@Instrument Zoo I will....and I'm not even a singer, I'm a rapper / drummer / producer, but I decided I need to train my singing voice to be at least 80% as nice as my rap voice
@@proverbalizer I think rappers have a lot to benefit from singing. Rap is or at least can be very melodious too. If you not only have a nice rhythm but a nice melody to it too and just generally a nice sound/tone, that is just eargasmic. Strangely though I actually know a rapper who has a great singing voice and lovely pronunciation and a lovely tone/voce color but I most often hate his flow haha so it's to a high degree very subjective I guess haha.
I don't know why everyone's worried about perfect pitch. It doesn't inherently make you a better musician, composer, songwriter or person. If your songs aren't good, and you develop perfect pitch, your songs still aren't good. Now you know what key it's in though.
It doesn't hurt. Half the point of learning your music theory is so that you can identify mechanics of music quickly, thus giving you more time to get those ephemeral musical ideas out before they fade away like smoke in the wind. Likewise, perfect pitch is another "shortcut" that can help you to beat the devil before he steals what inspiration has gifted you.
@sebastian berg I agree with you. it really helps when you start to compose complex music. when you consider all the modes applied consistently, u can just actually compose it in your head very clearly/precisely. it's a similar thing with hyper realism painters to film color grading professionals, there are only few people who can identify specific hues/colors as accurate as pixels, could actually memorize the digital codes of these colors. there's absolutely no more mix and match or trial and error process. they just compose the colors in their heads and apply the color accurately.
As a musician, I have played enough music to develop tinnitus with a constant pitch that I can use as a reference to find other notes. Tbh its a pro strat
@@SoniaSharma-fm8ym i have tinnitus as result of a brain injury. all it's told me is that for a few years i was boosting around 5khz to the point of ear piercing to the rest of my friends xD
I started playing bass at 52, now 55. I'm not worried about perfect pitch, I'm just worried about trying to remember what I studied yesterday. learning something new at this age is tough but a passion. as far as hearing, I can still hear my wife yelling at me. all good.
You don't have to worry about remembering what you studied yesterday. The bit of your brain that needs it will have stored it. Like your wife's yell: I don't guess you had to study very hard to recognize that. I'm 61 and still love learning new things. If I have to do it a bit slower than 30 years ago, so what? In the end we'll all be dead and know nothing, but that's true for the young smarty-pants who make fun of us, too. Bass guitar? Contrabasso? Some other thing? Doesn't matter, just enjoy, my young friend!
I think people need to understand that many trained musicians can imitate perfect pitch without actually having absolute pitch. Having notes fixed in your mind means you’re still relying on relative pitch. Absolute pitch means that you don’t have to think about it.
exactly, that's what i just replied to the comment above yours. all these adults saying "i developed perfect pitch recently" just memorized the frequencies and honed their relative pitch, which you _can_ develop as an adult. they seem to be confusing it with perfect pitch because the difference is a bit unclear
@@cinnomixwh0t do you mean memorized frequencies and honed relative pitch. 😅 That means still no absolute pitcha according to you. Hate to disappoint you but it actually what is pitch all about. And no human is not a metal detector to determine 1hz frequencies
@@cinnomix Another thing that irks me to no end is people claiming they have synesthesia, but the way they describe it makes ZERO sense. I've read comments where people explained their synesthesia as "certain genres having colors, so drum & bass is purple." I immediately thought that was the stupidest thing I've ever heard because you can't line up genres with colors. The reason synesthesia works for notes is because the frequency of sound waves determine the pitch... like how the frequency of light waves determine color. THAT'S how it works and THAT'S how the correlations are made. Not "this song feels purple." That's hippie dippie third eye BS and literally tells you nothing about the music.
I don't have to think about about yeah to this guy I don't have it because I'm still learning how to play guitar.... Honestly it seems like he is con flating someone being non verbal and someone who does not speak English... If you can instaly understand music you have absulte pitch nomatter what funny noises you need to make to convince someone you do.
LOL yeah i don't think Rick has any inkling how awesome he really is 😁👌like a freak of nature right? LOL it's only logical his son _would_ have perfect pitch you see haha and how amazing is that. AWESOME!!!!!! This is one of the best videos on the topic i think I'll find anywhere so why look lol Thank you Rick... How many ways can you say all good things to you! And thank you!!! Yeah... Heart and soul... Let the angels roll like thunder moving mountains for you and yours. Amein.
I'm just going to put this out here as a precautionary statement. Some kids don't care about being musicians no matter how early you start them. If they have an ability, definitely HELP them grow it. Don't become toxic about it. Perfect pitch is being presented as a natural ability here, with the insinuation that not all people even have the possibility of developing it -even as children. That being said, many people without this, do very well in music, even fantastic and make a living doing it and loving it. It's about as important as being able to see gold color in the Ring Nebula. Only a very small number of people can, and only children. As you age you lose sensitivity in the sensors of the eyes. Don't forget to let your children visit scads of good astronomy sessions before they're 10!
I developed perfect pitch at 85 years old after a near death experience and I am also a rocket scientist and a professional luthier, so you're obviously wrong Mr. Beato.
@@dividebyzero9530 You can't listen to a song if it's in a different key to the 1st version you heard, or you die. You can't sing or hum a song if you think it's in the wrong key, you either automatically know what it is, or if you haven't heard it in a while or have heard it only once or twice, you have to sit there and work out what key it is, or you die. If someone else sings without knowing the key, you die. And by die I mean extreme discomfort and pain.
My dog is harmonizing with the vacuum cleaner, the ambulance and the car alarm. He loves E minor chord. He also leaves the room when I don't play properly :D
I also harmonised with the vacuum cleaner! :D I used to see (hear) which other notes harmonised and which ones didn't, and I was so interested in the disharmonious (is that a word?) notes! I had forgotten about that, so thank you for jolting my memory! :)
As a follow up to this video, I think it would be useful if you could find people with perfect pitch and people with great relative pitch and give them to aural tests like you did to Dylan.
This man is right. I know, because I have a childhood friend that possessed this phenomenon. We grew up going to the same church and playing/singing music together. It was in my teen years that I remember my friend being able to tell me what note I was playing, humming, whistling...or if I was somewhere between the natural and the semitone. Yes I always checked on the piano. It's truly phenomenal.
When I was back in uni studying music, I knew a few fellas having perfect pitch. They hated it. Claiming that most music sounded out of tune to them. Im quite happy with my average relative pitch :-)
Bepi Visintainer - Yes. I sang in a choir with a woman who had perfect pitch, and she was always wincing. She could always tell when we had dropped in pitch (we weren't the best choir), and when anybody hit a sour note. I'm not sure why she put up with us!
@@sourisvoleur4854 I guess bad music is better than no music? Reading the other comments in this thread helps to explain why it's better to try and enjoy music as it is than make an effort trying to improve the music others make. It's really good to see your comments and remember that every blessing can be a curse, and also, while some people enjoy kicking others, it isn't necessary, the unintentionally inflicted pain probably outweighs what the assholes imagine they would like to inflict.
As a music teacher I get a lot of adults asking me about perfect pitch. Often many people confuse it with relative pitch. When I explain that, with practice, they can achieve a good enough ear to transcribe music and play what they hear they are usually satisfied. Perfect pitch is, as they say, overrated, at least for what most people want.
Salsa Blanca I would love it, over relative pitch, in order to not ever have to buy sheet music ever again. relative pitch wouldn't really help with more than 1 note being played at a time- you can't recognize an Abmb5 with relative pitch, only stuff like a D note going up to A.
That's not true... I don't have perfect pitch but if I hear an Abm7b5 chord, I'll instantly recognize it as a half diminished chord and maybe even the exact voicing I just won't know what key it's in unless I have a reference pitch. You don't need perfect pitch to play by ear although I'm sure it would make it easier
Kyle Windjack - same here. I was not born with a good ear. Most of the music I heard growing up with 60s rock my parents listened to - nothing complex. I had to train my ear myself. After graduating music collage, and years of playing and practice, I could hear extensions in chords. I still make mistakes with what I think I hear. I definitely don't have PP.
I don't have it.. I've met one person.. Maybe 2 who have perfect pitch.. And I always chuckle a little when I hear people say they have it.. And I'm always eager to test it.. Because it's not until you meet someone who does have it, do you truly understand what it is.. Good video.. 👍
it's unbelievable that some people out there believe you can learn perfect pitch.. this is non-sense...you either have it or you don't. You can learn and practice and become a very, very good at recognizing relative pitch and with extreme dedication, you can memorize the notes...but once you stop practicing you will forget them... on the other hand. someone that was born with this aptitude can never forget as it is part of them.
Perfect pitch is a highly specialized, but practically useless skill. Love that little kid, Dylan, but people are not filling arenas to watch a person categorize sonic frequencies into alphabets. Relative pitch is what is valuable as musician- that is being able to play in tune with what you hear regardless of if the tuning is standard, non-standard, out of tune etc. If you can play by ear, play what you hear in your head, play in key and on rhythm with other musicians you can have a successful career in music. Great musicians don't need perfect pitch. Perfect pitch does not impress listeners, because they don't know if the musicians they are listen to have perfect pitch, unless someone conducts a test and tells them. They do know however if they have relative pitch, if someone is singing or playing off key.
Just hit up my epileptic homie for the sweet Valproate hook up - I’m boutta be a musical genius. Catch me by the freeway diagnosing the pitch of car horns.
How would you distinguish between someone who actually learned it then, if you're going to bring forth this argument? It's easy to rationalize about something once you've come to a decision about what's true beforehand.
@@BillyViBritannia that's fairly easy. If they learned it, then they can document their progress over the course of their learning journey. Which means there evidence of them starting out without perfect and progressively screwing up less and less until they have the performance of someone with perfect pitch. If someone discovered they had Perfect pitch then with little context everything it musical notes they would demonstrate perfect pitch but it might seem like to them they learned it cuz they learned the names of the notes.
@@aliasjon8320 there is actually evidence of such a thing but people name it "true pitch" and they say it's different from perfect pitch because you associate the pith with another familiar sound first. However that's what Rick's son was doing when he said "thats the superman note" so I'm not sure why people feel the need to differentiate those skills. It's neither a game changing skill nor impossible to learn.
Yup. I've got Pitch Perfect for two notes because those were my starting note in the Cmajor scale for the instruments I played as a kid. I can give you a perfect Bflat and F because I played Trumpet and French Horn as a kid. I can guess the other notes with great accuracy because of piano training, but couldn't, right off the top of my head, sing you any other note without taking some time to think first.
having perfect pitch myself, i think what could be stressed more is the encouragement (and spreading of the information) that its actually not that hard to develop a relative pitch that with enough training becomes almost indistinguishable from perfect pitch in a musicians daily life. yes, you need ONE reference note at the beginning of the session, but thats it. you basically say this in your video too, but i think it could have been placed more prominently. ah well, monday quarterback brabbling on my part, pardon :) one more thing though: a phenomenon that is not talked about as often is the rather sad process of slowly losing perfect pitch with age. i initially thought of this as an urban myth (or a bedtime spook story of sorts ;), but this has now happened to 100% (!) of the people i know that have perfect pitch and are in their mid 40s or higher. the science behind it seems to suggest that this is because of the ever changing shape of our ears and the varying angles in which the soundwaves hit them as a result. im starting to experience it myself too, im now a fraction of a tone off. my "insticts" that used to be infallable have become a bit insecure, and at least for the first note that i hear, i need a moment to remind myself that my hearing is slightly detuned and i need to imagine the tone a bit deeper to be correct. it confuses the s**t out of me, sadly. i grew up with 440hz tuning, and it feels wrong now. i have an old piano in the studio that "hangs at 434", and when i sit there, hooray, im back to having infallable perfect pitch. now, for colleagues of mine, it has become a lot more extreme. and this is where *relative* pitch becomes a new meaning and importance. when youve been a pro musician your entire life, you usually have a very developed relative pitch, and that is what you then need to rely on in support of your used-to-be-perfect pitch. my father (also used to have PP) at age 80 is now a full halftone off. so the process in his brain is "i hear a tone, i transpose it in my mind one halfstep up, thats the note". which ironically makes it easier for him that it is for me with my micro detuning ;) anyway, you need the security that comes with trained relative pitch (especially maximum confidence with intervals, which can be learned as adult) because if you *used* to have perfect pitch, unlike somebody who just always worked with relative pitch, you have this internal conflict for every new note that you hear where your ex-PP says "that of course is a G" while your RP will say "this is a fifth over the B that you just heard, so its of course an f sharp". bottom line: relative pitch is super important even for people with perfect pitch. the good news is that, if you have perfect pitch, during the many many many years where your perfect pitch is fully intact, if you do play music, you unconsciously train relative pitch all the time as well, because of your constant awareness of all the notes you hear - awareness of their interval relationship to each other is then just a mere statistical process that your brain does. and its, thankfully, something you dont lose. like, my perfect pitch is now slightly f***ed because my "calibration is off" - but since intervals are independant of whether you hear 440 or 434 or whatever, you could still play me the weirdest intervals for a dozen years nonstop and i would still be able to identify all of them without ever making a mistake. so, that part of the "color palette feel" of hearing thankfully doesnt go away. rant over. sorry :)
wow, thanks a lot :) btw, we have talked before... actually, now that i think of it, i kind of fear that i have brought this up in the past already. so if im repeating myself, sorry for that :)
Your idea about the the changing shapes of the ears as we age are extremely important and a few years ago gave rise to a theory of mine that perhaps aged persons with less than perfect hearing do not actually need a hearing aid, but a plastic surgeon to alter the shape of their ears. I have tried altering my ear shapes a number of times and have actually been able to clearly hear many sounds that I can't hear normally. I would like to do more research on this idea.
zorglub667 That happened to me: I didn't know why people thought what I could do as a child was a big deal (from the ages of 6 until about 12) and could think up tunes in my head and write them on manuscript more easily than I could write. As I got older and puberty kicked in, I did the typical 'rebellious teen' stuff and moved away from music. Now the only thing that I can do musically is wince when something is sharp or flat: I used to play 5 instruments and now I can't even read music anymore...
spot on my friend...........I woudnt say i have perfect pitch BUT as you say about calibrating references im sure your aboulutly correct!......Im a musician and was around my grandfathers piano playing as a baby and carried that on into my own musical world........My point is that my piano (that was my grandads) is not set to correct pitch E.G. middle C is actually down to G but slightly sharp too.........BUT saying this i used to hear songs or films and climb onto the stool and find these songs with no problem at all.....this is why my grandfather used to love having me around when he played........we never talked about perfect pitch and we never discused the tuning of the piano and he actually taught me about middle C but obviously it was never true C at 440 HZ.......we in England also have a news program called " News at 10" and it samples big ben the bell out of the clocktower and that bell is not a true E its slightly sharp as i recall so I guess what im saying is there are so many other "Micro pitches" under sharps and flats that have been in the world i live in that it must be impossible to attain a perfect pitch when all these variables are considered.......would you not agree?......... i hope you both reply......thankyou
Oliver Sacks discusses perfect pitch at length in Musicophila. He mentions a number of cases where a brain injury (the planum temporale is especially related to perfect pitch) affected pp in different ways, in one case shifting the individual's pp by 1 semitone! And although some individuals have gained (or lost) great musical abilities after a brain injury, he never mentions this ever resulting in acquiring perfect pitch. HOWEVER, in a different chapter on Musical Savants he describes someone with autism who became a musical savant at 16 (a late age for this) including the ability to reproduce complex chords, instantly reproduce melodies, AND perfect pitch!
