Why you DON'T want Perfect Pitch
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- čas přidán 1. 05. 2024
- Perfect Pitch is awesome! But I never would want it for myself, and here's why!
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0:00 Intro (tests for AP)
2:00 AP defined
3:17 Untrained Pitch vs. Absolute Pitch
4:29 Quasi Absolute Pitch
6:47 Relative Pitch
9:22 Why You Don't Want Perfect Pitch
Thanks to Josh Bailey for the drums!
Gary Burton on Adam Tan's channel
• GARY BURTON answers al...
Rick Beato's video on losing perfect pitch
• Perfect Pitch: Why Do ...
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Peace,
Adam
As a musician with perfect pitch, I can confidently say that the only super power we have is the ability to hear how off we are all the time.
thats the problem with et its equqlly out of tune in every key( think piano concerto,when the piano enters at the end of an orchestral passasge-always totally out of tune - meantone temperaments sound much sweeter
I rarely hear perfectly tuned music, and my guitar always sounds out of tune lol.
Bro... I have a question
Can we play piano without having perfect pitch
@@anugrah5083 I'm pretty sure you can play piano without having any sense of pitch at all if you can learn where to place your fingers. It's one of the easier instruments pitch-wise since keyboards don't go out of tune the way other instruments do.
@@syntext thanks bro..
"Perfect pitch is being able to walk past a car crash and be like 'that crash was in c minor'"
- some dude
I think I heard Jack Black say something like this in an interview!
EXACTLY BRO
I do sh!t like that all the time, it’s no joke. If you speak a sentence, I always repeat the pitch your sentence ended on. I could even tell you every pitch in the sentence. I could even tell you the pitches that come from knocking on wood (usually major chords). I could tell you the pitches of percussion instruments like symbols and snares. I once heard a drum set in a band hall that was entirely in the key of A Flat Concert. Seriously, it was Ab, F, Eb, Ab, all in order from highest to lowest frequency. HELP.
@One Guy Named Ivan sounds like it
Lol this is exactly me. Some sounds don't have a clear pitch though, and you're generally not gonna hear a chord in a sound, but yeah, it's fun to just blart that out randomly
As someone who has gotten though life complete pitch untrained I can assure you it's very nice. Music either sounds pleasant or it doesn't, that's about all the musical information my brain generates. I noticed when I started doing photography, it changed the way I view images. Instead of being aware only of the emotional and narrative content of a picture, I am instead constantly being distracted by focal length, background compression, light and color contrast, composition, etc, etc. I imagine it's very similar to how music must feel to musicians and it kind of takes away a bit of the magic.
I experience the same phenomenon as an artist. Before I started taking it more seriously aka learning anatomy, composition, lighting, color theory and whatnot, I was drawing whatever the hell I wanted and I was happy with what I drew. Now I'm just frustrated because I keep noticing everything I do "wrong" with my art. More in depth knowledge can be a curse.
Being a creator of so many different types of content, I experience this with so many different art forms at this point, that my brain just sees it all as math. Everything is math and numbers now.
i’ve been a musician for forever and i haven’t
developed any pitch skills or anything lmao i see the notes and play and if it sounds good it does if it doesn’t it doesn’t but anyway it’s fun rawdogging it
It does. I play guitar, and the guitar music I really like is stuff that I can't process what's going on because it's still beyond me. A lot of songs that used fo be like, I can play now. But some people like Tosin Abasi will always be magical to me. Just insane shit.
Wow this is so true. SInce I started singing I always analyse what techniques the singer is using and I know when something is difficult or not. Now I don´t decide if I like someones voice by the sound of it ut I judge it by the way which techniques are used and it also changed my preferences which singers I like a lot.
Adam: perfect pitch fades away as you age.
Eddy: turning into a Pikachu in shock
Brett: smiling as happy as a koala bear
Lol yes
@@EZheng-bd1bg XD
Hospice nurse: hearing is the last to go.
