What is perfect pitch? You may already know that perfect pitch, or absolute pitch is the ability to identify a particular musical note without using a reference tone. It is sometimes also called absolute pitch. The ability allows a musician to perform many skills, including tuning an instrument, singing any note at will, or transcribing very quickly and in the correct key. Although the ability is quite rare (about 1 in 10,000), many musicians who have it are adept at both identifying and recreating notes. You can read more about this at: perfect pitch software.
Perfect Pitch Theory
The important question, which was never given enough attention until now, is not that of “what?” but the question of “how?”. How is it that a small proportion of people are able to notice a supposed elusive “quality” of each note, which most of us cannot? What are these differences and how does perfect pitch really work? Some musicians do extremely well without the ability and, at the same time, we all show amazing hearing abilities, such as the skill of recognizing familiar voices from a crowd. So, why can’t we hear the tone qualities between different notes?
To answer these questions, we need to understand a few basic acoustic principles. To start with, tonal sounds from any source contain fundamental frequencies of the notes being played as well as harmonics of those frequencies. Another name for harmonics are overtones. These are always in all tonal sound. Even when a simple sine wave signal is played through a loudspeaker, there will be harmonics in the sound. This happens due to the nature of waves to make other waves. Harmonics of a single note frequency are multiples of that frequency. The sound you hear when a single A440 note is played is a combination of 440 Hz, 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, 1760 Hz, 2200 Hz, and so on. Usually the fundamental (440 Hz) has the most energy, the second harmonic (880 Hz) has less, and the general trend is a decrease in volume as you count up the harmonics, although some instruments do take exception to this. The “first overtone” is the same as the second harmonic.. This article will use the terminology of harmonics to avoid the confusion.
Each instrument has its own harmonic levels, or “spectrum”. A clarinet has weak even harmonics, for example, with stronger odd ones and a strong fundamental. By contrast, a guitar has a high second, sixth, and seventh harmonics and a lower fundamental.
Of course the spectra of different instruments differs. The sound of the instruments are completely different. The timbre, or quality, of a tonal sound comes from its harmonic spectrum, as well as any noise parts (non tonal). We can easily tell the difference between a flute and a saxophone because they have very different harmonic spectra. You can read more about this at: perfect pitch training.
To summarize, the distinguished “quality” or timbre of tonal sounds are created from their harmonic make-up.
Getting back to the subject of perfect pitch, we know that musicians who have perfect pitch hear differences in “quality”, we might even say timbre, between the notes. We know that composers with perfect pitch may choose a certain key for its characteristics, depending on the mood of the piece. So how does this fit in with the harmonic spectra of the notes when we know this to be determined by the instrument? Well, the shocking, but obvious truth is that there is no physical difference in “quality” between the different notes. If there were, there would be no mystery to perfect pitch and the differences would have been physically measured already. The perceived difference between the notes is due to the frequency response and resonant frequencies of the human ear.
Like a microphone, the human ear can hear some frequencies better than others and contains certain parts, which are able to resonate strongly at particular frequencies. Any tonal sound entering the ear involves a wide range of harmonic frequencies, which set the whole machine in motion. Some frequencies will be heard to be of different volumes when they have the same physical loudness.
The response of the ear is seen on an Equal Loudness curve and is the same for everyone with good hearing. The ear is most sensitive at 4000 Hz and a sound at 30 Hz has to be almost one million times as powerful as one at 4 kHz to be perceived the same.
The resonances of the ear are a result of the combination of resonating parts. For example, the auditory canal has a resonance at about 3 kHz. Other considerations are the vibration of the eardrum, the bones in the middle ear, and the complex behavior of the cochlea.
The equal loudness curve is just one example of the non-linear frequency response of the ear. The ear is always exposed to many different frequencies and there are many complex phenomena at work. For example, the extent to which one frequency is masked by another depends greatly on the pitch of these frequencies.
So What is Perfect Pitch?
To conclude, perfect pitch is all about the perception of the harmonic spectra of different notes on the scale. First, there exists the actual harmonic levels of the sound. On the other, there is an internal spectrum from the response of the ear. The brain is extremely sophisticated and, in those who have perfect pitch, can detect the spectrum caused by the ear and distinguish it from that of the instrument. The harmonics of the notes are not given nearly as much attention in musical training as the fundamental tones and intervals, which leads to perfect pitch being very rare. To hear with perfect pitch, you need to be able to listen to the harmonics, which is a skill like any other and can be learned until it is second nature. Click here for more info: what is perfect pitch?