6:06 as a linguist, I've got to say: this is actually a pretty good explanation of how babies learn language. Your definition of a phoneme is a bit erroneous, but I am so impressed with the rest that it doesn't even bother me. Well done, Rick! Educating people on all fronts!
@@OldDawg-mc3dy It is absolutely relevant. The field of neuroscience was developed in part BY linguists (Noam Chomsky for example) to help explain observed linguistic phenomenon. Noam Chomsky, (one of the founders of field of neuroscience), has argued on record that the human capacity for mathematics is just a freebie that comes along with human's capacity for language. I don't think it would be a stretch to imagine human's capacity for music to be much the same: just a freebie that comes along with the neurological structures required for human language.
I started taking music lessons at 7 but didn't really start studying music until I was about 20, and then again at about 55. Even though I became movement impaired from a head injury in my late teens that prevents me from handling most instruments well, when I eventually found a instrument I could handle in my 50s, I was able to improv some very cool stuff. This video kind of explains how a movement impaired person could still have better than average improv ability. I love this YT channel!
I've had Dylan-style perfect pitch my whole life and, as a pipe organist, I find it more of a hinderance than an asset. Imagine playing historic pipe organs in Europe that are tuned differently. If you press a G, you might hear an F, F#, G, G#, or even an A or Bb, depending on the instrument. This is extremely disorienting, and I've had to fight my reliance on my perfect pitch to play these instruments well. I think it's much more useful to develop a good relative pitch.
Yeah, I knew a dude back in the day who had perfect pitch, he was a pain in the ass to work with, like if you played 1 chord and 1 string was slightly out of tune, he would immediately stop everything and tune the guitar, but I mean, no one in the studio could hear it, you needed a tuner to see it was actually 1 mil out of tune.
I'd like to know what "Dylan-style" is. I could google it, but I'm not going to. @Sel Poivre Perfect pitch isn't a talent, it's an ability. Talent is something you can learn and develop. Perfect pitch is something that is. Perfect pitch is as much a hindrance as it is a gift. @SN L Good relative pitch means that I can sing intervals like a Major third or perfect fifth really well, but I don't have perfect pitch. Relative pitch is the opposite of perfect pitch.
I taught myself perfect pitch in my late teens. I started with David Burge’s course, but after the first lesson I thought it was hogwash and I went my own way. Which was essentially what Dylan did. Each pitch was a prominent piece of a favorite song. For awhile it was tough to get the song associations out of head because they distracted me from the subject song. But over time it became automatic. Each pitch had its own color (similar to the circle of 5ths on a color wheel), its own emotion, and its own voice. For example “A” sounded like “Ack!” and sounded like “Broooom”. I would hear the squeak of a door and know it was C. Had I stuck with it I would certainly still have it. But life happened, and no time to be serious with music when you’re raising kids and working 10 hour days. There was a time I tried to improve, using some internet app where you could pick out chord notes. I got up to being successful with triads, which is better than I was as a teen. But then I got super busy again. And the app doesn’t exist anymore or I’d try it again now. So I think the reason adults typically can’t learn things like this, isn’t because they physically can’t. It’s because of too many other responsibilities and no time for the required freedom of mind.
I saw Adam Neely talk about this phenomenon, and in all seriousness, it works for some people and doesn't for others. The issue is that the internal "pitch" from tinnitus isn't always consistent from day to day or even throughout the day, so people who have this ability have to recalibrate their ear all the time.
Fantastic (and true) observations Rick. I am a musician here in the UK who studied and worked at EMI electronics in the 1960's. As a young scientist I worked with the team that made the first brain scanner - I was the young engineer that made many of the components used in 'The EMI scanner' - a simple machine by modern standards. I also started playing guitar at the age of seven and although I have very good relative pitch I couldn't claim to have perfect pitch per se. However, my son William (now 27) does have it and I agree with your observations as to why babies do develop this skill . I started teaching William to sing when he was a baby - he also listened to a lot of jazz, classical and progressive rock from the cradle ( not that he had a choice in that!). He now is a professional musician and plays most instruments (stringed), drums and percussion. He also has a perfect tempo clock in his head - again from learning so early I believe. Between us we run a recording studio, build guitars and train and teach players to build, repair and play... Absolutely love your no BS youtube channel. Regards, Robbie
Some of the greatest pianists and guitarists in the world never had perfect pitch. For heaven's sake Chuck Berry, or Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton or David Gilmour or Brian May or Slash or Kurt Cobain never had it and yet they had a great ear for music and created some of the most influential pieces of music in history...it's important to note that there's a lot of people out there with perfect pitch with perfect pitch yet it's only the chosen few that constitute the musical greats because they may be really good at naming notes and chords but have no specific flair at using them to make good music...what really matters is how you think about music and what you want your music to sound like, something that gives your music your individuality, and that my friend is what all the above legends have executed successfully and with breathtaking finesse
How do you know they got perfect pitch? You are guessing! Having or not having perfect pitch is irrelevant to whether or not one is a good musician. Your comment is ridiculous!
I must’ve developed my AP by luck of the draw. When I was eighteen months old, I developed benign relandic epilepsy, and got the rare form which caused learning delays. I couldn’t understand language, so I developed musical abilities instead. I would sing wordless melodies perfectly, and when I started piano at seven years old, I’d been asking for lessons for two years before that. I finally got caught up in language with everyone else when I was five, but I still don’t understand some subtle language nuances. I physically can’t learn other languages. Lastly, when I was nine, my technique teacher did the note-naming tests and I got it right every time. My epilepsy went after puberty, but I still have perfect pitch. It doesn’t go away even if I don’t use it. I can’t remember not having it. I wasn’t exactly born with it, but my brain went whack so I acquired it.
James, that's something to ponder, indeed. Maybe you would have loved music any way. What you went through served to sharpen the skills that allow you to accel at it. I have a sort of reverse story. I've loved music all my life. I started learning to play bass at age 15. This was 1985. Everybody wanted to be in a band. I wanted to write and play music. Famous rockstar would have been nice, but that wasn't my goal. I played with friends, with tapes, radio and eventually CDs. I would sit and play while watching TV. I loved it. I seriously considered going to a big city to pursue it further. Unfortunately, there were other things in store for me. I had a stroke in March of '92 at the age of 21, and lost control of my right side. Couldn't play any more. I play some now, but the use of my right hand is still limited. I also have trouble remembering things. Like how to play songs. I can't seem to retain things anymore. I guess you're brain trauma, made you the musician you are, while mine kept me from being the musician I wanted to be. God, fate, blind chance, the cosmos maintaining balance, whatever you may, or may not subscribe to the brain is super amazing and so fragile, at the same time. Play on for both of us.
How do you KNOW you weren't born with it, though? Most people who have perfect pitch don't know that they have it until the ages of roughly three to six; it all depends on when and whether the people around you notice that you have it or not (obviously, musically inclined parents will notice it earlier than those who aren't). Most kids will never be aware that they can or cannot name various notes on command before that age. You say that you discovered your command of absolute pitch at seven. This is a bit on the later side, but if the people around you weren't especially musically inclined, it's completely reasonable that no one would have noticed it until your piano teacher did when you started lessons. But just because it was discovered slightly later doesn't mean it was acquired later than birth. The fact is, unless someone sat down with you BEFORE you developed epilepsy at 18 months, and tested you to see if you had perfect pitch then - which would be a rare scenario indeed - you wouldn't know if you had it at that age or not. Indeed, I'm not sure how one would even diagnose it at so young an age, since most 18-month-olds (a) don't have the musical reference knowledge to be able to name the various notes, and (b) wouldn't have the language skills to be able to discuss the subject. You'd basically have to be in some sort of neuropsychology clinical study to know that at all at 18 months. I'm sure I've had perfect pitch since birth, but it wasn't discovered until I was four or five, when I started taking piano lessons. I'm not saying you don't have perfect pitch; I believe you probably do, if you can name notes instantly and/or produce them at will. I'm just questioning HOW you know you didn't have it since birth. :-) Cheers!
i think mushrooms have the potential to rewire a brain and could be used to develop perfect pitch given the perfect training exercises and prior musical training. It would have to be through color/number Synesthesia and developing strong emotional,color, and shape relationships to notes. I think our brains already do subconscious statistical analysis of all data and it could be very possible to rewrite ur brain. The most important takeaway of this comment: it is important to remember that nothing is impossible just because someone has a lot of experience and has no evidence of something being possible. Yes, this youtuber is really good at music, but I dont believe anyone who says something is impossible. Especially something as simple as perfect pitch. Yes it is possible. No it has not been proven to this point.
I would be my bottom dollar that taking psychedelics (LSD in particular; possibly marijuana) would replicate the baby pitch phenomenon. Neurogenesis. Neural plasticity. That’s all LSD is about. New perspectives. By the way. When the kid identifies the pitch and Dad says yes.... I thought according to Dad that it is impossible for him to have perfect pitch as an adult. So how can he affirm that the kid was correct? As much is I think Rick is awesome, I do think this video is a showcase of trying to show how his kid is better than everyone else. No disrespect here the kid is very gifted.
Does anyone else remember the advertisement for perfect pitch in all the guitar magazines of the 80s & early 90s? It was the goofiest looking thing. Rick your son is amazing, you taught him well, I love your videos.
I wish I had this video when my piano teacher at 12 was trying to train me into perfect pitch. Shoulda happened when I was 2 not 12. He graded my lessons, and I got an F. My dad grounded me until I made 4 As in a row (two months). Can you imagine being 12 and grounded because it’s impossible to have this thing you don’t have.
if he means "baby" as in actual baby i'd have to object. As long as ones brain is stiill in early development it should be possible.... and even still possible for adults with something liek Autism. Our brains stop developing around 22...... after that ur fucked.
What an fascinating video. I had perfect pitch - as good as Dylan - until I was in my early 50s. Then it started drifting -around a semitone flat so if I hear an 'A' I think its A#, and it's become way less 'instant' probably because I have to mentally transpose everything now. Interesting about Bach. My favourite music when I was 2-3 was a record my parents had of the Brandenburg concertos. I started piano lessons at just 5, but only because I used to play it all the time way before that. I got my first violin for my sixth birthday. People are right to say it's a bit of a party trick and a mixed blessing though. It meant I couldn't play the guitar with a capo because it sounded completely confusing - eg. I'd play a G chord and it would come out E-flat or something. Music written for brass instruments is sometimes written transposed, with C instead of B-flat and that used to be confusing too. But there are big benefits too of course - you can fluently write down any music you hear, instantly analyse chords and harmonies, and I was the 'human pitch pipe' when I was a chorister at Winchester cathedral
I really appreciate this video, a very dear friend of mine and lead guitar player in my band actually has perfect pitch. He has never really known why or how he acquired it. He always thought it was just something genetic. When watching this video he began having memories of his deceased father playing bach and bethoven in the house and his constant access to a piano.
I’ve been mimicking the sounds of things all my life and people have been weirded out by how accurate I get them. I do not have perfect pitch, but I do have a pretty nice relative pitch. I don’t know the names of any notes, but I can tell you how far they are apart by just hearing two. If I hear a note I can accurately find it on a piano on either the first or second try, but I still don’t know the names. I think that’s how far my relative pitch goes, and I think tons of people have it the way I do, I just wanted to share.
To be honest, there is probably a chemical +training solution, yes. There's also a device created by David Eagleman that electrocutes you to teach the brain new signals. Studying this might also provide some insight into possible solutions.
Perfect pitch is actually quite common, or rather I should say the ABILITY to have it, sadly you'll have to rely on your parents to teach it to you which is why it's rare lol
@@RobinEvans1234 He's actually said it in a video before that the perfect pitch Gene is consistent throughout half the population, but the actual skill needs to be developed vigilantly. Which is something very few parents do as most people aren't musicians or they aren't very heavily involved in it, futhermore, most parents won't force music onto their child, that is the cause of its rarity :)
@@alexloveday6430 I was actually listening to the vid as I was reading the comments, and it got to that bit strait after I dropped my inquiry, so I deleted my redundant inquiry and wished someone had played a lot more classical and jazz music at me when I was young.
@@RobinEvans1234 same wish tbh, but relative pitch is still more important and functions almost as fast depending on much you develop it ;) so don't give up!
Hey Rick, I get a bit nervous every time I see non-linguists explain linguistic phenomena but you did a pretty good job, I didn't spot any factual errors. I would explain children's acquisition of phonemic material like this though; children listen to contrasts in the language they get exposed to, for example a child with Egyptian parents will regularly hear [k] and [q], and thus they generalize that there is a contrast between these two. If all you hear is [k] but no [q] you will not develop a contrast between these two sounds, because it's not meaningful in the language at question. Similarly if you hear extremely simple music in your childhood, the distinctions between actual notes don't become meaningful, because you hear the same cadences over and over but just in different keys, so the child does not learn to differentiate between the notes themselves, because it concludes that there is no contrast between the same chord progression in D major vs. Bb major. What most people who claim that perfect pitch can be developed don't realize is that language can't be developed fully after the critical period either. If a child is not exposed to language in the first six years of its life, it will never acquire a language to any meaningful extent. This has been demonstrated with so called "feral children", who never acquire most of the skills we associate with full linguistic competence. In a sense a vast majority of all people are musical feral children.
To be quite frank I don't know and I am hesitant to conjecture on the subject, although I think it is quite clear that absolute pitch is not as common as language acquisition, possibly because our ancestors were selected based on that, as it seems to just be a side effect that surfaces given other factors that are present.
I feel that the analogy between phonemes and music may be instructive. Learning to distinguish the phonemes of a new language takes a long time, but many people become fluent in a new language, even as adults. With sufficient practice, a small minority of people even learn to produce the sounds of a language that they did not know in their youth to a degree that they may be mistaken as a native speaker. Nearly all pronunciation education experts have come to agree that it takes much too long to be a practical investment of time, and I'd argue that perfect pitch is the same. If only 1/10,000 develop something as children, then only 1/100,000,000 may learn it as adults. Rather than trying to convince students against developing native accent as "impossible", language teachers have realised that it's better to help learners understand how an (comprehensible) non-native accent meets 99.999% of all language needs than to try to convince people that it's "impossible". So now for the instructive part for music and perfect pitch: I'd suggest that there is no real advantage to convincing people that it's "impossible" to develop perfect pitch. Proving that something is not impossible can be achieved by doing it, and such suggestions will indubitably incite some such attempts. On the other hand, I'd suggest it makes much more sense to help people understand it as a return on investment. Even if it's possible, it will surely take a great deal of time that would be better spent on developing communication through music (as advanced levels of both listening and creating music can be achieved by nearly everyone...). Put another way, promote an understanding of what experts use to evaluate how well different practices may aid the development of musical abilities. In contrast, I would argue against an idea like: listened to 4-chord pop as a kid? Keep listening to pop. You will never be able to figure out more. It would be more like: actually, if you ever were to develop perfect pitch as an adult, it would be through spending more time developing your ear for high information music, not through intentional practice. Many of the adults who develop native-like accents did it by listening for a long time before they ever said anything in the new language.