I just posted a long comment that essentially said "ah, but your memory of what the keys and chords are, and your music theory knowledge, they do not fade in the same way as we age, and they can help 'adjust' and 'recalibrate' the slight changes to perfect pitch as we age (which I've been experiencing for 20 years and counting. (to day, things seem about a half step higher than I remember them being, that is, until I remember what keys/chords I KNOW them to be, (assuming it is music I have heard before.)
sooo goddamn trueeee
Perfect pitch studies: only 1% of the population has perfect pitch
This commen section: make it 95%
tbh, I think the reason is because a decent number of musicians have quasi-absolute pitch, the type of perfect pitch you get from getting used to playing an instrument for some time, and don't realize that's different. In practice it's essentially the same, but one is trained knowledge, the other is (somewhat) innate to the person
Hey I like your name
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Definitely part of that 5% no-pitch-at-all here. Always had issues learning notes. I tried to learn playing the piano, but just didn't have what it takes to keep practicing all the time.
I mean, I hear the blasted things and can repeat them accurately, but heck if I know what letter it is.
I would suggest that is because the viewers of this channel are not a representative sample of the population. Although, I also realize your 95% may be a (partial) exaggeration. (If you were wondering; otherwise, I did enjoy your joke).
You broke my youtube page
Thousands of people suffer from perfect pitch every year. Together we can stop this.
It’s quite easy to find out if someone has this terrible disease, because they’ll tell you.
Every four beats, a bar passes
Together we can stop this violence
@@iforgotmyname2739 lol yeah most of them build their whole personality around it
@@hunter00143 loads odd time signature with malicious intent
@@marcusaurelius4941 hot single mother’s with perfect pitch in your area
I have perfect pitch, and I got to tell you, I had a hard time playing piano when was transposed. It threw me off playing in C but hearing C#. I also got to say, the truck was beeping in F… unless my tv speakers aren’t great😂😂 you were close. Love the video!
It was an F
Yup it was in F
I have a slightly weird question about perfect pitch.
Have you ever heard someone fart and known what the pitch was?
Really interesting analogy with the color blindness. I'm color blind, and a big part of my color vision is contextual. People ask me stuff like "oh, what color is that plant". Probably green, dude, cause most plants are.
It's also interesting how much I use brightness as a color indicator, or atleast separator. Discussion color blindness with non-colorblind people, that seems to be something that people with normal color vision don't use as much. Similarly to the absolute pitch example, they never have to think about what color things are (with a few exceptions, like that dress a few years back), and thus don't really have to use anything else than color as a filter.
And similarly to your pitch example, there are perks of not having perfect color vision. The military have used color blind people as spotters/scouts, because they seem to have an easier time seeing through camouflage. Kind of makes sense, as those are made to trick normal color vision people. We also supposedly have better night vision. Anecdotally true for me, I have crazy good night vision. I'm not sure how solid the science behind that is.
Non color blind people lose color vision when we are in the dark. I see everything in a dark blue tone when my eyes switch to "night vision". I suppose it is the same for other people. As far as I know the part of the eyes that is responsible for color doesn't have very good perception in low light, so the black and white part is all that remains. It sounds plausible that color blind people could have better night vision.
@@berman00 it's true that the colour vision goes in low light, and it does so for everyone. But that seems to make it less plausible that colour blind people should have an advantage at night; the darkness just levels the playing field.
they have the experience
There are two types of nerve cells in the retina that perceive light. They're named after their general shape: rods and cones.
Rods react to any light within the visible spectrum. They aren't fussy. They don't care what color the light is, they just want to know it's there. Rods therefore detect how bright something is overall, but they do not gather any color information whatsoever.
Cones are picky and only react to light within a certain range of frequencies within the visible spectrum. Because they only react to a fraction of visible light, they need brighter light overall in order to function. This is why it's hard to discern colors in the dark -- your rods gather enough light to report visual information to the brain, but your cones can't. If you've ever thought that a place looks different at night and you think you're being silly or going crazy, you aren't. It does look different because you're not getting as much visual feedback.
