Is it possible to train yourself to recognize pitches?

[Cecil6243]

As in to recognize an A note vs. an F on the guitar without looking where it is played? And of course not being born with perfect pitch if there really is such a thing. I seem to remember my roommate that was a music major at Indiana University was taking a class on that.

Is there anyone here that can do that?

I guess I could look this up on the Internet but it's more fun to ask questions here.

[Wags]

My quick answer - you can train your ear to recognize relative pitch, ie., intervals and even complex chords, but perfect pitch is likely a gift, and more often than not, a curse.

[rllink]

My wife does not have perfect pitch, but she is a trained vocalist. She does scales a Capella like we do scales on the guitar. Some of us that is. If you ask her to give you a C, or a B flat, or an F, she can give it to you. I don't know how far she can go with it, I've never put her to the test. I also don't know if that skill goes beyond voice and can be applied to a stringed instruments, though I've seen and heard her correct the kids when they were taking piano lessons just listening to them. But it has come from training, it is not some natural ability that she possesses.

[nightchef]

Yes. At least, I've done it. My pitch recognition is still not perfect, but it's a lot closer than it used to be.

The key is repeating and imprinting experiences of hearing & identifying pitch. This could be a favorite song that you've heard so many times you can play it back in your head in its original pitch. I used to use the Who's "Baba O'Riley" this way.

More recently, I've been singing in a chorus that starts its warmups each week, after a few mouth-activating exercises, by singing an A together without a prompt from piano or pitchpipe. The first few times I did it, I was all over the place. Then I got pretty close. These days, after years in the chorus, I'm usually spot on, or very close to it, just from repetition.

[ljguitar]

Hi
We had a friend in college who had perfect pitch - or a version of it. She had memorized middle C on a Piano growing up, and could hear it in her head and then extrapolate every other pitch from it. She was the 'pitch-pipe' for our acapella choir.

She would get up and leave the room if a guitarist who was playing had just tuned his/her strings in relationship to each other instead of to A=440Hz.

I've seen children with perfect pitch on YouTube name any note someone plays. They don't know how they do it, they just do. I'm assuming it's similar to my friend from college - that they have probably memorized pitches or at least a single pitch.

There is a difference between memorizing and sounding pitches out of thin air, and knowing what the next note is relative to the one you are playing/hearing. The latter is easily learned.

[NormanKliman]

Once I start playing, yeah it’s possible. I would think that’s what jazz guitarists try to do.

If you’re asking about identifying the key immediately on first listen, I agree with others upthread that it’s a skill that can be developed. It’s just a recent impression, but I think I see it in my playing, when I study recordings of non-guitar music.

Originally Posted by nightchef

...a favorite song that you've heard so many times you can play it back in your head in its original pitch. I used to use the Who's "Baba O'Riley" this way.

Beat me to the punch. I was going to suggest Stairway to Heaven (key of A).

In any case, I think that with enough experience most guitarists can hear in their heads the sound of certain chords. What say all of you?

Pro friends of mine who accompany a lot seem to be pretty good at guessing key and capo position before the singing starts. I’ve seen that happen a few times and I’m pretty sure that a few of those times the guitarist based his guess on the singer’s speaking voice.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Cecil6243

As in to recognize an A note vs. an F on the guitar without looking where it is played? And of course not being born with perfect pitch if there really is such a thing. I seem to remember my roommate that was a music major at Indiana University was taking a class on that.

Is there anyone here that can do that?

I guess I could look this up on the Internet but it's more fun to ask questions here.

The more you play guitar, the more you get used to the sound of certain notes on guitar.
It's a phenomenon known variously as tonal memory, pitch memory, or "true pitch".
It's like certain notes wear a groove in your brain through constant use.
So I can tune a newly strung guitar up to concert pitch with no reference. I can't usually get it exact, but it's within a semitone - typically slightly flat.
I can use my feeling of how low E sounds (and feels when I hum it) to guess the keys of recordings, and usually get them right (more often than not, anyway).