I think you misunderstood my point. I am not saying that you can't learn new phonemes as an adult, or become fluent in a new language. I have done both, so I know it from experience. What I'm saying is that the ability itself to differentiate between phonemes and understand contrasts within aural information is developed during the critical period. Similarly, a child needs to learn to differentiate between pitches and not cadences during the critical period, after which it won't happen (to the best of my knowledge).
A 2013 study from Harvard University researchers reported that a drug commonly used to treat epilepsy could effectively reopen a critical period of learning ability, allowing a person to learn skills like absolute pitch.
Don't know where this homophobia stems from Nor do I care. I believe Rock's point was simply to give an example of perfect pitch , which his son just happens to posses. It could have been anyone's son. Fortunately for Rick his son his son truly posses We should celebrate this and be happy for Rick. However, I sense insecurity on the part some regarding of which tells me if not others that they are themselves insecure with, first the their own selves, and secondly perhaps, just perhaps) their own a plack of perfect pitch. It also reveals for those making such comment, lack of forsite. If these people spent less time acting as a bitches and calling out others as bitches, they they would much happier for it they might achieve relative pitch and be grateful for that. PS. They might also find they have more friends and gigs. I don't care who they are they are only harm themselves ( personally, professionally, and their own possibility to acheive relative pitch. Again, I say iit dissent matter,you are, what you like to think of yourselves. This attitude in the end doesn't serve you or others.
Perfect pitch is over-valued. For music it's the relation of pitches, how they insinuate and challenge a tonal narrative, is what matters. relative pitch is where it's at, and anyone can learn it.
Scott Joplin had perfect pitch. He wrote his music away from a piano without any difficulty. Between that and tuning instruments (and correcting performers) is the best use you can find for it. However listening to music can be aggressive and abrasive when one feels the forks of off-key stabbing one's eardrums into submission. Not sure if it's worth it.
Itemtotem I’ve got AP and non-12-equal pitches don’t bother me. Without xenharmonic ear training, it’s very easy for the ear to make a 12-edo-like framework out of what you’re hearing.
but you got to admit, playing a piece of music after hearing it (or by memory) is a really nice thing. If you have perfect pitch, the relation of the pitches is natrual to you or not?
I have a guitar tuner. That is all I need. I have perfect recognition of when things are not in pitch and that is all a musician needs. So I guess I have perfect non-pitch.
@@Parrish_Muhoberac Also as noted very few people have perfect pitch. So for the vast majority this is not a problem and very slight minor pitch problems have no effect on our enjoyment and experience of music.
If someone with "perfect pitch" ability hears a 440 Hz tone and identifies it as "A", what happens if they're presented with 446Hz, or 453Hz or 459Hz? At what point does "A" become "A#"?
dhy5342 lol, I just did that with my voice.... I sang an A, then bended it one pitch at a time a few times until I got to Bb. My cat was napping, she picked herself up & came over purring.... So in my case, I get a happy kitty ☺️. She's used to music & sits in my lap purring when I practice my flute. To answer the question, once A goes over 450, it starts to sound more like a Bb to me.
Depends on what the musician is used to, and their inherent talent. Jacob Collier, being a few levels beyond perfect pitch, can also arbitrarily divide an interval into equal parts and sing them. (Search his name and "microtones"). But Aimee Nolte, who also has perfect pitch, is blown away by that ability and is pretty much reduced to the level of the rest of us when trying to hit the notes between the notes.
Jacob Collier's ability is pretty astounding, he cann't just hear what note something is, he can tell you fairly accuratly what the frequency itself is, and he can hear that a note is an A sharpened by about 40% of a semitone etc.. So the answer is, it depends on the musician. It's the same as colour - when does red become orange in a gradient?
somehow you hear them both. I'd say like, that is one heck of a Bb-ish "A" sound. Here's something that will blow your mind. Sometimes the relativeness is completely different than the note. I've transferred bad cassettes to CD and would be like, "why's that major 3rd (in A Major) sound like a D? That's totally a third it's totally in relationship to A, but I'm hearing a D. Evidently the bad A rounded to an A but the bad C# was closer to the D than the A was to the Bb. I don't know.
Great Video Rick! I believe you are right. I have wondered about this for many years. i had a friend when I was younger named Larry. He had absolute pitch. It always fascinated me. We were in high school together. He could literally play just about any instrument you could hand him. I was a beginner on guitar when he and I hung out back then. We started a band together. For some reason, he wanted to play drums. He was an incredible drummer, but I couldn't wrap my head around why he would want to play drums, when he had perfect pitch. Unfortunately he passed away several years ago, and I have tried for at least 20 years to teach myself perfect pitch with no success at all. However, trying to acquire perfect pitch DID help me to obtain a very good relative pitch. I can name most notes pretty quick, but I do need a middle C for reference...I felt like a failure for several years, but this video made me feel a lot better about myself...lol Thank you sir!
I have never known anyone with perfect pitch, and don't have myself. Perfect pitch is not defined, as it is claimed here, to be able to define a note instantly when hearing it, but simply to sing one named tone. But this is what people can't learn, and I would to meet the guy claiming to be able to sing an F#. Perfect pitch is not regarded as being important for musicians and composers and most of them didn't have it. Relative pitch is on the other hand extremely important, but most people have that . Dillon is one in a million, I believe.
I dont have perfect pitch but with that being said I got somewhat kind of a, weird for me, pitch memory. I have a type of frequence in my head of a G# what I recognize from a song I heard planty of times in my childhood and no its not a classical piece or jazz piece. its a standart piece with acctually one modulation with a key change from G to G#. because of listening to that song all the time i kinda internalized it and sometimes when i hear someone playing a G# on the guitar but just the G#, not the chord, i recognize it. not always but sometimes. it feels weird but i have to say im fine with it. i still have to train on my relative pitch and then i can at least say "i always have a reference tone!" smh... just kidding with a little bit of seriousness. I would love to have perfect pitch but its not needed in my opinion. and who cares if u have to take 5 mins longer for transcribing things. doesnt make much of a difference. perfect pitch is nice to have but no must need. u just need to have talent and feel for music. look at eric clapton, carlos santana, miles davis, stravinsky and many others who changed the world with their music. fuck people who say perfect pitch is needed. its nice but nobody really needs it.
@@alllovese4syx319 I would really like to meet you one day and hear your note, and see if you can reproduce it precisely every time (which I believe you can not. :-) Whatever! Thanks for your input.
@@sormu16 Well, i gotta tell you, i have to really focus on it when i want to reproduce it, cuz of, so i believe, harmonics inside of a note. if u dont know what im talking about, then u should know that C for example exists also out of a G and so on. Thats what makes it difficult but possible.
Neuroplasticity slows down but does not stop as we age. If we can learn to perceive new colors (light frequencies) that were lost due to cultural conditioning, we can most definitely learn to perceive specific audio frequencies (notes) that we never learned to discern due to lack of cultural conditioning.
You missed the point of this video. My parents language was German and Portuguese. I speak English, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swiss German, German and French fluently. I've taken accent courses in cockney and my English is almost indistinguishable from any native Londoner and I'm currently learning the Mid-Atlantic US accent. Even though I speak many languages and hold also the highest qualification diploma possible with many of them they are never going to be a natural first language. I can even think of a number of words and expressions I know in English that I do not know how to say in my mother/father- tongue and still that doesn't put me on the same level as someone who was born in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or USA. If you have perfect pitch you don't need to think about it, it comes natural. You could train and get to a certain level of proficiency but it would never even come close to someone who has retained it from their childhood. You just have to accept that some talents don't get better through extensive training. Even though I can easily make anyone believe I'm an englishman, it takes great effort to do so and during a moment of stress or inattentiveness my accent could theoretically slip just a tiny bit. I can fool everyone but I can't fool myself.
Considering some people apparently go into comas then wake up being able to speak an entirely different language, I wonder if someone could be knocked out and then wake up with perfect pitch.
That is how my mother found out I had perfect pitch! Whenever she was singing or humming a song I knew, I told her she sings it wrong and corrected the key to the song. of course, I was young, so I just stubbornly sang in the right/original key I heard the song in, to try and convince her to move to it. I have a recording of me doing it, really funny
People who claim they developed Perfect Pitch as an adult -- actually had perfect pitch as a child, but were not exposed to music training. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many people with natural (childhood) perfect pitch never, ever, ever developed it, and its simply there in the back of their head. For those very few, very lucky people, training could UNLOCK & formalize a skill their baby-brain acquired years ago, assuming they haven't been totally isolated from music. But it WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE to formalize in adults who did not already develop this unrefined-ability as a baby.
This claim is not falsifiable since if the perfect pitch was not discovered until adulthood there would be no way to know when it first appeared. So taking all cases where people first showed perfect pitch as adults, as evidence that they must have had it since childhood is really a self-fulfilling delusion.
It is possible for anyone to learn perfect pitch without any musical experience at any age. The reason why Rick Beato claims that only babies can develop perfect pitch is because babies cannot form complex thoughts. As we grow older, more and more life events happen around us and our brains record, process, and store these events as thoughts. Some thoughts we keep, and some we forget. What Rick did with his child was consistently drill music into child's head as a baby. As a baby, his child embodied those sounds because babies don't have to worry about life situations meaning they don't need to store thoughts. I doubt anyone can remember anything as a baby, because we cannot store thoughts as babies. His child adapted to music pitches as a baby. Why? Because babies can't think. They eat and sleep. That's it. As humans beings, we are evolutionary calibrated to adapt to surroundings and as we get older we develop a conscience to solve these problems for survival rather than depend on others. As we tend to get older, the conscience begins to develop and gets in the way of our "potential" because it limits our ability to focus specifically on one thing. We have over 50,000 thoughts per day and we start to form thoughts at the age of one. Babies have infinite potential at the infant stage because they have no thoughts. However, through meditation it is possible to clear thoughts, and develop the ability to gain perfect pitch. For example, Buddha was able to let go of all thoughts (if you believe in the concept of religion) and achieved enlightenment through meditation. Basically, let go of thinking. Feel the sounds of music with not only your mind, but also the body and don't think. It's really, really, REALLY hard to do this because we have adapted to thinking. We thrive on it. Like a drug. But if a person can achieve this, not only can we develop perfect pitch, but we can also create new pitches. The universe is still a mystery, and we have been able to disprove theories throughout history and time again and again. Don't ever let anyone tell you that something is impossible.
That sounds more like new age mysticism woo woo than anything else. Just because we want to believe that anyone can develop perfect pitch doesn't make it so. I have more confidence in the scientists who talk about brain plasticity and windows of opportunity than religious wishful thinking.
Eddy Chen of twosetviolin developed perfect pitch in his high school years. Is this still perfect pitch because he said he just knows the note and doesn't think about it?
I have perfect pitch and I don't understand why it is such a big deal....it's very annoying that everyone wants to test me like Rick did to the kid in this video. For me it's like someone pointing to an everyday object and asking me to name them. Imagine yourself saying "that's a car" "that's a toothbrush" "that's a door" and people gush at you. About 1/4 of my classmates in college (I was a music major) have perfect pitch and none of us find ourselves special, nor we think we are better musician than our colleagues are, just because we have perfect pitch. We still have to work hard to master our instruments. I am a clarinet major and I had a very hard time getting used to the fact that clarinet is a B-flat instrument. As a beginner I always fingered D when my teacher asked me to play C. I did this because I have perfect pitch. So having perfect pitch is not always so great. The only time I feel blessed by perfect pitch is when my students want to learn a pop song and I could jot down the notes right away for them to read. That's all. So stop wasting your time trying to acquire this "ability" and/or arguing with people whether it is possible to develop perfect pitch as an adult or even a child. It's more important that you have a good sense of relative pitch, which is totally trainable for sure!
I understand where you’re coming from, but when you have a gift that 1/10,000 ppl have (way less among English speakers) you have to understand why people find it so special.
but everyone can point out an object, and a very select few people can tell a pitch right off the bat. it's unique. i see what you mean, it's not all great for you personally but to a lot of us it's so cool. :)
You dont know the ability you have just recently i realize how beneficial it would be to develop this gift. It is like you are not born a body builder you have to lift weights the same thing with this gift you have to explore it and go beyond naming notes, like Dealan he actually can name all the notes within a chord he is beyond triads and inversions, but i bet he had to develop it, i am not talking about developing naming notes or acquiring perfect pitch i am talking about naming all the notes of complex chord beyond the factory gift God gave Dealyan. Developing the already acquired perfect pitch.
“I was tone deaf and had no sense of rhythm when I began playing the guitar, and I've pondered that for many years. The answer I finally came up with was that music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice. That's one answer. ”- Robert Fripp, guitarist
@@lucaxtshotting2378 people with perfect pitch don't necessarily have relative pitch. It is in many cases even harder for them to develop relative pitch, because their ability to hear every note obstructs them. Its like having a 20 dollar bill when you need to pay 10 dollars and no one has any change.
Its really not a valuable skill. I knew a pianist who could name whatever note you played. it was him who told me doesn't it really mean anything as far as improving musicianship.
@@SH-th4wy It's the equivalent of a party trick for a musician. If you're a singer and you start the song by singing a certain note, hooray. But that's where its application ends. It doesn't make you better at composing music, it doesn't mean you hear more precisely than others (you can have perfect pitch and still have a bad ear), it doesn't make you better at playing any instruments under normal circumstances. Name me a legitimate scenario where perfect pitch is more than just a trick or niche application.
@@ReTracer I've never had trouble transcribing by ear and I don't have perfect pitch. Relative pitch works fine even for finding chords if you've done enough ear training. Instead of hearing A-C-E I hear root-third-fifth. At best it's easier because you don't have to ever do much ear training.
Kyle Hart Not convincing, Kyle. Transcribing well is not the same as transcribing effortlessly. Imagine for a moment being able to hear a cluster of ten notes, and writing them down without any step required of working anything out. Then again and again and again.
I think that's the biggest thing. Saying it's impossible to develop doesn't sit well with me. I think that if a kid can learn it most of the time, so can adults if they want to.The thing is, it's a bit overrated. Who REALLY wants to? Like not just for show but truly wants to? Very few people because once it's "good enough" (relative) it's useless to get perfect pitch.