Most humans have 3 cone types that are centered on red, green, and blue (as in indigo, not sky blue) light, and the combinations of these colors at different intensities are interpreted by our brains as the full spectrum of perceptible color. Red, green, and blue are known as the primary additive colors. The screen on your computer, phone, and TV produce these three colors (and ONLY these three colors) in different proportions within each pixel to form an image. For example, equal amounts of all three RGB channels make grayscale shades. Lots of red and lots of green makes yellows, while lots of red and a little green makes oranges and browns depending on the overall brightness.
I'm not an expert in colorblindness by any means. However, if you are colorblind, something about your cones or the way your brain interprets their feedback is different. There are different types of colorblindness that have different effects. Maybe your brain can't distinguish between the red signal and the green signal, or maybe you don't get a blue signal at all, so you distinguish those colors by their different luminosity -- how bright they are -- because your rods are still giving you overall brightness feedback. This can be advantageous in cases where the additional color information makes an object's hue similar enough to the hue of its background that a human can't distinguish between the different shades of the same hue. You don't get that additional information, so you can tell the difference much more easily.
If you're not colorblind and you want to know what colorblind people see, you can find utilities online that let you view or upload images and convert them into an approximation of how someone with colorblindness might see it. This is extremely useful for accessibility when designing websites, apps, games, and anything else that uses different colors to convey information, because you can make sure that a colorblind person can still parse what they're looking at.
There are also similar utilities that try to simulate how different animals see. Most animals only have two sets of cones, and don't see the same range of colors that humans do. (Bulls cannot see the color red. Joke's on you, matadors.) These aren't a perfect representation of how an animal sees -- cats, for example, perceive movement in a way that can't be recreated for humans. There are also some animals that have _more_ sets of cones than us, which lets them see _more_ colors, and sometimes even lets them see electromagnetic frequencies outside of visible light. The most famous example of that is probably the mantis shrimp, which you should Google, because they're [BASS]ing bonkers.
I will conclude this comment essay with a fun fact: if you ask a physicist what frequency of light corresponds to the color magenta, they won't be able to answer you. That is because the color magenta doesn't technically exist. Purple does, but magenta doesn't. Seriously, check out the spectrum of a rainbow or a prism -- magenta isn't there. Magenta is just what happens when your cones report a combination of red and blue frequencies in a certain spot. Your brain needs a way to represent that, so it just makes something up. Everything that any of us perceive is sensory feedback being interpreted by the unbelievably advanced organic computer that is the human brain. Not all of us get the same output from the same input. And literally no one is anywhere close to perceiving the quantum physics weirdness that actually makes up reality.
Have a nice day! :)
@@skakdosmer They are more trained to understand differences without seeing color though (or seeing a less extensive range of it), so they might have an easier time navigating at night.
A better title for this video would’ve been “How to ruin someone’s day if they have perfect pitch”.
after watching and listening to Adam explaining this, I''m having a hard time understanding the "tone" of this video. I felt like the purpose of this video was closer to the title you suggested than anything else tbh.
@@TreegoTunes I think apart of it is that so many musicians starting out are dismayed and it’s a way to help them understand it’s just a different way of understanding music. Def seems like kinda a put down tho
nah, life as in aging ruins it without any outside help.
@@TreegoTunes I mean it's literally both
If you don't have absolute pitch, seeing the title of this video in itself is already a nice boost, you're told, "it's ok you don't have it, here's why".
Then if you have absolute pitch and see the title it already tells you, "hey, it's obviously cool that you have it, but here's the downsides."
And then the video goes with the same energy I think.
Lmao yeah, I have perfect pitch and always wondered how people experience music without it, so I was looking forward to hear what he had to say. Then all of a sudden I'm learning I'm going to be miserable in my old age 🤣😭 Soured my mood a bit but I have to laugh at how that was the absolute last thing I expected him to say.
“It’s kind if like being color blind”
Me who’s color blind and has perfect pitch
👁👄👁
😂
Would be interesting to see a study examining whether these two things are actually connected though.
@Samer Mohamed I am color blind but do not have perfect pitch, so if they are connected then I’m an anomaly, and I’m pretty sure that I am not. Either that or I’m weirder than I originally thought possible.