So it's a kind of "imperfect pitch", in that it depends on memory of (mainly) one note, and then relative pitch to work out others.

it's common among non-musicians too, when they know a song so well (on one recording) that they can sing it in the right key from memory.
More here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory
http://www.cogprints.org/643/1/pitch.HTM

[Andyrondack]

Originally Posted by ljguitar

Hi
We had a friend in college who had perfect pitch - or a version of it. She had memorized middle C on a Piano growing up, and could hear it in her head and then extrapolate every other pitch from it. She was the 'pitch-pipe' for our acapella choir.

She would get up and leave the room if a guitarist who was playing had just tuned his/her strings in relationship to each other instead of to A=440Hz.

I've seen children with perfect pitch on YouTube name any note someone plays. They don't know how they do it, they just do. I'm assuming it's similar to my friend from college - that they have probably memorized pitches or at least a single pitch.

There is a difference between memorizing and sounding pitches out of thin air, and knowing what the next note is relative to the one you are playing/hearing. The latter is easily learned.

Apparently there are cells in the ear that detect the actual frequency of sound waves as there are cells in the eyes that detect the frequency of light, but with the sound waves
the brain doesn't develop the structures to process them.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

Apparently there are cells in the ear that detect the actual frequency of sound waves as there are cells in the eyes that detect the frequency of light, but with the sound waves
the brain doesn't develop the structures to process them.

Except in those infants that develop perfect pitch, of course.

IOW, as you say, everyone's brain has the necessary equipment at birth - simply because the structures (the cochlea of the inner ear) are relatively straightforward: a spiral containing a series of different sized receptors as it gets narrower towards the centre. This allows us to perceive differences in pitch, as well as timbral quality (overtone spectrum). Those skills have proved important for survival, clearly. The fact the receptors also make perfect pitch possible is an accidental side effect.

In infants, the aural sense is mostly directed towards learning language - a crucial human skill, learned totally by ear and vocal mimicry, in the first few years of life. This seems to have evolved as an instinctive behaviour in those first few years. After infancy, as the child grows into an adult, the ability to learn a new language that way gets more and more difficult - even though as adults we understand more and more how language works, intellectually. We just get "stuck" with our mother tongue, because that's all we actually need - to be able to communicate with those immediately around us, as soon as possible in our life.
Childhood itself is not so much a process of learning new stuff - adding to our mental capacity - as narrowing down the broad innate potential to focus on what matters day to day. We start off potentially capable of learning almost anything. But naturally we get directed to what we experience as important in the world as we find it. That's the genius of the human brain - it's evolved to be adaptable, to be able to deal with whatever environment we get confonted with. Hence all the spare capacity at the beginning.

In some infants, in unusual circumstances, they are confronted with music in a way that makes music appear to be as important as speech. It's clearly an organised system of sounds that appear to have important meaning for the adults partaking in it. So - the infant thinks - I'd better see if I can make sense of that stuff, as well as the noises coming out of their mouths! With music, of course, it's not absolute pitch that matters - it's relative pitch - but the infant doesn't know that. It can easily latch on - subconsciously - to pitch specifics, enough to remember the sound of specific frequencies, especially if those specifics are named.

The language link is proved by the higher incidence of perfect pitch among speakers of tonal languages, such as Mandarin. Infants learning Mandarin don't need perfect pitch (otherwise they would all have it!) - but they do need to pay a lot more attention to pitch changes within syllables, because single syllables change meaning drastically depending the pitch shape (up down or both).
So when those infants are confronted with music, naturally they will apply that more detailed attention to it as well.