Heres a point NOBODY brings up. EVER. I know professional sound engineers (the ones who get 250.00 and hour, drive a Tesla, and recorded a lot of seriously famous albums you have at home, not the "sound guys" who work for beer, lol)...they lose their minds of a guitar is out. But they CANNOT tell jack about drums. At all. I can tell you from across the room, what kind of drum, how big, what drum heads he's using, how big the sticks are, all kinds of stuff. He once asked he, "Why do people buy Roland V-drums? They're so expensive. What's the difference between those and the cheap ones?" He honestly couldn't tell the difference, but he claims Roland has a bit of a hum in every product, DI box or not. He can also hear phase, which I kind of can't and theres no money in it for me at this point yet. Answer: A, mechanically, Roland makes a VERY solid product if you respect them. I've got pieces that are 20+ years old. One cleaning or power supply replacement in that whole time. Cheaper products don't sound anywhere near as good from across the room, (they sound real fake) and they won't be around 20 years from now. It won't be worth it to fix them. An electronics engineer is 75.00 to just LOOK at it. Plus parts n labor. So, you want to spend 3 grand now for a VERY durable item that sounds and feels much better (they don't even easily get scratched) and just have to do it once, or do you want to do it 10 times over 20 years? I vote once.
@Gabzo Avro But its kinda not fair though, because if im a musician with no AP, and another musician with AP, and we try to write the same song, try to give the same theme and same emotions,, and we have the same exact characters and beliefs and physical appearance and experiences (VERY HYPOTHETICAL, I know), he will do it better than i ever can.. i know its not a competition but its not natural that this is the truth of the matter, philosophically..
I used to be a chick singer with a rock band, and I sang jazz and opera(!) in college, but I flunked music theory (twice), and I ain't got no perfect pitch, but I have a good ear compared to a lotta rock singers, or at least that's what our producer/engineer Fred Catero told me. I can almost always nail a vocal on the first take with no flubs, but both of my daughters can just out of the blue sing songs they've heard on the radio acapella, and they're right on the money with the original recorded version. When my younger daughter was a toddler strapped into her car seat, she'd sing the intros in tune to the radio Classic Rock Top 10 Countdown songs before they even started playing .My older daughter is a now a working professional singer, and I like to think it's because I played "Pump It Up" in her crib as a lullaby because it lulled her right to sleep. Kids always make stuff that you had to work really hard at look easy. That's parenthood.
Hey, so at 10:40ish he says that Dylan remembered Star Wars in its specific key before even knowing note name!! That seems the be the key! ...I have great relative pitch and sometimes I can hit spot on with perfect/absolute pitch but when he said this I thought back to some of my favorite early childhood songs and began singing them and it was in the correct key that I remember from my youth!‼️The song was imprinted on Dylan’s brain 🧠! Match the notes with the songs you remember from back then!
I remember back when I was in college, I took a jazz class, the instructor ( Bobby Bradford, jazz trumpet master) stated that perfect pitch is only something one is born with. So there could be a bus driver who has never played an instrument could have perfect pitch. It makes sense that perfect pitch could (COULD) be developed as a baby, because it's a baby with a wide open brain and infinite cognitive possibilities. I believe that it could be DISCOVERED or realized in some adults, but it was always there to begin with.
When I was very young, no classical or jazz was played in the house. I play guitar, by ear, for 44 years now, having started at age 15. I only know what I know.
thank you for this highly informative video, this is the type of content that I love stumbling across on UA-cam.. A powerful learning experience and worth every second of watch time
Careful then. Because it's highly inaccurate. It's clear that he read some pop science and can articulate it well, but he clearly doesn't have a grasp of the underlying problem or the limitations of studies. Several years back the only papers I found claiming that perfect pitch could not be acquired in adulthood were fundamentally flawed junk science. Today there is substantial evidence to the contrary of his claims. His video about lossless music isn't much better. Using scientific terms doesn't turn flawed studies or conclusions into truth.
What "hellish bootcamp" teaches children the soundtrack of Batman and Star Wars? Children learn automatically just by being exposed to stuff. And the entire content of the video is that children learn very quickly. They can possibly recall every single note in the soundtrack after watching the movie twice. Think how a child learns a language. Almost no parent ever is even remotely capable of teaching a language to an adult properly. But basically every parent successfully teaches language to kids (and not just language), because all you need to do with children for them to learn to talk is talking. It is just learning by imitation. It is unavoidable for children to pick up skills.
He subjected his child to music as a second language from the time his fetal child developed ear cavities. I believe there’s an app out that will allow you to do the same.
agreed...the hell with tuning by ear.people that don't play music or know any thing about music don't even give a damn if your even playing real musical instruments anyway.
INVISIBLE TYRANT well, yeah I guess.. but one of the cons of having perfect pitch is being able to tell if a note is off pitch.. it’s almost like nails on a chalkboard. I’ve heard many recordings (especially from the 60’s-70’s) where the song is permanently ruined for me because one bass string was out of tune, and every time a note is played on that string screams out of the mix.. even pitch perfect people can’t tell the difference between 440hz-441hz so tuners are definitely welcomed
I sometimes have the same issue. I was in the car with my wife and a Beatles song came on (I can't remember which one it was mid 60s - before Sgt. Pepper or the White Album, as not being a Beatles fan those are the only two I have), and I had to ask her to change the radio channel as it was out of pitch and was hurting me. Not all out of pitch records affect me like that - some just sound odd. But I wouldn't consider myself to have perfect pitch at all. Maybe adequate pitch. That's about overall pitch, but there are certainly some bands that also failed to tune their instruments properly. About 1/4 of the output by Traffic, for example, has some instrument or other that is out of tune, and much as I love the concept of 60s ska, the brass is generally so out I have serious problems enjoying it. My wife's problem is that she has the hearing of a bat, even in her 40s, so there are a lot of things that to her are grating, and sadly that includes a lot of live music with over hyped high end.
You said that memorizing a single note is different from having perfect pitch. But what if someone were to spent all of their lifetime memorizing most of the notes in a piano. Couldn't that person develop some sort of "artificial perfect pitch"? Not an instinct response to the note like the natural perfect pitch but instead some sort of memory pitch? Not sure how that would apply to other instruments and any other sounds though.
The guy on the channel "saxologic" was able to name the notes on a keyboard, but did acknowledge that it is probably not the same instant familiarity as someone with ap. Would play something random inbetween to lose the reference of the previous note.
The way your son learned the concept first and then developed a name for each note shows just how people actually learn -- we gather up ideas and then link them together under an identity, not the other way around, which is how many topics are taught and seems to be the way most people think things should be learned. Just an interesting observation I found while listening. The whole thing is a rather amazingly interesting subject.
Are people confusing having perfect pitch with being able to play by ear? I can play just about any instrument by ear pretty well. I can find the notes for pretty much any simple song I want to play on the piano and do so pretty much instantaneously, especially if it's in C (no sharps or flats). Maybe other people who don't have this ability (and I know there are many,) can develop it. I don't know, though, because I've always been able to do this and didn't have to do anything to acquire it. But one thing I definitely CAN'T do is identify the name of a note when I hear it. I can easily hear music in my head and play what I hear. But my mental point of reference floats around so I may mentally hear a song in any key and not know which it is until I actually play it on the piano. And that's ok. I think people make to big of a deal over being able to read and identify notes. I don't care about the letter names of the notes or which key something is in. The important thing is to actually be able to play music that sounds good and have fun doing it.
+Danko I'm sorry I had misread what was stated. I thought they were saying they would be able to play any song from their head but I missed the part about it being in any key (which makes it not perfect pitch).
I had perfect pitch when I was a kid but drifted away from music and now it's less accurate. Does this mean I can't relearn it, or can I because I had it when I was little?
Once learned it can be recalled through practice it's kinda like riding a bike or playing guitar after a long time away it slowly comes back from memory
I had a music professor who had an explanation for people who think they developed perfect pitch. It seemed plausible to me. Relative pitch can be learned. You can also learn to memorize an A440. My professor demonstrated that a person with great relative pitch can reference that memory and quickly figure out the interval. It isn't as fast as someone with perfect pitch. As you said, you can develop a really good ear and really good relative pitch. Those are very worthwhile endeavors. More worthwhile than attempting to "learn" an innate ability.
Most people have good relative pitch, as it is simply needed for singing. I have never known anyone with perfect pitch, and I believe you are flatly wrong when you say "You can also learn to memorize an A440".
I had NEVER felt the need to develop perfect pitch, until this guy said it was impossible... weird.
do it and prove him wrong. let us know when you've got it
I guess that's one of the characteristics of humans which makes them the most superior race on this planet but also the most egoistic
@Instrument Zoo I will....and I'm not even a singer, I'm a rapper / drummer / producer, but I decided I need to train my singing voice to be at least 80% as nice as my rap voice
@@Parrish_Muhoberac You didn't understand what I was refering to
@@proverbalizer I think rappers have a lot to benefit from singing. Rap is or at least can be very melodious too. If you not only have a nice rhythm but a nice melody to it too and just generally a nice sound/tone, that is just eargasmic. Strangely though I actually know a rapper who has a great singing voice and lovely pronunciation and a lovely tone/voce color but I most often hate his flow haha so it's to a high degree very subjective I guess haha.
What about adults that act like babies? Can they develop 'perfect pitch'?
They'll develop into a perfect bitch 100%
They can. If they can forget everything first...
no
Very stable musical genius
@@247hdjazz it's a joke
I don't know why everyone's worried about perfect pitch. It doesn't inherently make you a better musician, composer, songwriter or person.
If your songs aren't good, and you develop perfect pitch, your songs still aren't good. Now you know what key it's in though.
+CortMarshal Haha! Good point!!
it is really good for sight singing
i like your quote, Now you just know what shitty notes you put in
It doesn't hurt. Half the point of learning your music theory is so that you can identify mechanics of music quickly, thus giving you more time to get those ephemeral musical ideas out before they fade away like smoke in the wind. Likewise, perfect pitch is another "shortcut" that can help you to beat the devil before he steals what inspiration has gifted you.
@sebastian berg I agree with you. it really helps when you start to compose complex music. when you consider all the modes applied consistently, u can just actually compose it in your head very clearly/precisely. it's a similar thing with hyper realism painters to film color grading professionals, there are only few people who can identify specific hues/colors as accurate as pixels, could actually memorize the digital codes of these colors. there's absolutely no more mix and match or trial and error process. they just compose the colors in their heads and apply the color accurately.
As a musician, I have played enough music to develop tinnitus with a constant pitch that I can use as a reference to find other notes. Tbh its a pro strat
Wowww.. Never thought of this🤨🤨🤔I too have developed tinnitus.
@@SoniaSharma-fm8ym i have tinnitus as result of a brain injury. all it's told me is that for a few years i was boosting around 5khz to the point of ear piercing to the rest of my friends xD
Sonia Sharma yea if it’s loud enough you can use it as a referebce
LIFEHACK
😀
But should I tune my baby to 440 Hz or 432 Hz?
def 440
You can't tuna fish why would you tuna baby
Laughed so much, thank you.
451Hz.
@@Demonstray I'm sueing you
I started playing bass at 52, now 55. I'm not worried about perfect pitch, I'm just worried about trying to remember what I studied yesterday. learning something new at this age is tough but a passion. as far as hearing, I can still hear my wife yelling at me. all good.
Rock that bass as fucking hard as you can man!
Get ya wife screaming like a death metal singer when ya play! ^^
like Chaney Crabb ;).
Have you tried turning your bass amp louder?
Love your reply, "Thomas" -- your great attitude has and will continue to carry you far!
You don't have to worry about remembering what you studied yesterday. The bit of your brain that needs it will have stored it. Like your wife's yell: I don't guess you had to study very hard to recognize that. I'm 61 and still love learning new things. If I have to do it a bit slower than 30 years ago, so what? In the end we'll all be dead and know nothing, but that's true for the young smarty-pants who make fun of us, too.
Bass guitar? Contrabasso? Some other thing? Doesn't matter, just enjoy, my young friend!
Perfect pitch is when you throw a banjo out the window and you hit an accordion player.
LOL
grichard24 I love that.
Lmao 😂
, who falls on the bagpipes and breaks them.
yes
I think people need to understand that many trained musicians can imitate perfect pitch without actually having absolute pitch. Having notes fixed in your mind means you’re still relying on relative pitch. Absolute pitch means that you don’t have to think about it.
exactly, that's what i just replied to the comment above yours. all these adults saying "i developed perfect pitch recently" just memorized the frequencies and honed their relative pitch, which you _can_ develop as an adult. they seem to be confusing it with perfect pitch because the difference is a bit unclear
@@cinnomixwh0t do you mean memorized frequencies and honed relative pitch. 😅 That means still no absolute pitcha according to you. Hate to disappoint you but it actually what is pitch all about. And no human is not a metal detector to determine 1hz frequencies
@@cinnomix Another thing that irks me to no end is people claiming they have synesthesia, but the way they describe it makes ZERO sense. I've read comments where people explained their synesthesia as "certain genres having colors, so drum & bass is purple." I immediately thought that was the stupidest thing I've ever heard because you can't line up genres with colors. The reason synesthesia works for notes is because the frequency of sound waves determine the pitch... like how the frequency of light waves determine color. THAT'S how it works and THAT'S how the correlations are made. Not "this song feels purple." That's hippie dippie third eye BS and literally tells you nothing about the music.
I don't have to think about about yeah to this guy I don't have it because I'm still learning how to play guitar.... Honestly it seems like he is con flating someone being non verbal and someone who does not speak English... If you can instaly understand music you have absulte pitch nomatter what funny noises you need to make to convince someone you do.
@@GreenBlueWalkthroughWhat does having perfect pitch have to do with playing a certain instrument? What are you even on to here?
While it's too late for me. I'm definitely writing this down on my "Things to do as a parent" list.
For sure!
Same
LOL yeah i don't think Rick has any inkling how awesome he really is 😁👌like a freak of nature right? LOL it's only logical his son _would_ have perfect pitch you see haha and how amazing is that. AWESOME!!!!!! This is one of the best videos on the topic i think I'll find anywhere so why look lol Thank you Rick... How many ways can you say all good things to you! And thank you!!! Yeah... Heart and soul... Let the angels roll like thunder moving mountains for you and yours. Amein.
I advice you not to do it, If you don't want your child to suffer as a musician
I'm just going to put this out here as a precautionary statement. Some kids don't care about being musicians no matter how early you start them. If they have an ability, definitely HELP them grow it. Don't become toxic about it. Perfect pitch is being presented as a natural ability here, with the insinuation that not all people even have the possibility of developing it -even as children. That being said, many people without this, do very well in music, even fantastic and make a living doing it and loving it. It's about as important as being able to see gold color in the Ring Nebula. Only a very small number of people can, and only children. As you age you lose sensitivity in the sensors of the eyes. Don't forget to let your children visit scads of good astronomy sessions before they're 10!
I developed perfect pitch at 85 years old after a near death experience and I am also a rocket scientist and a professional luthier, so you're obviously wrong Mr. Beato.
David RF 😂😂😂😂😂
Is this sarcasm? If it's, it's an ABSOLUTELY hilarious comment... PITCH PERFECT!
