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!
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!
Terrific video, so interesting and well explained. As a lowly relative pitch-er, this was fascinating
That flute playing is beautiful! Goes great with your harpsichord playing.
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
what a fantastic idea for a video and excellent execution, loved it q:
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!
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 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)
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!
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.
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!
Hello. Another perfect pitch musician. I feel proud of you.
I didn't know I needed to see this video until I saw it.
"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”
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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
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 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
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!
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!
You make complete sense bro ❤. Thanks for posting this video.
Glad this made sense with you, appreciate the support!
wonderful video, keep it up!
Thank you!
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).
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!
This was a fascinating video. :)
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
That's a thing I've always wondered about. There were no tuning standard before World War I. 415 Hz is used today for most Baroque music (with the exception of French at 392 Hz), but in the actual Baroque times tunings were all over the place (sometimes even higher than 440 Hz). So, what was the experience of people born with the perception of sound that is known today as perfect pitch when perfect pitch as a concept was impossible?
That's such a good question that I'd love to know the answer to, it's a shame that there isn't much (to my knowledge) research done on this area! Maybe those who developed perfect pitch also had really really good relative pitch and transposition abilities that could override their perfect pitch?
I think this is because most people didn't travel much in the past. When you spend your whole life in one region, you get used to the local tuning (which would be the tuning of local organ).
@@karelspinka3031 Some musicians travelled, to the extent that some baroque flutes were made with interchangeable sections (corps de rechange) because just adjusting the head joints has limits, beyond which the flute is out of tune with itself too much to be lipped back into tune. Some sets had as many seven interchangeable centre joints to cope with all the princely courts that employed musicians and had their own local tuning.
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?
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 🤣
I think the shift of pitch after your surgery was likely due to some sort of pressure building up around your ear. If I'm listening to music on earbuds and I have a long yawn, sometimes I'll notice the pitch shifts up just slightly (obligatory statement that I also have perfect pitch) and comes back down after I finish yawning. I do find though that my perfect pitch is generally a few cents low, 440 sounds a little sharp to me when I hear it played on a drone.
On a side note, a fun thing about being a tuba player is that our sheet music is always written in concert pitch. You can use F or CC (or Eb and BBb) tubas depending on what the part needs, and you just change the fingerings depending on the instrument you play instead of reading a transposed part. I've played transposing instruments before, though I usually think of the pitches on the staff as how they sound in concert pitch. If I'm reading a horn part and I see a D in the staff, I know it sounds a concert G and reads a D, but I'll usually have to take a second to actually "read" what is written.
Thank you for making this video and sharing your journey with baroque pitch! It's interesting to see how other people with perfect pitch deal with those issues.
I'm not sure weather my case is called perfect pitch or not. I play piano, clarinet and saxophone. I can name the written pitches on all instruments once I hear them. For example, I can hear it's a middle C on the piano, and I can hear it's a written middle C from a Bb clarinet or an A clarinet, though they supposed to sound a Bb and A respectively. Same case as alto sax which is in Eb. I remembered when I did dictation test from different instruments, all instruments in C were good for me, but when the teacher played a recording of a passage from a clarinet and asked us to dicate it using sounding (actual) pitch, I had to dictate the written pitches on Bb clarinet, and transposed them back to sounding pitches! I can even tell if the passage is playing on a Bb clarinet or an A clarinet! So I think what I can recognize is not the pitch itself, but the color of the note sounding on each instrument.
It's fascinating that you can identify the written pitches on different instruments even though the sounding pitches are different - I guess it's like timbre memory mixed with the written pitch of each instrument?
@@NicholasMaMusic There are particular "tells" with clarinets, namely where the break is. Third line B♭ is the uppermost note of the chalumeau register, and B♮ is the lowest note of the clarion register, and the tone quality is very different although we do our best to disguise this discontinuity. However, some B♭ clarinets have an extra "low E♭" specifically so they can play music written for clarinet in A which expects that note to be there (sometimes there's no time to switch instruments, so you just pick the one that causes you the least pain and play everything on it), in which case middle B♭ can also be played "long". In that case it would be very difficult to distinguish between a clarinet in A playing its "long B" and a B♭ clarinet playing its "extra-long B♭" because they're going to be exactly the same bore length.
dude achieved baroque pitch dao and ascended to and enlightened baroque perfect relative mastery
a successful tribulation breakthrough 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Pianist with perfect pitch here, studied fortepiano and am studying harpsichord, beginner in organ. You get used to 415 pitch. Now sometimes if I hear music in specific keys, say C major, G major in 415, I really do hear them as C major and G major, but sometimes I hear them at 440, as C# and F#. I have no idea what exactly switches the systems in my brain 😅 Partially, I think for 415, I may have that type of perfect pitch where it depends on the instruments making the sound - if I hear harpsichord, my brain usually plugs in 415, but that happens also in pieces wo harpsichord… Before, and now too, I hear all tuned instruments at 440, if I happen to hear music at 415 now, it applies.