@@dachking6657 I think they are related but it´s not like if you are color blind you will have perfect pitch, but If you are color blind your ears tend to be more developed, just like evreytime when life takes something from you, it will compensate, giving you something else. I am color blind with very good ears, very good relative pitch and working to have quasi perfect pitch. I am pretty sure color blind people are way more likely to depelop perfect pitch than non color blind people. I started ear training being quite old (18).
@@leosonic not how it works. in your brain, perfect pitch is more like learning a language. it’s much easier to develop a language when you’re younger than when you’re older, the only difference being that you can’t become fluent in absolute pitch once you’ve grown out of this ‘language learning’ phase. sure, a blind/colourblind person might be more likely to pick up on individual tones, since they have less stimuli to distract them, but perfect pitch and colourblindness are in no way connected. that would be like saying ‘yeah, knowing norwegian and being blind go hand in hand’.
My former violin teacher (with perfect pitch) said it was very difficult to sit in with a baroque orchestra as they used baroque tuning which is a semitone lower. Regarding color I have a very exact reference to colors. As an example, I was out shopping and spotted some nice red espresso cups and I immediately recognized they had exactly the same red nuance as my espresso machine. I bought the cups and indeed they had the exact same red nuance as the espresso machine .
I was thinking about that the whole time as well. "A" being 440Hz means absolutely nothing. Even different professional orchestras tune to different frequencies, and the frequency of "A" has shifted over decades and centuries of music. If I was hearing an orchestra with excellent pitch relative to each other as "wrong" because they tuned to a different frequency, I think I would hate it. I'm honestly thankful that I have excellent relative pitch, but not perfect pitch.
As someone with perfect pitch, I often like music pitched down slightly. It makes it stand out, but also sound retro and laid back, likely due to it's association with vinyl/tape. It's also often a new perspective on music I am likely to have heard many times before.
I think perfect color is more useful
Color is also relative to it's surroundings
@@itdepends604 l prefer it very slightly sharper but I am a violinist.
@@chicken_person the same difficulty l have.
Being musically trained, I always knew I didn't have "perfect pitch"... so clicking this video and failing the last two intro 'tests' had me NAKED AND AFRAID
HOW COULD YOU FAIL THAT??
the first test is useful; the second is not so useful.
There are a lot of factors that give notes identity, so with minimal context the notes don’t establish strong identity. 🐧🐉
Absolute pitch can definitely feel like a "disease" when you're singing in a choir that suffers from pitch drift and you are looking at your sheet music. Feels very disorienting... You might end up having to mentally calculate each note as you sing. But on the flip side, when you are out with your choir friends, you can give them the starting pitch and be nicknamed the Tuning Fork.
true. i’ve been the human pitch pipe for basically every choir i’ve sung in since age 15. it’s kind of a fun status to have. makes you feel special. xD but yes, a cappella pieces mean you constantly have to recalibrate and transpose on the fly, which can be annoying.
i wonder if there’s a whole choir out there made up of people with AP. i’m sure someone has done it. it’d be interesting to hear that [or to be in it!].
"Perfect pitch" really doesn't exist, because there are simply too many variables that go into determining what the frequency of any particular note is. While most people say that you can simply assume 440 Hz as the reference frequency for A and 12-tone equal temperament, those are still assumptions, and by being assumptions they inherently introduce ambiguity that prevents generalising this ability to anything other than 12-TET with 440 Hz A.
With that out of the way:
I go to church a lot, but mainly for the music and the social interaction I get, as I'm not religious. There are five young adult ministries that I am currently going to. Both during normal service and during young adult service, I will often have my earbuds in while we sing. Why?
1. My earbuds serve as hearing protection.
2. They help me hear myself as I sing. -I have absolute pitch but- often times the loud volume prevents me from hearing myself without some form of hearing protection.
3. Too often, there have been cases where one of the singers on stage will be noticeably out of tune (almost always during the young adult gatherings, not normal service) and because their voice is being amplified, it throws ME off even though I have perfect pitch. In these cases, I end up playing a tone (most of the times, it's the root note of whatever key the song is in) in the background because the poor intonation distracts me so much.