David RF Hi, really interesting. Do you remember anything from your NDE? If so, would you mind to tell us a little bit about it.
Best,
Neno
Wait, I think you forgot that you also cured the common cold! Thanks, man!
Nazareno D'adamante They played Led Zeppelin there.
What if I listened to every Pink Floyd album as a baby, do I have psychedelic pitch?
Nope, just a very happy childhood...
nah you'd just sleep a hell of a lot.
Zeuseides you become LSD
I listen to every classical music even before I was born but I can’t develop any pitch. Not even relative pitch 😂
Got 99 problems but a pitch ain't 1
Great comment!
Slim Shady forever xD
Don't worry you aren't missing out! It's an absolute pain in the backside.
@@emryswalton1802 Howso?
@@dividebyzero9530 You can't listen to a song if it's in a different key to the 1st version you heard, or you die. You can't sing or hum a song if you think it's in the wrong key, you either automatically know what it is, or if you haven't heard it in a while or have heard it only once or twice, you have to sit there and work out what key it is, or you die. If someone else sings without knowing the key, you die.
And by die I mean extreme discomfort and pain.
Meh, I'm going to develop perfect pitch tomorrow before lunch.
You can do it - I learned it yesterday while doing my morning shave. Piece of cake
ytlongbeach 😂😂😂
Hi people, it might be possible to use an app on your mobile to get this perfect pitch ability. In the future, just download it from the Matrix.
102 fastball
Sup, pitches?
VirKill Almasy stop causing treble
I’ll take a note
These puns are really falling flat.
frequently bassically perfect, dude! ;-))))
I love the internet and the interesting and funny interactions it allows.
Son of a pitch!
perfect pitch is when you can instantly recognize notes and chew gum at the same time
ZeroFunctional I came here to kick ass and chew gum, is that close enough?
Duke Nukem had perfect pitch. True story...
Hey, I can do 50% of the task then!
... and I'm all out of gum.
Hahaha good reference.
I have perfect pitch. Unfortunately, the world doesn't have perfect catch.
BA DUM TSSSS
I did laugh!!
🤣
Yogis Berra had perfect catch.When u get to the throw,pitch it
I used to harmonize with the vacuum cleaner when I was 3 years old.
Ha! I WAS a vacuum cleaner when I was 3 years old.
My dog is harmonizing with the vacuum cleaner, the ambulance and the car alarm. He loves E minor chord. He also leaves the room when I don't play properly :D
I also harmonised with the vacuum cleaner! :D I used to see (hear) which other notes harmonised and which ones didn't, and I was so interested in the disharmonious (is that a word?) notes!
I had forgotten about that, so thank you for jolting my memory! :)
LOL! I used to do the same thing with the garage door opener when i was little.
I used to do it with the floor fan, with my face pressed right up close to the grill, lol.
(Nope, never had perfect pitch, though.)
Given that I’m a 53 year old kid that never grew up, there’s still hope for me 😁
eleven is too old for that
dooon't stop, beliiieeevin
@@sameasnow oh oh aaaaaaaahhhhhh!
As a follow up to this video, I think it would be useful if you could find people with perfect pitch and people with great relative pitch and give them to aural tests like you did to Dylan.
This!
This man is right. I know, because I have a childhood friend that possessed this phenomenon. We grew up going to the same church and playing/singing music together. It was in my teen years that I remember my friend being able to tell me what note I was playing, humming, whistling...or if I was somewhere between the natural and the semitone. Yes I always checked on the piano. It's truly phenomenal.
When I was back in uni studying music, I knew a few fellas having perfect pitch. They hated it. Claiming that most music sounded out of tune to them. Im quite happy with my average relative pitch :-)
Bepi Visintainer - Yes. I sang in a choir with a woman who had perfect pitch, and she was always wincing. She could always tell when we had dropped in pitch (we weren't the best choir), and when anybody hit a sour note. I'm not sure why she put up with us!
@@AspynDotZip I used to play slightly out of tune just for comedy's sake :-)
@@sourisvoleur4854 I guess bad music is better than no music? Reading the other comments in this thread helps to explain why it's better to try and enjoy music as it is than make an effort trying to improve the music others make.
It's really good to see your comments and remember that every blessing can be a curse, and also, while some people enjoy kicking others, it isn't necessary, the unintentionally inflicted pain probably outweighs what the assholes imagine they would like to inflict.
Think how happy you would be if you had none. You know, like the lady at karaoke that makes the dogs howl three blocks over. She always really happy.
Very true... They are wincing at every sound that is not in tune.. not only music, even a police sure for example
As a music teacher I get a lot of adults asking me about perfect pitch. Often many people confuse it with relative pitch. When I explain that, with practice, they can achieve a good enough ear to transcribe music and play what they hear they are usually satisfied. Perfect pitch is, as they say, overrated, at least for what most people want.
100% agree. Perfect absolute pitch is a good parlor show, but really not necessary in the real world.
Salsa Blanca I would love it, over relative pitch, in order to not ever have to buy sheet music ever again. relative pitch wouldn't really help with more than 1 note being played at a time- you can't recognize an Abmb5 with relative pitch, only stuff like a D note going up to A.
That's not true... I don't have perfect pitch but if I hear an Abm7b5 chord, I'll instantly recognize it as a half diminished chord and maybe even the exact voicing I just won't know what key it's in unless I have a reference pitch. You don't need perfect pitch to play by ear although I'm sure it would make it easier
Kyle Windjack - same here. I was not born with a good ear. Most of the music I heard growing up with 60s rock my parents listened to - nothing complex. I had to train my ear myself. After graduating music collage, and years of playing and practice, I could hear extensions in chords. I still make mistakes with what I think I hear. I definitely don't have PP.
PP helps you when you get lost with RP. and vice versa. that's the true power is the comparison.
I think people are mistaking perfect pitch with a great ear. They are two different things!!!!
I don't have it..
I've met one person.. Maybe 2 who have perfect pitch..
And I always chuckle a little when I hear people say they have it.. And I'm always eager to test it..
Because it's not until you meet someone who does have it, do you truly understand what it is..
Good video.. 👍
O Xemangas ,.....as if perfect pitch means awesome musicianship. I agree with you !!
i agree
it's unbelievable that some people out there believe you can learn perfect pitch.. this is non-sense...you either have it or you don't. You can learn and practice and become a very, very good at recognizing relative pitch and with extreme dedication, you can memorize the notes...but once you stop practicing you will forget them... on the other hand. someone that was born with this aptitude can never forget as it is part of them.
Perfect pitch is a highly specialized, but practically useless skill. Love that little kid, Dylan, but people are not filling arenas to watch a person categorize sonic frequencies into alphabets.
Relative pitch is what is valuable as musician- that is being able to play in tune with what you hear regardless of if the tuning is standard, non-standard, out of tune etc.
If you can play by ear, play what you hear in your head, play in key and on rhythm with other musicians you can have a successful career in music. Great musicians don't need perfect pitch. Perfect pitch does not impress listeners, because they don't know if the musicians they are listen to have perfect pitch, unless someone conducts a test and tells them. They do know however if they have relative pitch, if someone is singing or playing off key.
Just hit up my epileptic homie for the sweet Valproate hook up - I’m boutta be a musical genius. Catch me by the freeway diagnosing the pitch of car horns.
@Ross May your comment gave me an aneurysm.
Did it work?
I think some people _realize_ they have perfect pitch as an adult and confuse it with having _learned_ it as an adult.
How would you distinguish between someone who actually learned it then, if you're going to bring forth this argument?
It's easy to rationalize about something once you've come to a decision about what's true beforehand.
@@BillyViBritannia that's fairly easy. If they learned it, then they can document their progress over the course of their learning journey. Which means there evidence of them starting out without perfect and progressively screwing up less and less until they have the performance of someone with perfect pitch. If someone discovered they had Perfect pitch then with little context everything it musical notes they would demonstrate perfect pitch but it might seem like to them they learned it cuz they learned the names of the notes.
@@aliasjon8320 there is actually evidence of such a thing but people name it "true pitch" and they say it's different from perfect pitch because you associate the pith with another familiar sound first. However that's what Rick's son was doing when he said "thats the superman note" so I'm not sure why people feel the need to differentiate those skills. It's neither a game changing skill nor impossible to learn.
@@BillyViBritannia Can I take a moment to acknowledge your cool username fellow code Geass fan
Yup. I've got Pitch Perfect for two notes because those were my starting note in the Cmajor scale for the instruments I played as a kid. I can give you a perfect Bflat and F because I played Trumpet and French Horn as a kid.
I can guess the other notes with great accuracy because of piano training, but couldn't, right off the top of my head, sing you any other note without taking some time to think first.
Actual Title of this Video: Why my son is better than you.
You just want to smack him for doing it so effortlessly .
Word
Title of your comment:
I'm super jealous of your son's ability...
@@metalhead2320 Nah boi I got relative pitch I'm good.
@@metalhead2320 Just chill my man we're cool here in comment land.
having perfect pitch myself, i think what could be stressed more is the encouragement (and spreading of the information) that its actually not that hard to develop a relative pitch that with enough training becomes almost indistinguishable from perfect pitch in a musicians daily life. yes, you need ONE reference note at the beginning of the session, but thats it. you basically say this in your video too, but i think it could have been placed more prominently. ah well, monday quarterback brabbling on my part, pardon :)
one more thing though: a phenomenon that is not talked about as often is the rather sad process of slowly losing perfect pitch with age. i initially thought of this as an urban myth (or a bedtime spook story of sorts ;), but this has now happened to 100% (!) of the people i know that have perfect pitch and are in their mid 40s or higher. the science behind it seems to suggest that this is because of the ever changing shape of our ears and the varying angles in which the soundwaves hit them as a result. im starting to experience it myself too, im now a fraction of a tone off. my "insticts" that used to be infallable have become a bit insecure, and at least for the first note that i hear, i need a moment to remind myself that my hearing is slightly detuned and i need to imagine the tone a bit deeper to be correct. it confuses the s**t out of me, sadly. i grew up with 440hz tuning, and it feels wrong now. i have an old piano in the studio that "hangs at 434", and when i sit there, hooray, im back to having infallable perfect pitch.
now, for colleagues of mine, it has become a lot more extreme. and this is where *relative* pitch becomes a new meaning and importance. when youve been a pro musician your entire life, you usually have a very developed relative pitch, and that is what you then need to rely on in support of your used-to-be-perfect pitch. my father (also used to have PP) at age 80 is now a full halftone off. so the process in his brain is "i hear a tone, i transpose it in my mind one halfstep up, thats the note". which ironically makes it easier for him that it is for me with my micro detuning ;) anyway, you need the security that comes with trained relative pitch (especially maximum confidence with intervals, which can be learned as adult) because if you *used* to have perfect pitch, unlike somebody who just always worked with relative pitch, you have this internal conflict for every new note that you hear where your ex-PP says "that of course is a G" while your RP will say "this is a fifth over the B that you just heard, so its of course an f sharp".
bottom line: relative pitch is super important even for people with perfect pitch. the good news is that, if you have perfect pitch, during the many many many years where your perfect pitch is fully intact, if you do play music, you unconsciously train relative pitch all the time as well, because of your constant awareness of all the notes you hear - awareness of their interval relationship to each other is then just a mere statistical process that your brain does.
and its, thankfully, something you dont lose. like, my perfect pitch is now slightly f***ed because my "calibration is off" - but since intervals are independant of whether you hear 440 or 434 or whatever, you could still play me the weirdest intervals for a dozen years nonstop and i would still be able to identify all of them without ever making a mistake. so, that part of the "color palette feel" of hearing thankfully doesnt go away.
rant over. sorry :)
Best comment on this video. I would love to talk to you sometime. Please write to me at rickbeato1@gmail.com. Thanks!
wow, thanks a lot :) btw, we have talked before...
actually, now that i think of it, i kind of fear that i have brought this up in the past already. so if im repeating myself, sorry for that :)
Your idea about the the changing shapes of the ears as we age are extremely important and a few years ago gave rise to a theory of mine that perhaps aged persons with less than perfect hearing do not actually need a hearing aid, but a plastic surgeon to alter the shape of their ears. I have tried altering my ear shapes a number of times and have actually been able to clearly hear many sounds that I can't hear normally. I would like to do more research on this idea.
zorglub667
That happened to me: I didn't know why people thought what I could do as a child was a big deal (from the ages of 6 until about 12) and could think up tunes in my head and write them on manuscript more easily than I could write.
As I got older and puberty kicked in, I did the typical 'rebellious teen' stuff and moved away from music.
Now the only thing that I can do musically is wince when something is sharp or flat: I used to play 5 instruments and now I can't even read music anymore...
spot on my friend...........I woudnt say i have perfect pitch BUT as you say about calibrating references im sure your aboulutly correct!......Im a musician and was around my grandfathers piano playing as a baby and carried that on into my own musical world........My point is that my piano (that was my grandads) is not set to correct pitch E.G. middle C is actually down to G but slightly sharp too.........BUT saying this i used to hear songs or films and climb onto the stool and find these songs with no problem at all.....this is why my grandfather used to love having me around when he played........we never talked about perfect pitch and we never discused the tuning of the piano and he actually taught me about middle C but obviously it was never true C at 440 HZ.......we in England also have a news program called " News at 10" and it samples big ben the bell out of the clocktower and that bell is not a true E its slightly sharp as i recall so I guess what im saying is there are so many other "Micro pitches" under sharps and flats that have been in the world i live in that it must be impossible to attain a perfect pitch when all these variables are considered.......would you not agree?......... i hope you both reply......thankyou
Maybe we just need to learn a new way to teach perfect pitch
Oliver Sacks discusses perfect pitch at length in Musicophila. He mentions a number of cases where a brain injury (the planum temporale is especially related to perfect pitch) affected pp in different ways, in one case shifting the individual's pp by 1 semitone! And although some individuals have gained (or lost) great musical abilities after a brain injury, he never mentions this ever resulting in acquiring perfect pitch. HOWEVER, in a different chapter on Musical Savants he describes someone with autism who became a musical savant at 16 (a late age for this) including the ability to reproduce complex chords, instantly reproduce melodies, AND perfect pitch!
6:06 as a linguist, I've got to say: this is actually a pretty good explanation of how babies learn language. Your definition of a phoneme is a bit erroneous, but I am so impressed with the rest that it doesn't even bother me. Well done, Rick! Educating people on all fronts!
Being a linguist is not relevent, this is about biology and what a human brain is open to and when it is open to a certain catallyst while develpoing.
@@OldDawg-mc3dy It is absolutely relevant. The field of neuroscience was developed in part BY linguists (Noam Chomsky for example) to help explain observed linguistic phenomenon. Noam Chomsky, (one of the founders of field of neuroscience), has argued on record that the human capacity for mathematics is just a freebie that comes along with human's capacity for language. I don't think it would be a stretch to imagine human's capacity for music to be much the same: just a freebie that comes along with the neurological structures required for human language.
