Second Monday Music: Absolute pitch

Not absolutely necessary!

By André Duvall

Absolute pitch is a person’s ability to identify a musical tone sounded to them without hearing a reference tone. There are various manifestations of absolute pitch (also commonly referred to as “perfect pitch”). It can be considered the ability of a person to sing a particular tone “pulled out of thin air,” without any prior sound given to them. Some who possess this trait can identify multiple tones sounded at once, in addition to single tones; I have met others who cannot identify isolated tones, but they can identify the key of a musical piece when hearing multiple tones in harmony and in succession. What advantages or disadvantages are there for a musician to have absolute pitch?
    I myself do not have absolute pitch. It seems that the majority of musicians do not, either. However, throughout my musical experiences, I have interacted with friends, teachers, and fellow members of ensembles who do claim to possess this trait. In my earliest years as a music student in middle school, I remember finding the phenomenon of absolute pitch intriguing and desirable. People certainly seemed to ask about it with great veneration. While it did not lose its intrigue for me as a psychoacoustic phenomenon, the more musicians I met who discussed their experiences with me, the more I realized as a middle school student that absolute pitch is not critical in the overall functioning of a musician. In fact, even though it can be helpful in some situations, it can frequently be a nuisance, hindering more than it assists—as I will exemplify later. Nonetheless, there seems to be a common misconception that absolute pitch is an important ability that helps people become good musicians. Indeed, to this day, a conversation that often develops from a non-musician when discussing my musical studies goes along the lines of:

    Non-musician: “Do you have perfect pitch?”
    Me: “No, I do not.”
    Non-musician: “Really?! My mother did, and that’s how she learned to play the piano so well. How then are you able to learn all of that music?”
    Me: “Well, there are many factors involved, but lots of practice is a big part of it…”

…and eventually, if they seem interested enough to continue listening, and I am in the mood to continue explaining, they soon realize that perfect pitch does not in itself guarantee that a person will easily become a good musician.
    My first piano teacher had absolute pitch. She was also a trained vocalist, and she cited her ability to hear pitches without a given reference point to be a great help when singing solo lines a cappella (without accompaniment of instruments), especially when having to sing excerpts for sight-singing classes as a freshman in college. She remembers having to do less study to recognize the sounds of specific chord progressions for ear-training exams than her peers. She also found it to be helpful when singing with a choral ensemble. My undergraduate piano professor also possessed perfect pitch. She rarely referred to it (later I learned this was because she understood that it was really not as important as her ability to perceive relative pitch), but when she did refer to it, it was always in reference to music she was hearing rather than music she herself was learning. She was able to distinguish the key of the piece being played down the hall. This could be helpful if it was a piece she didn’t know; for example, if she heard a piece on the radio but didn’t catch the name, she might be able to look it up more easily if she recognized the key and style.
    A friend who plays low-brass instruments (euphonium and baritone) expressed some of his disdain for possessing absolute pitch. Also a vocalist, he was often “driven nuts” when singing or playing in an ensemble that was slightly “out of tune.” Although members of the ensemble might be in tune with each other, they were often not exactly centered on the specific frequencies that my friend’s ear and brain were wired to recognize. He felt that this is one of the major and unavoidable disadvantages for some people with absolute pitch, as ensembles everywhere are naturally going to play around slightly different pitch centers. Furthermore, many brass instruments require many fine adjustments for playing together, which can be frustrating to someone whose absolute pitch is not very pliable.
    I have worked with a choir director who finds conducting or singing transposed music (music that is played in a key higher or lower than the key of the notes written on a page) to be incredibly disorienting because of her absolute pitch. For example, if the written part of a chorale or hymn is too high for the particular voices in an ensemble, the director might give the pianist accompanying an ensemble sheet music written in a lower key. Those without absolute pitch will probably not feel disoriented when viewing the music. But for my colleague, even though she mentally understands the musical theory concepts behind the transposition, the visual cues on the page create a cognitive dissonance with the auditory sensations she is expecting to hear. Inevitably, I am sure there are those with absolute pitch who likewise would not feel disoriented, but some certainly do. In her ear-training test for graduate school for voice study, her auditors required her to transpose her sight-singing exercise when they realized she had perfect pitch. So, her skill actually caused her audition to be harder rather than easier!

Of much greater value to a musician’s overall skill set is a good sense of relative pitch. An acquired trait, its cultivation requires a musician to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship of tones, and it will be useful regardless of the exact frequency of the pitch center. The isolated advantages of absolute pitch are not as helpful in everyday musical situations, whereas relative pitch can be immensely valuable. In most ensemble or solo performance situations, the ability to pull a tone from the sky is not going to be crucial, because after the first note is given, a strong sense of relative pitch can do a great job, as well; careful listening and blending of tones regardless of the pitch center is the salient skill needed.
    One can certainly develop different degrees of relative pitch with training. Perhaps many cases of people claiming to acquire absolute pitch are really developments of relative pitch and musical memory rather than true “absolute pitch.” For example, there was a particular piece of music that I listened to over and over as a child, centered on the pitch D. I remember at some point in middle school realizing that I could identify the pitch D when I heard it, but it had to be in a certain octave, and isolated from other pitches. Possessing absolute pitch can have its advantages as a sort of fun “wowing” factor, when one can identify the pitch of non-musical sounds. Some people are able to tap into their absolute pitch abilities only if the tones sounded are produced by musical instruments, but others can recognize pitches in sounds that are often a mix of pitch and noise, like train horns or the sound of wood tapping against furniture.
    Absolute pitch is not the same as color synesthesia, in which aural stimulation produces visual sensations of colors, light, and shapes…a topic for another Second Monday Music column!
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Copyright © 2013 by André Duvall

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