4. Often times I will think that something is sharp or flat when it's actually in tune, so I still double-check if I have doubts.
I feel like you could be nicknamed "the Tuning Fork" if you just carry around a tuning fork as well.
Does just intonation sound like pitch drift? I've always been curious. Does a lowered third in a major key sound horribly wrong to you? I've never had anyone to ask.
Because the next level of development AFTER obtaining perfect pitch, is to understand Context is more important than "perfection."
"I have perfect pitch, you know." "Oh, I'm sorry, that must be hard."
It is. It sucks a lot.
@@TacComControl lol not it doesn't
@@SunWithBrackets Try being a compulsive perfectionist on top of it. ONE untuned instrument in a big band or orchestra, one faulty mic on a set, you hear ALL of it. And it's like nails on a chalkboard when it happens.
@@TacComControl not only people with perfect pitch get bothered by things like these. I have relative pitch and i find those annoying too. Perfect pitch does not equal something like perfectionism
@@TacComControl I have the same thing whenever I hear the slightest bit of compression, which becomes very apparent with balanced headphones
As someone with sound-colour synesthesia which drives my perfect pitch, I am very curious to see if it is still likely I lose mine when I get older. Also I sing in an a cappella group and perfect pitch is so handy (except when entire group tends sharp and you gotta adjust yourself in your brain to match the group that takes some effort haha).
The interesting thing about my sound-colour synesthesia that I want to share is that one day I just decided to map out what the colours look like for each note just for fun. I initially arranged them in chromatic scale however later decided to arrange it circle of fifths. Apparently, the colours for my synesthesia make a rainbow when in the circle of fifths and that was absolutely mind blowing for me at that moment. I don't really know how or when my brain formed those connections but I remember having it pretty early on (like at least grade 2) even though I didn't know what it was back then. It's just a very fascinating thing to me and I feel like it's a big part of my identity. That's all, thanks for reading :))
Woe that’s crazy…Very interesting!
That's insane! I'm kinda jealous lol 😅
Wonder if there's any science that could explain that
Adam has that (not perfect pitch)
I believe the classical composer Scriabin also saw music in colors.
my Leviton Effect notes are A for tuning, F for tuning, D for megalovania, and G C and E from ukulele tuning, which i can do by ear.
Perfect pitch people: Note is A like apple is red.
Me with sound-colour synesthesia: Note is A because it is red.
C IS RED! A IS PURPLE! (the way you see it is good too I'm just joking around)
@@three_crows_all_day C is blue for me. I wish I had a purple note but I don’t.
I love people with synaesthesia
C is super yellow for me
Interesting! Can I ask any of you if it works across different octaves? Like A3 and A5 have the same color?
If you say "perfect pitch" three times in the dark, Rick Beato appears in your room while you're sleeping.
And gives your family his opinion
He can be pretty frightening in some videos. He kind of looks like an old homeless man, experiencing his first line of crystal meth.
...and hums quietly to himself ?!?!?!?!
Guess he has better stuff to do.
Great, I'll get right out of bed and start jamming with him.
The actual talent is an inherent understanding of your tempo upon first listen
A useful color analogy might be the blue and black vs. white and gold dress picture of 2015 online viral fame. Some people were able to automatically pick up on visual cues that the photo was overexposed and see the dress as blue and black, while others did not but percieved the same "distance" between the colors, seeing white and gold or alternating between the two.
YES! And this extrapolates to 'innate geolocating'...or an aspect of it: In an unknown location, knowing which way the points of the compass are, east, west, north or south. Dogs especially have this sense, as do migrating animals, albeit magnetite has been implicated in bird brains as a cause of this.
The point is that that 'inane' ability diminishes with age...as does IQ (usually peaks at around 50 yrs for humans). But your point isn't the same as this, but a very important vector that bears on it.
Because colour is to an extent relative because the same object will transmit different wavelengths depending on lighting conditions.