@@rolasmola9641 N
Not relevant it is biological
Language is biological.
@@rolasmola9641 😂😂😂
I started taking music lessons at 7 but didn't really start studying music until I was about 20, and then again at about 55. Even though I became movement impaired from a head injury in my late teens that prevents me from handling most instruments well, when I eventually found a instrument I could handle in my 50s, I was able to improv some very cool stuff. This video kind of explains how a movement impaired person could still have better than average improv ability. I love this YT channel!
I've had Dylan-style perfect pitch my whole life and, as a pipe organist, I find it more of a hinderance than an asset. Imagine playing historic pipe organs in Europe that are tuned differently. If you press a G, you might hear an F, F#, G, G#, or even an A or Bb, depending on the instrument. This is extremely disorienting, and I've had to fight my reliance on my perfect pitch to play these instruments well. I think it's much more useful to develop a good relative pitch.
Such a stupid thing to say for real... What would some people do to have this talent...
Faith Matters what do mean by good relative pitch?
Yeah, I knew a dude back in the day who had perfect pitch, he was a pain in the ass to work with, like if you played 1 chord and 1 string was slightly out of tune, he would immediately stop everything and tune the guitar, but I mean, no one in the studio could hear it, you needed a tuner to see it was actually 1 mil out of tune.
I'd like to know what "Dylan-style" is. I could google it, but I'm not going to.
@Sel Poivre Perfect pitch isn't a talent, it's an ability. Talent is something you can learn and develop. Perfect pitch is something that is. Perfect pitch is as much a hindrance as it is a gift.
@SN L
Good relative pitch means that I can sing intervals like a Major third or perfect fifth really well, but I don't have perfect pitch. Relative pitch is the opposite of perfect pitch.
@MegaMech. "Dylan-style" is in the video. It's the presenter's son (Dylan) instantly naming notes without a moment's hesitation.
Not trying to be snarky and condescending.
I taught myself perfect pitch in my late teens. I started with David Burge’s course, but after the first lesson I thought it was hogwash and I went my own way. Which was essentially what Dylan did. Each pitch was a prominent piece of a favorite song. For awhile it was tough to get the song associations out of head because they distracted me from the subject song. But over time it became automatic. Each pitch had its own color (similar to the circle of 5ths on a color wheel), its own emotion, and its own voice. For example “A” sounded like “Ack!” and sounded like “Broooom”. I would hear the squeak of a door and know it was C.
Had I stuck with it I would certainly still have it. But life happened, and no time to be serious with music when you’re raising kids and working 10 hour days. There was a time I tried to improve, using some internet app where you could pick out chord notes. I got up to being successful with triads, which is better than I was as a teen. But then I got super busy again. And the app doesn’t exist anymore or I’d try it again now.
So I think the reason adults typically can’t learn things like this, isn’t because they physically can’t. It’s because of too many other responsibilities and no time for the required freedom of mind.
Relative Pitch + Tinnitus = Perfect Pitch ;)
I saw Adam Neely talk about this phenomenon, and in all seriousness, it works for some people and doesn't for others. The issue is that the internal "pitch" from tinnitus isn't always consistent from day to day or even throughout the day, so people who have this ability have to recalibrate their ear all the time.
Yeah, I was joking. My tinnitus is actually a few octaves too high to use as a useful reference haha
Ahahaha
For many years it rang in F... worked to a degree... Its in A now
Right now my tinnitus is two notes. A B7 and a C8
Fantastic (and true) observations Rick. I am a musician here in the UK who studied and worked at EMI electronics in the 1960's. As a young scientist I worked with the team that made the first brain scanner - I was the young engineer that made many of the components used in 'The EMI scanner' - a simple machine by modern standards. I also started playing guitar at the age of seven and although I have very good relative pitch I couldn't claim to have perfect pitch per se. However, my son William (now 27) does have it and I agree with your observations as to why babies do develop this skill . I started teaching William to sing when he was a baby - he also listened to a lot of jazz, classical and progressive rock from the cradle ( not that he had a choice in that!).
He now is a professional musician and plays most instruments (stringed), drums and percussion. He also has a perfect tempo clock in his head - again from learning so early I believe. Between us we run a recording studio, build guitars and train and teach players to build, repair and play...
Absolutely love your no BS youtube channel. Regards, Robbie
Robbie Gladwell so cool that you work on music with your son. Very inspiring!
Some of the greatest pianists and guitarists in the world never had perfect pitch. For heaven's sake Chuck Berry, or Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton or David Gilmour or Brian May or Slash or Kurt Cobain never had it and yet they had a great ear for music and created some of the most influential pieces of music in history...it's important to note that there's a lot of people out there with perfect pitch with perfect pitch yet it's only the chosen few that constitute the musical greats because they may be really good at naming notes and chords but have no specific flair at using them to make good music...what really matters is how you think about music and what you want your music to sound like, something that gives your music your individuality, and that my friend is what all the above legends have executed successfully and with breathtaking finesse
Great point. What is the value of it?
Hendrix may have had absolute pitch actually
@@tylerkeegan5615 Nah he didn't have it. Half of his records are out of tune.
How do you know they got perfect pitch? You are guessing! Having or not having perfect pitch is irrelevant to whether or not one is a good musician.
Your comment is ridiculous!
I must’ve developed my AP by luck of the draw. When I was eighteen months old, I developed benign relandic epilepsy, and got the rare form which caused learning delays. I couldn’t understand language, so I developed musical abilities instead. I would sing wordless melodies perfectly, and when I started piano at seven years old, I’d been asking for lessons for two years before that. I finally got caught up in language with everyone else when I was five, but I still don’t understand some subtle language nuances. I physically can’t learn other languages. Lastly, when I was nine, my technique teacher did the note-naming tests and I got it right every time.
My epilepsy went after puberty, but I still have perfect pitch. It doesn’t go away even if I don’t use it. I can’t remember not having it. I wasn’t exactly born with it, but my brain went whack so I acquired it.
The human brain is utterly amazing, and still such a mystery.
GreyMatterStew yep. I wonder if I’d be a musician at all of that medical accident hadn’t happened.
James, that's something to ponder, indeed. Maybe you would have loved music any way. What you went through served to sharpen the skills that allow you to accel at it.
I have a sort of reverse story. I've loved music all my life. I started learning to play bass at age 15. This was 1985. Everybody wanted to be in a band. I wanted to write and play music. Famous rockstar would have been nice, but that wasn't my goal. I played with friends, with tapes, radio and eventually CDs. I would sit and play while watching TV. I loved it. I seriously considered going to a big city to pursue it further. Unfortunately, there were other things in store for me. I had a stroke in March of '92 at the age of 21, and lost control of my right side. Couldn't play any more. I play some now, but the use of my right hand is still limited. I also have trouble remembering things. Like how to play songs. I can't seem to retain things anymore.
I guess you're brain trauma, made you the musician you are, while mine kept me from being the musician I wanted to be. God, fate, blind chance, the cosmos maintaining balance, whatever you may, or may not subscribe to the brain is super amazing and so fragile, at the same time. Play on for both of us.
How do you KNOW you weren't born with it, though? Most people who have perfect pitch don't know that they have it until the ages of roughly three to six; it all depends on when and whether the people around you notice that you have it or not (obviously, musically inclined parents will notice it earlier than those who aren't). Most kids will never be aware that they can or cannot name various notes on command before that age. You say that you discovered your command of absolute pitch at seven. This is a bit on the later side, but if the people around you weren't especially musically inclined, it's completely reasonable that no one would have noticed it until your piano teacher did when you started lessons. But just because it was discovered slightly later doesn't mean it was acquired later than birth. The fact is, unless someone sat down with you BEFORE you developed epilepsy at 18 months, and tested you to see if you had perfect pitch then - which would be a rare scenario indeed - you wouldn't know if you had it at that age or not. Indeed, I'm not sure how one would even diagnose it at so young an age, since most 18-month-olds (a) don't have the musical reference knowledge to be able to name the various notes, and (b) wouldn't have the language skills to be able to discuss the subject. You'd basically have to be in some sort of neuropsychology clinical study to know that at all at 18 months. I'm sure I've had perfect pitch since birth, but it wasn't discovered until I was four or five, when I started taking piano lessons.
I'm not saying you don't have perfect pitch; I believe you probably do, if you can name notes instantly and/or produce them at will. I'm just questioning HOW you know you didn't have it since birth. :-) Cheers!
GreyMatterStew Indeed! At least you still have your voice, right? I’ll play on, for you, myself, and everyone else who needs it. :)
Well im an autistic adult (20 years old) and I developed perfect pitch two weeks ago. I just had to learn the names of the notes
I'm being serious when I ask if anyone has tried to train for perfect pitch under the influence of hallucinogens.
i think mushrooms have the potential to rewire a brain and could be used to develop perfect pitch given the perfect training exercises and prior musical training. It would have to be through color/number Synesthesia and developing strong emotional,color, and shape relationships to notes. I think our brains already do subconscious statistical analysis of all data and it could be very possible to rewrite ur brain.
The most important takeaway of this comment: it is important to remember that nothing is impossible just because someone has a lot of experience and has no evidence of something being possible. Yes, this youtuber is really good at music, but I dont believe anyone who says something is impossible. Especially something as simple as perfect pitch. Yes it is possible. No it has not been proven to this point.
I would be my bottom dollar that taking psychedelics (LSD in particular; possibly marijuana) would replicate the baby pitch phenomenon. Neurogenesis. Neural plasticity. That’s all LSD is about. New perspectives.
By the way. When the kid identifies the pitch and Dad says yes.... I thought according to Dad that it is impossible for him to have perfect pitch as an adult. So how can he affirm that the kid was correct?
As much is I think Rick is awesome, I do think this video is a showcase of trying to show how his kid is better than everyone else. No disrespect here the kid is very gifted.
Chris Indermuehle memories are retained on psychedelics
alextheskaterdude07 I don’t get your point, Rick is playing the piano
Does anyone else remember the advertisement for perfect pitch in all the guitar magazines of the 80s & early 90s? It was the goofiest looking thing. Rick your son is amazing, you taught him well, I love your videos.
Totally remember that goofy looking guy in those ads in Guitar Player Mag...HAHA!
David Lucas Burge. He still sells that course.
I bought the book used! Interesting, but not extremely helpful.
@@simpleeye7950 👍
yes i bought that course and it was excellent ear training,
People can learn to speak a new language without accent up until the age of 8, so the thing about the phonems can not be correct.
Perfect pitch is when one throws an accordion into a dumpster and it lands on a banjo.
I've heard that, and yet I still love the banjo, lol!
Ohh Me-Owww LOL
I love these instruments , but still funny.
Thank goodness no bagpipes were harmed!
Nope. Bagpipes have to be involved!
I tuned my guitar perfectly by ear once, I still have no idea how I did it or how to do it again
It's like having super powers that only work in the dark when no one is around to see.
Do it again but this time blindfolded and in the dark
Most people who play stringed instruments seriously learn to tune by ear. This still doesn’t count as perfect pitch.
Do you remember tuning your guitar perfectly, or do you remember the way you felt and were thinking the time you tuned it perfectly?
The best I can do for a tuning base is recalling songs deeply rooted in my memory from adolescence. Intro to 2112 is a go too. Burned in.
I wish I had this video when my piano teacher at 12 was trying to train me into perfect pitch. Shoulda happened when I was 2 not 12. He graded my lessons, and I got an F. My dad grounded me until I made 4 As in a row (two months). Can you imagine being 12 and grounded because it’s impossible to have this thing you don’t have.
But you DID eventually get it. Perfect pitch disproved.
@@nycholaus and from what exactly did you deduce that?
I'm fairly sure it was relative pitch, not perfect pitch. They're similar but not the same
That's what happens when you have narcissistic parents.
if he means "baby" as in actual baby i'd have to object. As long as ones brain is stiill in early development it should be possible.... and even still possible for adults with something liek Autism. Our brains stop developing around 22...... after that ur fucked.
What an fascinating video. I had perfect pitch - as good as Dylan - until I was in my early 50s. Then it started drifting -around a semitone flat so if I hear an 'A' I think its A#, and it's become way less 'instant' probably because I have to mentally transpose everything now.
Interesting about Bach. My favourite music when I was 2-3 was a record my parents had of the Brandenburg concertos. I started piano lessons at just 5, but only because I used to play it all the time way before that. I got my first violin for my sixth birthday.
People are right to say it's a bit of a party trick and a mixed blessing though. It meant I couldn't play the guitar with a capo because it sounded completely confusing - eg. I'd play a G chord and it would come out E-flat or something. Music written for brass instruments is sometimes written transposed, with C instead of B-flat and that used to be confusing too.
But there are big benefits too of course - you can fluently write down any music you hear, instantly analyse chords and harmonies, and I was the 'human pitch pipe' when I was a chorister at Winchester cathedral
I really appreciate this video, a very dear friend of mine and lead guitar player in my band actually has perfect pitch. He has never really known why or how he acquired it. He always thought it was just something genetic. When watching this video he began having memories of his deceased father playing bach and bethoven in the house and his constant access to a piano.
a neuroscientist that claims authority in the subject and doesn't know what relative pitch is? hahaha welcome to brazil
Cássio Zambotto it's s similar situation when physicists and engineers sit down with musicians to talk about musical acoustics.
Perhaps on the neuroscientist claim he was... oh, I don't know: LYING!???
boobtuber06 I don't think he was lying, I think he really didn't understand the difference between AP and RP
I’ve been mimicking the sounds of things all my life and people have been weirded out by how accurate I get them. I do not have perfect pitch, but I do have a pretty nice relative pitch.
I don’t know the names of any notes, but I can tell you how far they are apart by just hearing two. If I hear a note I can accurately find it on a piano on either the first or second try, but I still don’t know the names.
I think that’s how far my relative pitch goes, and I think tons of people have it the way I do, I just wanted to share.
Step 1 Do DMT
Step 2 study music
Step 3 ????
Step 4 PROFIT
To be honest, there is probably a chemical +training solution, yes. There's also a device created by David Eagleman that electrocutes you to teach the brain new signals. Studying this might also provide some insight into possible solutions.
It's funny how Perfect Pitch is very rare, yet about 50% of the commenters here claim to have it. :)
Perfect pitch is actually quite common, or rather I should say the ABILITY to have it, sadly you'll have to rely on your parents to teach it to you which is why it's rare lol
@@RobinEvans1234 He's actually said it in a video before that the perfect pitch Gene is consistent throughout half the population, but the actual skill needs to be developed vigilantly. Which is something very few parents do as most people aren't musicians or they aren't very heavily involved in it, futhermore, most parents won't force music onto their child, that is the cause of its rarity :)
@@alexloveday6430 I was actually listening to the vid as I was reading the comments, and it got to that bit strait after I dropped my inquiry, so I deleted my redundant inquiry and wished someone had played a lot more classical and jazz music at me when I was young.
@@RobinEvans1234 same wish tbh, but relative pitch is still more important and functions almost as fast depending on much you develop it ;) so don't give up!