We have an original 1820 fortepiano tuned to 415 due to static problems, in the beginning I heard 440, but gradually got used to it. But up to my 3rd year, playing chromatic stuff (like Chopin’s Berceuse) on it was a nightmare, although other stuff were ok. To be fair I don’t play all that much on that instrument. Our 1790 fortepiano replica was at 430, and I heard and still hear 440 with a particular ‘colour’ there. When I started harpsichord in my 2nd fortepiano year, 415 wasn’t that strange any more. We had transposable harpsichords/continuo organ which could do 392 and 466Hz - those were quite disconcerting 😅 But we really heardly use those so I reckon it’s just a matter of getting used to it. Been playing historical instruments for 7yrs and for modern instruments, so far I haven’t lost 440 (yet), I don’t think I’ll lose it as long as I continue playing all the instruments :)
I also used to hear chords as individual notes stuck together, but since I started continuo, the coherence has just skyrocketed. I can hear the progressions (in up to early romantic music) as progressions, with figured bass numbers 😂 As a side note, I love continuo and the creative freedom it offers. Maybe the ‘transposing brain’ in early music may be complemented with reading music in all types of clefs (C-clefs, F-clefs on all lines of the system, including 7 line keyboard tablature) - no idea... But there is a certain ‘switch off’ in the brain needed for both, especially in the beginning, at least that’s how it felt for me. It could be a different way of thinking and hearing things in the beginning, perhaps also with the baroque short octave too.
Thank you for sharing these detailed experiences - good to know it's possible to develop a more fluid switch and that A440 still remains even after 7 years of historical instruments
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!
My own sense of absolute pitch has always had latency associated with it. I can identify a pitch without much effort, but it takes about a second. No amount of effort changes this, that's just as fast as that particular circuit can operate. Because of that, I've _also_ had to develop relative pitch, and relating a note to a degree of the scale is _much_ lower latency, like 100 _milliseconds_ or so. My perfect pitch was never good enough to use as a crutch, but it's just good enough to be useful in a quiet setting. Honestly I'm glad, as I was more annoyed and inconvenienced when it shifted rather than worried. If it never came back, I'd have managed.
Oh that's fascinating, first I've heard of a latency perfect pitch that's so interesting it's come with the benefit of developing relative pitch!
8 minutes in. Id be rewriting the music a semitone lower in desparation by then
Haha yeah it's interesting you mention that - I actually tried doing that for a bit too, but writing something in C major as B major would just have me playing B major on the keyboard (which would then sound like Bb major) so didn't really work - it might be just me with my piano background so would be interesting to see if others could do this strategy!
What I have to do where A-415 is the pitch is to call that pitch Ab or G#. In other words, I subtract a half step from the nominal A-415 pitch to get the equivalent A-440 pitch.
Ich habe gelernt, alles einen Halbton tiefer zu transponieren. Ich sehe A+Moll und greife As-Moll.
I had my wisdom teeth removed over the summer and the exact same thing happened to me also where my pitch moved down a semitone
Oh man glad to hear I'm not alone with this, hope it shifted back eventually!
@ Luckily it did shift back after 1-2 weeks
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!
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!
My piano teacher, María Teresa Ramírez, a famous Mexican pianist, use to have perfect pitch. At the end of her life she was very confused, since she started to hear half tone lower sometimes.
It's unfortunate that this pitch shift as you describe does seem to happen commonly as people get older yeah
8:45 THE BACON. I CAN FEEL THE BACON SIZZLING ACROSS MY FOREHEAD 🫠😵💫
🫠
i don't have perfect pitch, but sometimes I have a similar problem. when I grab my bass and play there are days I love what I play, but very rarely it just sounds off. I tune several times, I check the eq settings but nothing seems to help and everything sounds shitty. a day later its fine, without touching any settings :D the human mind is mysterious
I've had a few sicknesses that have altered my pitch tuning up or down a semitone. I had to rely on my transposition skills when playing, but I usually try to focus more on the key of a piece than the actual pitches so I can rely more on my relative pitch in those scenarios. In a few sicknesses there was a pitch imbalance between 2 ears. Once I head an ear infection in my right ear. My left ear heard A as A but my right ear started hearing A as Ab and later as A#. It was weird but fortunately my left ear was my dominant ear so I could focus more on what it heard over my right.
Yikes hearing simultaneous different pitches in both ears sounds wild, glad to hear it was only temporary!
I think relative pitch is the only thing that makes sense to have and that theres no reason to be obsessed with a single A hz just that whatever you decide on is in tune with itself.
Relative pitch does seem to be the more practical tool to have indeed
I had the same!!! I had surgery and for a week or so my pitch was also flat. I noticed it as soon as I woke up from surgery. I also notice my pitch getting sharper when having a migraine. I didn't know anyone else experienced this!
