Quote:
Originally Posted by cmd612
That's good to know, thanks. I don't have perfect pitch but have heard a couple of people who do have it say that a piece of music they're very familiar with sounds completely, painfully, wrong to them when it's in a different key, even if the relative intonation is fine. I guess that's not universal. Or maybe they're just particularly irritable.  |
I don't have perfect pitch, but I do have the experience of a song in a different key sounding "completely, painfully, wrong" (well maybe not painfully, but definitely uncomfortably).
My band had to change the key of a song that I'd known (and played) for over 30 years in its original key (C), because a female singer needed it raised, to F. It was just as easy to play in F, but I was amazed how wrong and clunky it sounded.
And yet, the more we played it in that key, the better it sounded, until it sounded as "right" in F as it had in C.
It was my first experience of the phenomenon of "pitch memory". We become accustomed to the keys of songs the more we hear them in that key. Some are more sensitive than others, but even non-musicians have pitch memory.
In short, you don't need perfect pitch to think a different key is "wrong" -
IF you have heard it for long enough in the original key - as you would have on a famous recording.
You might not be
offended by the new key, but (even if you can't tell that it's the key that's different) you will probably think something is odd about it - and you might put it down to how the band are playing it.
Having said that, a half-step would probably be imperceptible to most people - unless the original key really was ingrained in their brains.