@@alexloveday6430 Yes, relative pitch gets the job done.
Time to get some valproate and a bunch of avant-garde jazz albums
Lmfao I was wondering why I didn't see any comments about that part
No jazz. Don't do it
Your son is ADORABLE! I need to get my toddler sons started then
Here's the biggest takeaway from this video: Dylan is a dope kid.
Yep, he's the coolest person on UA-cam as far as I'm concerned
I'm really impressed with him. He grew up in a perfect environment and the kid has already a successful career ahead!
Hey Rick, I get a bit nervous every time I see non-linguists explain linguistic phenomena but you did a pretty good job, I didn't spot any factual errors. I would explain children's acquisition of phonemic material like this though; children listen to contrasts in the language they get exposed to, for example a child with Egyptian parents will regularly hear [k] and [q], and thus they generalize that there is a contrast between these two. If all you hear is [k] but no [q] you will not develop a contrast between these two sounds, because it's not meaningful in the language at question. Similarly if you hear extremely simple music in your childhood, the distinctions between actual notes don't become meaningful, because you hear the same cadences over and over but just in different keys, so the child does not learn to differentiate between the notes themselves, because it concludes that there is no contrast between the same chord progression in D major vs. Bb major.
What most people who claim that perfect pitch can be developed don't realize is that language can't be developed fully after the critical period either. If a child is not exposed to language in the first six years of its life, it will never acquire a language to any meaningful extent. This has been demonstrated with so called "feral children", who never acquire most of the skills we associate with full linguistic competence. In a sense a vast majority of all people are musical feral children.
Great comment! I love comments that actually expand upon the topic. Thank you!
Musical Feral Children is an amazing band name.
To be quite frank I don't know and I am hesitant to conjecture on the subject, although I think it is quite clear that absolute pitch is not as common as language acquisition, possibly because our ancestors were selected based on that, as it seems to just be a side effect that surfaces given other factors that are present.
I feel that the analogy between phonemes and music may be instructive. Learning to distinguish the phonemes of a new language takes a long time, but many people become fluent in a new language, even as adults. With sufficient practice, a small minority of people even learn to produce the sounds of a language that they did not know in their youth to a degree that they may be mistaken as a native speaker. Nearly all pronunciation education experts have come to agree that it takes much too long to be a practical investment of time, and I'd argue that perfect pitch is the same. If only 1/10,000 develop something as children, then only 1/100,000,000 may learn it as adults. Rather than trying to convince students against developing native accent as "impossible", language teachers have realised that it's better to help learners understand how an (comprehensible) non-native accent meets 99.999% of all language needs than to try to convince people that it's "impossible".
So now for the instructive part for music and perfect pitch: I'd suggest that there is no real advantage to convincing people that it's "impossible" to develop perfect pitch. Proving that something is not impossible can be achieved by doing it, and such suggestions will indubitably incite some such attempts. On the other hand, I'd suggest it makes much more sense to help people understand it as a return on investment. Even if it's possible, it will surely take a great deal of time that would be better spent on developing communication through music (as advanced levels of both listening and creating music can be achieved by nearly everyone...). Put another way, promote an understanding of what experts use to evaluate how well different practices may aid the development of musical abilities.
In contrast, I would argue against an idea like: listened to 4-chord pop as a kid? Keep listening to pop. You will never be able to figure out more. It would be more like: actually, if you ever were to develop perfect pitch as an adult, it would be through spending more time developing your ear for high information music, not through intentional practice. Many of the adults who develop native-like accents did it by listening for a long time before they ever said anything in the new language.
I think you misunderstood my point. I am not saying that you can't learn new phonemes as an adult, or become fluent in a new language. I have done both, so I know it from experience. What I'm saying is that the ability itself to differentiate between phonemes and understand contrasts within aural information is developed during the critical period. Similarly, a child needs to learn to differentiate between pitches and not cadences during the critical period, after which it won't happen (to the best of my knowledge).
A 2013 study from Harvard University researchers reported that a drug commonly used to treat epilepsy could effectively reopen a critical period of learning ability, allowing a person to learn skills like absolute pitch.
Watching that video I randomly sang a note, saying "C". Went to my keyboard, was actually an F#. Can't be farther...
Do you have a transpose button?
First case of absolute imperfect pitch in the world!
Where you can't name the actual note but you can name the farthest one from it
Literally the Tritone 😂
Hey if you consistently had polar opposite pitch, could be a use for that lol
Some of us are inexplicably obsessed by the perfect pitch myth. To me, a reliable musical memory is far more important...
i'm sorry, but it's just completely non-scientific to say "i'm sorry, but you can't learn perfect pitch as an adult"
that kid is incredible!
@Grundle Munch ???
@Grundle your lack of neurons is incredibly pathetic
Don't know where this homophobia stems from
Nor do I care.
I believe Rock's point was simply to give an example of perfect pitch , which his son just happens to posses. It could have been anyone's son. Fortunately for Rick his son his son truly posses
We should celebrate this and be happy for Rick. However, I sense insecurity on the part some regarding of which tells me if not others that they are themselves insecure with, first the their own selves, and secondly perhaps, just perhaps) their own a plack of perfect pitch. It also reveals for those making such comment,
lack of forsite. If these people spent less time acting as a bitches and calling out others as bitches, they they would much happier for it they might achieve relative pitch and be grateful for that.
PS. They might also find they have more friends and gigs. I don't care who they are they are only harm themselves ( personally, professionally, and their own possibility to acheive relative pitch. Again, I say iit dissent matter,you are, what you like to think of yourselves. This attitude in the end doesn't serve you or others.
Grundle Munch Like you Omg!
Perfect pitch is over-valued. For music it's the relation of pitches, how they insinuate and challenge a tonal narrative, is what matters. relative pitch is where it's at, and anyone can learn it.
Yep.
Scott Joplin had perfect pitch. He wrote his music away from a piano without any difficulty. Between that and tuning instruments (and correcting performers) is the best use you can find for it. However listening to music can be aggressive and abrasive when one feels the forks of off-key stabbing one's eardrums into submission. Not sure if it's worth it.
Itemtotem I’ve got AP and non-12-equal pitches don’t bother me. Without xenharmonic ear training, it’s very easy for the ear to make a 12-edo-like framework out of what you’re hearing.
this! relative pitch is love
but you got to admit, playing a piece of music after hearing it (or by memory) is a really nice thing. If you have perfect pitch, the relation of the pitches is natrual to you or not?
Has anybody been astounded by a word or expression that their child has said, in perfect context, completely out of the blue?
I have a guitar tuner. That is all I need. I have perfect recognition of when things are not in pitch and that is all a musician needs. So I guess I have perfect non-pitch.
@@Parrish_Muhoberac Also as noted very few people have perfect pitch. So for the vast majority this is not a problem and very slight minor pitch problems have no effect on our enjoyment and experience of music.
If someone with "perfect pitch" ability hears a 440 Hz tone and identifies it as "A", what happens if they're presented with 446Hz, or 453Hz or 459Hz? At what point does "A" become "A#"?
dhy5342 lol, I just did that with my voice.... I sang an A, then bended it one pitch at a time a few times until I got to Bb. My cat was napping, she picked herself up & came over purring.... So in my case, I get a happy kitty ☺️. She's used to music & sits in my lap purring when I practice my flute. To answer the question, once A goes over 450, it starts to sound more like a Bb to me.
Depends on what the musician is used to, and their inherent talent. Jacob Collier, being a few levels beyond perfect pitch, can also arbitrarily divide an interval into equal parts and sing them. (Search his name and "microtones"). But Aimee Nolte, who also has perfect pitch, is blown away by that ability and is pretty much reduced to the level of the rest of us when trying to hit the notes between the notes.
Jacob Collier's ability is pretty astounding, he cann't just hear what note something is, he can tell you fairly accuratly what the frequency itself is, and he can hear that a note is an A sharpened by about 40% of a semitone etc.. So the answer is, it depends on the musician. It's the same as colour - when does red become orange in a gradient?
Thats what he was saying about the "buckets". An "A" is the tones that are in between a B and an A#.
somehow you hear them both. I'd say like, that is one heck of a Bb-ish "A" sound. Here's something that will blow your mind. Sometimes the relativeness is completely different than the note. I've transferred bad cassettes to CD and would be like, "why's that major 3rd (in A Major) sound like a D? That's totally a third it's totally in relationship to A, but I'm hearing a D. Evidently the bad A rounded to an A but the bad C# was closer to the D than the A was to the Bb. I don't know.
Great Video Rick! I believe you are right. I have wondered about this for many years. i had a friend when I was younger named Larry. He had absolute pitch. It always fascinated me. We were in high school together. He could literally play just about any instrument you could hand him. I was a beginner on guitar when he and I hung out back then. We started a band together. For some reason, he wanted to play drums. He was an incredible drummer, but I couldn't wrap my head around why he would want to play drums, when he had perfect pitch. Unfortunately he passed away several years ago, and I have tried for at least 20 years to teach myself perfect pitch with no success at all. However, trying to acquire perfect pitch DID help me to obtain a very good relative pitch. I can name most notes pretty quick, but I do need a middle C for reference...I felt like a failure for several years, but this video made me feel a lot better about myself...lol Thank you sir!
I have never known anyone with perfect pitch, and don't have myself.
Perfect pitch is not defined, as it is claimed here, to be able to define a note instantly when hearing it, but simply to sing one named tone.
But this is what people can't learn, and I would to meet the guy claiming to be able to sing an F#.
Perfect pitch is not regarded as being important for musicians and composers and most of them didn't have it.
Relative pitch is on the other hand extremely important, but most people have that .
Dillon is one in a million, I believe.
I dont have perfect pitch but with that being said I got somewhat kind of a, weird for me, pitch memory. I have a type of frequence in my head of a G# what I recognize from a song I heard planty of times in my childhood and no its not a classical piece or jazz piece. its a standart piece with acctually one modulation with a key change from G to G#. because of listening to that song all the time i kinda internalized it and sometimes when i hear someone playing a G# on the guitar but just the G#, not the chord, i recognize it. not always but sometimes.
it feels weird but i have to say im fine with it. i still have to train on my relative pitch and then i can at least say "i always have a reference tone!" smh... just kidding with a little bit of seriousness.
I would love to have perfect pitch but its not needed in my opinion.
and who cares if u have to take 5 mins longer for transcribing things. doesnt make much of a difference.
perfect pitch is nice to have but no must need.
u just need to have talent and feel for music. look at eric clapton, carlos santana, miles davis, stravinsky and many others who changed the world with their music.
fuck people who say perfect pitch is needed. its nice but nobody really needs it.
@@alllovese4syx319 I would really like to meet you one day and hear your note, and see if you can reproduce it precisely every time (which I believe you can not. :-) Whatever! Thanks for your input.
@@sormu16 Well, i gotta tell you, i have to really focus on it when i want to reproduce it, cuz of, so i believe, harmonics inside of a note. if u dont know what im talking about, then u should know that C for example exists also out of a G and so on. Thats what makes it difficult but possible.
Neuroplasticity slows down but does not stop as we age. If we can learn to perceive new colors (light frequencies) that were lost due to cultural conditioning, we can most definitely learn to perceive specific audio frequencies (notes) that we never learned to discern due to lack of cultural conditioning.
agreed 💪
You missed the point of this video. My parents language was German and Portuguese. I speak English, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swiss German, German and French fluently. I've taken accent courses in cockney and my English is almost indistinguishable from any native Londoner and I'm currently learning the Mid-Atlantic US accent. Even though I speak many languages and hold also the highest qualification diploma possible with many of them they are never going to be a natural first language. I can even think of a number of words and expressions I know in English that I do not know how to say in my mother/father- tongue and still that doesn't put me on the same level as someone who was born in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or USA.
If you have perfect pitch you don't need to think about it, it comes natural. You could train and get to a certain level of proficiency but it would never even come close to someone who has retained it from their childhood. You just have to accept that some talents don't get better through extensive training. Even though I can easily make anyone believe I'm an englishman, it takes great effort to do so and during a moment of stress or inattentiveness my accent could theoretically slip just a tiny bit. I can fool everyone but I can't fool myself.
What have YOU DONE TO YOUR SON !!!
I wish my parents had done to me :(
I have done the same with my son 11 years ago, Started at 2 with little games.
@@calrich768 what do you mean?
Considering some people apparently go into comas then wake up being able to speak an entirely different language, I wonder if someone could be knocked out and then wake up with perfect pitch.
I will remember to play sophisticated music to every baby I encounter. This explains why I struggled with learning Cantonese and Mandarin in my 20s.
That is how my mother found out I had perfect pitch!
Whenever she was singing or humming a song I knew, I told her she sings it wrong and corrected the key to the song. of course, I was young, so I just stubbornly sang in the right/original key I heard the song in, to try and convince her to move to it.
I have a recording of me doing it, really funny
Well, thank you Mr. Beato.
Now I want to conceive a child
People who claim they developed Perfect Pitch as an adult -- actually had perfect pitch as a child, but were not exposed to music training. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many people with natural (childhood) perfect pitch never, ever, ever developed it, and its simply there in the back of their head. For those very few, very lucky people, training could UNLOCK & formalize a skill their baby-brain acquired years ago, assuming they haven't been totally isolated from music. But it WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE to formalize in adults who did not already develop this unrefined-ability as a baby.
This claim is not falsifiable since if the perfect pitch was not discovered until adulthood there would be no way to know when it first appeared. So taking all cases where people first showed perfect pitch as adults, as evidence that they must have had it since childhood is really a self-fulfilling delusion.
It is possible for anyone to learn perfect pitch without any musical experience at any age. The reason why Rick Beato claims that only babies can develop perfect pitch is because babies cannot form complex thoughts. As we grow older, more and more life events happen around us and our brains record, process, and store these events as thoughts. Some thoughts we keep, and some we forget. What Rick did with his child was consistently drill music into child's head as a baby.
As a baby, his child embodied those sounds because babies don't have to worry about life situations meaning they don't need to store thoughts. I doubt anyone can remember anything as a baby, because we cannot store thoughts as babies. His child adapted to music pitches as a baby. Why? Because babies can't think. They eat and sleep. That's it. As humans beings, we are evolutionary calibrated to adapt to surroundings and as we get older we develop a conscience to solve these problems for survival rather than depend on others. As we tend to get older, the conscience begins to develop and gets in the way of our "potential" because it limits our ability to focus specifically on one thing. We have over 50,000 thoughts per day and we start to form thoughts at the age of one. Babies have infinite potential at the infant stage because they have no thoughts. However, through meditation it is possible to clear thoughts, and develop the ability to gain perfect pitch. For example, Buddha was able to let go of all thoughts (if you believe in the concept of religion) and achieved enlightenment through meditation.
Basically, let go of thinking. Feel the sounds of music with not only your mind, but also the body and don't think. It's really, really, REALLY hard to do this because we have adapted to thinking. We thrive on it. Like a drug. But if a person can achieve this, not only can we develop perfect pitch, but we can also create new pitches. The universe is still a mystery, and we have been able to disprove theories throughout history and time again and again. Don't ever let anyone tell you that something is impossible.