In short, perfect pitch is an accidental skill, that piggybacks on the language instinct. It's not a musical skill per se, because it's not required for understanding music - any more than it's required for understanding language (even tonal languages). But the ear has the necessary receptors, and sometimes they just get sidelined into pitch identification.
As an analogy, its a little like learning to recognise a person by the clothes you first see them wearing all the time. Then when they wear something different you think it must be a different person. To be skilled at recognising people, you have to get beyond the clothes and go by the face and other unchanging personal characteristics.
Likewise, with perfect pitch, one can think that when the key of a song is changed, it sounds "wrong". And yet it's the same song, because all its important characteristics are identical - its pitch relationships. "Dressing" it in a different key makes no difference to what matters.

[Silly Moustache]

Originally Posted by ljguitar

Hi
We had a friend in college who had perfect pitch - or a version of it. She had memorized middle C on a Piano growing up, and could hear it in her head and then extrapolate every other pitch from it. She was the 'pitch-pipe' for our acapella choir.

She would get up and leave the room if a guitarist who was playing had just tuned his/her strings in relationship to each other instead of to A=440Hz.

I've seen children with perfect pitch on YouTube name any note someone plays. They don't know how they do it, they just do. I'm assuming it's similar to my friend from college - that they have probably memorized pitches or at least a single pitch.

There is a difference between memorizing and sounding pitches out of thin air, and knowing what the next note is relative to the one you are playing/hearing. The latter is easily learned.

I understand that "perfect pitch" can be more of a curse than a blessing. In my childhood with both parents working we would have a "woman what does" i.e. someone to come in and do the housework.

One lady insisted that there was no music to be played whilst she was in the house, which was hard on my when I was at home.

I thought she was just being awkward,but one day she explained to me that she was born with perfect pitch and it has destroyed any chance of enjoying music, even (especially) classical music as she could pin point the one violin or brass instrument that was a fraction out and then that was all she would hear. I felt very sad for her, as even then I loved my music and would play radio and records every chance I got.

However, she also taught me to enjoy silence and the tme when youcan make music in your head.

There is no way that I'm pitch perfect but I can certainly hear stuff out of tune. I also think I'm fairly good at identifying a chord but not sure if it is recognizing the chord itself, or the intervals in the notes - i.e. a 1st position G will never sound like a 1st position D or F etc.

I think this stuff often comes with age and familiarity with the instrument.

[Silly Moustache]

My sincere thanks to JonPR for that considered information. Today, I have learnt something! That's a good day!

[rllink]

It seems that the common belief is that for some reason being blessed with perfect pitch curses that person with pain if they hear a pitch that isn't perfect. Why would it be anymore painful to hear a note out of tune for that person then for the rest of us? I can certainly hear notes that might not be in tune, depending on context, it doesn't cause me pain. Can't most of us hear a klinker? And out of tune in relation to what? Jazz players purposely play discordant notes. Is it impossible for persons with perfect pitch to listen to Jazz? Just thinking about it.

[davidbeinct]

Originally Posted by rllink

It seems that the common belief is that for some reason being blessed with perfect pitch curses that person with pain if they hear a pitch that isn't perfect. Why would it be anymore painful to hear a note out of tune for that person then for the rest of us? I can certainly hear notes that might not be in tune, depending on context, it doesn't cause me pain. Can't most of us hear a klinker? And out of tune in relation to what? Jazz players purposely play discordant notes. Is it impossible for persons with perfect pitch to listen to Jazz? Just thinking about it.

Agreed. In Silly M’s example above perfect pitch would not actually be needed to hear an instrument out of tune with the rest, just really good relative pitch. I doubt I would hear one violin slightly out of tune with the orchestra but I’m certain I would hear one very out of tune with the rest of a string quartet.

[brad4d8]

I don't know if it's really training, but the few times I've had to tune a badly out of tune guitar with no handy reference pitch, I've been able to hit the A string to within a few cents of concert pitch. However, if somebody played it for me blindfolded, I probably couldn't tell what it was.

[Nimiety]

I only have relative pitch, but after years in orchestra I've 'memorized' the 'buzz' of the electronic tuner and/or the oboe to A. I can now successfully hum that A 4/5 times.

But I can't necessarily identify an A if it's not that exact same A.