Interesting about the migrane causing a sharper pitch, haven't heard that precedent before - seems like a common thing with other commenters too though about surgery rendering a temporary flatter pitch perception though!
I never felt worried about relative or perfect pitch. I grew up playing the piano, dropped my pianist career at age 9 and lived happily ever after. Today I am clinical psychologist and keep playing various instruments as an amateur. Since I heard about this thing „perfect pitch“ I sometimes challenge while hearing a piece by going to the piano and trying to hit a note I have in mind. It sometimes works and that is fun. It works way better, when I have been practising more recently. And it does not work, when I have been away from the keyboard for some days. So, is perfect pitch the ability to recognise a specific colour? Is it a question of training? Why should something called „A“ defined at 440 Hz be „hardwired“ for some people? As a psychologist I do not see any reasonable explanation. I know that gifted and highly gifted persons are tremendously fast in their cognitive abilities. Good memory can allow to have a whole concerto stored in muscle (and musical) memory. The latter being possibly close to speech memory. So, are some individuals tricked in perceiving perfect pitch by their own memory plus calculation speed?
About your question about why A is hardwired to 440hz for certain people, it's probably a factor of exposure growing up in environments that are 440hz based (aka most Western/tonal music nowadays), so those who are predisposed to perfect pitch "learn" that tuning, eventually becoming hardwired. These are some interesting points you raise for sure!
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!!😘😘
Congratulations on your accomplishments! When you got oral surgery, it changed the resonance of your skull suddenly, and your brain had to adapt. People don't realize that we hear not just from the ear canals, but from our entire head. (Our ear structure evolved from primitive jaw bones.) Orthodontia can do the same thing because it changes the way the teeth resonate against each other, and can be a real problem for wind-instrument players, aside from just screwing up one's embouchure. I was lucky because the "base" for my relative pitch has been G4 my whole life, and doesn't get in the way.
That "Baroque tuning" (A = 415 Hz [The 'H' is capitalized because it's taken from Heinrich Hertz's name.]) you're working with is a modern convention; and "period accurate" playing is also a modern conceit. Reference pitch varied widely across Europe during the Baroque Period, with that in Venice being very high (close to A440's B4), and that in parts of Germany being lower. In fact, Bach's cousin, Johann Gottfried Walther (and the mathematician Leibniz) said that reference A should be 392 Hz, the equivalent of G4 in A440. Of course, there is also the issue of variations in actual tuning of each note in the scale for Renaissance and Early Baroque or Late Baroque music, ranging from _meantone_ to _well temperament_ to _equal temperament._ Any music before the time of J.S. Bach (even Buxtehude) should be played on an instrument with meantone temperament, if one is aiming for a "period" performance.
8:49 is the bach’s allemande? I think I played that before lol (was so proud of myself for recognizing it for some reason)
Yep it is you're right!
@ thanks lol! I must congratulate you on your playing, I’ve also watched the video on why you don’t want perfect pitch, and although I’m a non-perfect pitch person myself, I can really feel how off everything was for you. Really well done!
9:16 I had similar experience, exept it was just one ear. I heard all sounds nearly a semitone lower in the left ear, while the right one was hearing normal. Thankfully it was just for 2 days. And I wonder what was the reason (I didn't have my wisdom teeth removed at that time).
I'm surprised you didn't mention the experience of playing with different temperaments. The harpsichord you're playing at 13:22, 13:30, and 17:43 is tuned to Quarter-Comma Meantone. It's especially easy to tell at 17:45, the major third in C# Major in Meantone are extremely wide (the root and fifth are closer to C-half-sharp and G-half-sharp which makes an F natural very out of tune). Was the "blurring" you described preventing you from noticing this somehow, or was it just too complex of a topic to also address in the video?
When I was playing on that harpsichord knew it "sounded out of tune" (not pure 12 tone equal temperament), but identifying which temperament it was (or if it was just a wonky harpsichord that hadn't been tuned in years) is a skill I have yet to learn haha, especially when multitasking with the A415 "blurring" hearing method when playing. I'd love to hear the experiences of a perfect pitch person who can fluently identify temperaments in different A tunings!
I had the same experience "losing" my perfect pitch. I had a tongue surgery and a few days later I got out my cello and at first thought it was just really flat, but then I realized through things like sounds from my refrigerator that it was actually my ears. I don't know what about the surgery caused this, but since you said it was a wisdom teeth that caused it I think it has something to do with mouth surgeries.
For me, the air wiggles 425 times a second but playing on an instrument with a different tuning like my two organs that are tuned to 450hz and 435hz, I have an easy time just picking it up and playing the same but the notes are about a semi tone apart. Same goes when my untunable piano quickly drops in pitch getting closer to baroque tuning because the pins are loose.
I thought it was normal to be able to just jump to an instrument with a substantially different tuning since I can do it in the basic learning stage where I can't even read sheet music yet.