That sounds more like new age mysticism woo woo than anything else. Just because we want to believe that anyone can develop perfect pitch doesn't make it so. I have more confidence in the scientists who talk about brain plasticity and windows of opportunity than religious wishful thinking.
@@extendmedia4062 You're fucking stupid. It's been proven time and time again by SCIENCE that adults can't develop perfect pitch. You're wrong.
@@oakleysierney1918 I am tone deaf I must have grew up in a sound proof box
Eddy Chen of twosetviolin developed perfect pitch in his high school years. Is this still perfect pitch because he said he just knows the note and doesn't think about it?
I have perfect pitch and I don't understand why it is such a big deal....it's very annoying that everyone wants to test me like Rick did to the kid in this video. For me it's like someone pointing to an everyday object and asking me to name them. Imagine yourself saying "that's a car" "that's a toothbrush" "that's a door" and people gush at you. About 1/4 of my classmates in college (I was a music major) have perfect pitch and none of us find ourselves special, nor we think we are better musician than our colleagues are, just because we have perfect pitch. We still have to work hard to master our instruments. I am a clarinet major and I had a very hard time getting used to the fact that clarinet is a B-flat instrument. As a beginner I always fingered D when my teacher asked me to play C. I did this because I have perfect pitch. So having perfect pitch is not always so great. The only time I feel blessed by perfect pitch is when my students want to learn a pop song and I could jot down the notes right away for them to read. That's all. So stop wasting your time trying to acquire this "ability" and/or arguing with people whether it is possible to develop perfect pitch as an adult or even a child. It's more important that you have a good sense of relative pitch, which is totally trainable for sure!
Yuju Ti Dude, being able to write down the notes immediately to any song is freaking awesome. Have a balloon. 🎈
I understand where you’re coming from, but when you have a gift that 1/10,000 ppl have (way less among English speakers) you have to understand why people find it so special.
but everyone can point out an object, and a very select few people can tell a pitch right off the bat. it's unique. i see what you mean, it's not all great for you personally but to a lot of us it's so cool. :)
oh, i understand. only you have the right to waste time.
You dont know the ability you have just recently i realize how beneficial it would be to develop this gift. It is like you are not born a body builder you have to lift weights the same thing with this gift you have to explore it and go beyond naming notes, like Dealan he actually can name all the notes within a chord he is beyond triads and inversions, but i bet he had to develop it, i am not talking about developing naming notes or acquiring perfect pitch i am talking about naming all the notes of complex chord beyond the factory gift God gave Dealyan. Developing the already acquired perfect pitch.
Note to self: when I have kids play lots of jazz for them!
lol, if Stravinsky didn't have perfect pitch, then i'm pretty sure it aint a big deal if you don't have it, people!
That's a good point. What other famous musicians didn't have perfect pitch?
“I was tone deaf and had no sense of rhythm when I began playing the guitar, and I've pondered that for many years. The answer I finally came up with was that music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice. That's one answer. ”- Robert Fripp, guitarist
Neither Ravel
that's a pretty dope quote.
Most of them.
The main thing is this. If you do or dont have perfect pitch, it does not matter.
Andy Hay. Absolutely true.
Relative pitch is far more important - unless you're a piano tuner.
harryoakley exactly. Identifying Intervals is far more useful and attainable than saying the name of one note
@@lucaxtshotting2378 people with perfect pitch don't necessarily have relative pitch. It is in many cases even harder for them to develop relative pitch, because their ability to hear every note obstructs them.
Its like having a 20 dollar bill when you need to pay 10 dollars and no one has any change.
@@lucaxtshotting2378 None of it makes any sense, it's music
Its really not a valuable skill. I knew a pianist who could name whatever note you played. it was him who told me doesn't it really mean anything as far as improving musicianship.
That is a pretty subjective statement. Perhaps I'd agree if you said AP is valuable depending on how you use the ability.
@@SH-th4wy It's the equivalent of a party trick for a musician. If you're a singer and you start the song by singing a certain note, hooray. But that's where its application ends. It doesn't make you better at composing music, it doesn't mean you hear more precisely than others (you can have perfect pitch and still have a bad ear), it doesn't make you better at playing any instruments under normal circumstances. Name me a legitimate scenario where perfect pitch is more than just a trick or niche application.
Kyle Hart transcribing by ear. So much easier.
@@ReTracer I've never had trouble transcribing by ear and I don't have perfect pitch. Relative pitch works fine even for finding chords if you've done enough ear training. Instead of hearing A-C-E I hear root-third-fifth. At best it's easier because you don't have to ever do much ear training.
Kyle Hart Not convincing, Kyle. Transcribing well is not the same as transcribing effortlessly. Imagine for a moment being able to hear a cluster of ten notes, and writing them down without any step required of working anything out. Then again and again and again.
a lack of perfect pitch does not mean someone cannot be a good musician. It would be nice to have it but it's not the end of the world if you don't.
I think that's the biggest thing. Saying it's impossible to develop doesn't sit well with me. I think that if a kid can learn it most of the time, so can adults if they want to.The thing is, it's a bit overrated. Who REALLY wants to? Like not just for show but truly wants to? Very few people because once it's "good enough" (relative) it's useless to get perfect pitch.
You just need "perfect relative pitch".
Heres a point NOBODY brings up. EVER.
I know professional sound engineers (the ones who get 250.00 and hour, drive a Tesla, and recorded a lot of seriously famous albums you have at home, not the "sound guys" who work for beer, lol)...they lose their minds of a guitar is out. But they CANNOT tell jack about drums. At all. I can tell you from across the room, what kind of drum, how big, what drum heads he's using, how big the sticks are, all kinds of stuff.
He once asked he, "Why do people buy Roland V-drums? They're so expensive. What's the difference between those and the cheap ones?" He honestly couldn't tell the difference, but he claims Roland has a bit of a hum in every product, DI box or not. He can also hear phase, which I kind of can't and theres no money in it for me at this point yet.
Answer: A, mechanically, Roland makes a VERY solid product if you respect them. I've got pieces that are 20+ years old. One cleaning or power supply replacement in that whole time.
Cheaper products don't sound anywhere near as good from across the room, (they sound real fake) and they won't be around 20 years from now. It won't be worth it to fix them. An electronics engineer is 75.00 to just LOOK at it. Plus parts n labor.
So, you want to spend 3 grand now for a VERY durable item that sounds and feels much better (they don't even easily get scratched) and just have to do it once, or do you want to do it 10 times over 20 years?
I vote once.
@Gabzo Avro But its kinda not fair though, because if im a musician with no AP, and another musician with AP, and we try to write the same song, try to give the same theme and same emotions,, and we have the same exact characters and beliefs and physical appearance and experiences (VERY HYPOTHETICAL, I know), he will do it better than i ever can.. i know its not a competition but its not natural that this is the truth of the matter, philosophically..
@@Icepacalapse Perfectly summarized.
I used to be a chick singer with a rock band, and I sang jazz and opera(!) in college, but I flunked music theory (twice), and I ain't got no perfect pitch, but I have a good ear compared to a lotta rock singers, or at least that's what our producer/engineer Fred Catero told me. I can almost always nail a vocal on the first take with no flubs, but both of my daughters can just out of the blue sing songs they've heard on the radio acapella, and they're right on the money with the original recorded version. When my younger daughter was a toddler strapped into her car seat, she'd sing the intros in tune to the radio Classic Rock Top 10 Countdown songs before they even started playing .My older daughter is a now a working professional singer, and I like to think it's because I played "Pump It Up" in her crib as a lullaby because it lulled her right to sleep. Kids always make stuff that you had to work really hard at look easy. That's parenthood.
Hey, so at 10:40ish he says that Dylan remembered Star Wars in its specific key before even knowing note name!! That seems the be the key! ...I have great relative pitch and sometimes I can hit spot on with perfect/absolute pitch but when he said this I thought back to some of my favorite early childhood songs and began singing them and it was in the correct key that I remember from my youth!‼️The song was imprinted on Dylan’s brain 🧠! Match the notes with the songs you remember from back then!
I remember back when I was in college, I took a jazz class, the instructor ( Bobby Bradford, jazz trumpet master) stated that perfect pitch is only something one is born with. So there could be a bus driver who has never played an instrument could have perfect pitch. It makes sense that perfect pitch could (COULD) be developed as a baby, because it's a baby with a wide open brain and infinite cognitive possibilities. I believe that it could be DISCOVERED or realized in some adults, but it was always there to begin with.
When I was very young, no classical or jazz was played in the house. I play guitar, by ear, for 44 years now, having started at age 15. I only know what I know.
thank you for this highly informative video, this is the type of content that I love stumbling across on UA-cam..
A powerful learning experience and worth every second of watch time
Careful then. Because it's highly inaccurate. It's clear that he read some pop science and can articulate it well, but he clearly doesn't have a grasp of the underlying problem or the limitations of studies.
Several years back the only papers I found claiming that perfect pitch could not be acquired in adulthood were fundamentally flawed junk science. Today there is substantial evidence to the contrary of his claims. His video about lossless music isn't much better. Using scientific terms doesn't turn flawed studies or conclusions into truth.
I wonder what hellish music bootcamp he put his child through.
Haha true XD
What "hellish bootcamp" teaches children the soundtrack of Batman and Star Wars? Children learn automatically just by being exposed to stuff. And the entire content of the video is that children learn very quickly. They can possibly recall every single note in the soundtrack after watching the movie twice.
Think how a child learns a language. Almost no parent ever is even remotely capable of teaching a language to an adult properly. But basically every parent successfully teaches language to kids (and not just language), because all you need to do with children for them to learn to talk is talking. It is just learning by imitation. It is unavoidable for children to pick up skills.
Don't take it so seriously dude.... It was just a funny comment... lol @@LordMardur
He subjected his child to music as a second language from the time his fetal child developed ear cavities. I believe there’s an app out that will allow you to do the same.
I was thinking a very similar thought. Seems like he used his kid as some sort of guinea pig/experiment
One of the most fascinating lectures I've ever heard on UA-cam, or anywhere else, for that matter.
if you have perfect pitch you can tune pianos for a living
...you ever seen how many strings are inside a piano? I’ll still take the tuner thanks lol
agreed...the hell with tuning by ear.people that don't play music or know any thing about music don't even give a damn if your even playing real musical instruments anyway.
INVISIBLE TYRANT well, yeah I guess.. but one of the cons of having perfect pitch is being able to tell if a note is off pitch.. it’s almost like nails on a chalkboard. I’ve heard many recordings (especially from the 60’s-70’s) where the song is permanently ruined for me because one bass string was out of tune, and every time a note is played on that string screams out of the mix.. even pitch perfect people can’t tell the difference between 440hz-441hz so tuners are definitely welcomed
I sometimes have the same issue. I was in the car with my wife and a Beatles song came on (I can't remember which one it was mid 60s - before Sgt. Pepper or the White Album, as not being a Beatles fan those are the only two I have), and I had to ask her to change the radio channel as it was out of pitch and was hurting me. Not all out of pitch records affect me like that - some just sound odd. But I wouldn't consider myself to have perfect pitch at all. Maybe adequate pitch. That's about overall pitch, but there are certainly some bands that also failed to tune their instruments properly. About 1/4 of the output by Traffic, for example, has some instrument or other that is out of tune, and much as I love the concept of 60s ska, the brass is generally so out I have serious problems enjoying it.
My wife's problem is that she has the hearing of a bat, even in her 40s, so there are a lot of things that to her are grating, and sadly that includes a lot of live music with over hyped high end.
I'm going to relay this to a piano tuners page for a bit of entertainment :)
You said that memorizing a single note is different from having perfect pitch. But what if someone were to spent all of their lifetime memorizing most of the notes in a piano. Couldn't that person develop some sort of "artificial perfect pitch"? Not an instinct response to the note like the natural perfect pitch but instead some sort of memory pitch? Not sure how that would apply to other instruments and any other sounds though.
The guy on the channel "saxologic" was able to name the notes on a keyboard, but did acknowledge that it is probably not the same instant familiarity as someone with ap. Would play something random inbetween to lose the reference of the previous note.
The way your son learned the concept first and then developed a name for each note shows just how people actually learn -- we gather up ideas and then link them together under an identity, not the other way around, which is how many topics are taught and seems to be the way most people think things should be learned.
Just an interesting observation I found while listening. The whole thing is a rather amazingly interesting subject.
Are people confusing having perfect pitch with being able to play by ear? I can play just about any instrument by ear pretty well. I can find the notes for pretty much any simple song I want to play on the piano and do so pretty much instantaneously, especially if it's in C (no sharps or flats). Maybe other people who don't have this ability (and I know there are many,) can develop it. I don't know, though, because I've always been able to do this and didn't have to do anything to acquire it. But one thing I definitely CAN'T do is identify the name of a note when I hear it. I can easily hear music in my head and play what I hear. But my mental point of reference floats around so I may mentally hear a song in any key and not know which it is until I actually play it on the piano. And that's ok. I think people make to big of a deal over being able to read and identify notes. I don't care about the letter names of the notes or which key something is in. The important thing is to actually be able to play music that sounds good and have fun doing it.
+Melissa0074 Actually I think that may be perfect pitch. You just haven't attached the note names to the sounds that you've heard.
She remembers the intervals between notes and is able to reproduce them instantly. How is that perfect pitch?
I believe this is called relative pitch and it is frequently developed by many musicians over time
+Danko I'm sorry I had misread what was stated. I thought they were saying they would be able to play any song from their head but I missed the part about it being in any key (which makes it not perfect pitch).
Not the same thing.
One of the clearest explanations of this, frequently, hotly debated subject. Loved the presentation Rick. Great job!
how does perfect pitch work for systems that aren't 12tet?
can your child display similar skill with quarter tones?
Sounds like it's time to switch my toddler's favourite car music to something more complex.
tichu7 Dream Theatre
I had perfect pitch when I was a kid but drifted away from music and now it's less accurate. Does this mean I can't relearn it, or can I because I had it when I was little?
Once learned it can be recalled through practice it's kinda like riding a bike or playing guitar after a long time away it slowly comes back from memory
I had a music professor who had an explanation for people who think they developed perfect pitch. It seemed plausible to me.
Relative pitch can be learned. You can also learn to memorize an A440. My professor demonstrated that a person with great relative pitch can reference that memory and quickly figure out the interval.
It isn't as fast as someone with perfect pitch.
As you said, you can develop a really good ear and really good relative pitch. Those are very worthwhile endeavors. More worthwhile than attempting to "learn" an innate ability.
Thats how I do it, Ive just got the first note of Sonata 11 in my head which is a c# and can get anything from there.
Most people have good relative pitch, as it is simply needed for singing.
I have never known anyone with perfect pitch, and I believe you are flatly wrong when you say "You can also learn to memorize an A440".
my pitch detection has gotten worse as i have gotten older i know this much.