Adam Neely convinces himself he doesn’t want perfect pitch for 15 minutes straight
And apparently a lot of other people
Those grapes surely must be sour
and he succeeds
Exactly
Everyone around me for years thought (and still thinks) that I have perfect pitch, when in reality I just have true pitch. Seems to me that not a lot of people know about this one's existence, sadly
I don’t have perfect pitch but I know that the third step in my house squeaks the first note of the wii theme song
Is it the wii shop? I hummed the note and man I was pretty fast to think that the first note is in D.
This is the most important skill
@@socksboii3848 Yeah, and I think you're right. I have a bit of relative pitch from playing still dre every day for like a year (the first note of that is c) and it's like an increment up.
lmao i don't know why i like this comment so much but it legit made me laugh
Well now we need to engineer the rest of the stairs to squeak the notes in order. Then every time you go down them you can enjoy the glory of the emeht iiw odnetnin
2:48 I had a friend in high school who could do that - mash 7-8 keys on the piano and she could pick out the individual notes. This is amazing not because of perfect pitch, but because a note on a piano is not a single pitch. It's a hodgepodge of multiple pitches - complex overtones layered on top of a fundamental frequency for each note. When you play a piano note, your ear does not hear "a piano note." It hears this mishmash of different frequencies, and your brain recognizes from the relative amplitude of the overtones that it's a piano note, and therefore the fundamental frequency is A (or C# or whatever).
This is the primary challenge faced by those song recognition apps - picking out the fundamental frequency(ies) from the overtones, so it can figure out what the notes of the song are. Most of them gave up and now resort to pattern matching with known song samples (I think SoundHound is the only one which still lets you hum a melody). When you play multiple notes at once, all these overtones mix together and are heard simultaneously. So the brain has to pick out each individual note based on its overtones (many of which overlap like in the major and minor chords). It's an incredible feat, like seeing 7 letters written on top of each other at different angles, and instantly being able to read each letter.
A friend of mine can do this. He sat in with a band once and they didnt mix him into the monitors but it was fine as he could simply auralise his part into the whole. He got compliments even though he was just jamming along without hearing a note he played
Adam, your clarity of thought and ability to communicate complex ideas is very impressive. Thank you for all the content, I appreciate what you do.
Survivorship bias: You polled people who are already into music, thus gathering a higher percentage of people with absolute pitch. Also, some people like to brag.
For sure. And also there is also the chance that in any given group one of the sides could just do worse by chance. Can’t trust case studies 🙃 thanks highschool stat
@@spookiedukey That effect tends to cancel on average and can be readily described by statistical methods. It is the non-random effects you have to be aware of because they cannot be easily detected or removed from data. Assuming you don't engage in p-hacking or try to fit trend lines through noise.
Was looking for this comment considering how his data turned out relative to the audience asked.
It's not really survivorship bias since there isn't any screening making it so that only people with AP would be able to answer. It's better to describe it as volunteer bias because the people answering already have interest in the channel.
@@deadperson7333 ...is there two names for the same effect? I only know it as survivorship bias.
I once had a Ford Festiva with a broken speedometer. I’d put any AC/DC song in the key of A on and match the pitch of the motor with the song, thus knowing that I was traveling at 55 mph.
lol
if you have perfect pitch and quick math you dont need a speedometer
yeet.
But then you’d already know what an A is if you had absolute pitch. Duck tales
imagine listening to the pitch of a motor to determine speed. what an unnecessary necessary superpower
The truck sound was an F..not an E. I jumped up to check it on the piano because I knew you were mistaken. I've had perfect pitch since I was a kid. Still have it at age 69. I must say that it has been profoundly helpful in my career as a jazz violinist, and as a musician who can sit in with anybody and not ask what the key is. It's served me well.
I’m glad somebody actually picked that up. That bothered me so much.
@@seashell2504same
I don't have perfect pitch, but have been trying to teach myself for the past five months on and off. Despite almost everyone I know telling me it's impossible, I've been making significant progress. I almost immediately guessed the notes of the first demo correctly, which definitely felt pretty cool. (A and wonky Eb) I suppose this is actually quasi-absolute pitch, but it's fairly useful when it works.
Good job man
I think you got it
I believe in you 😊
@@xplodingkatz Thanks!
Me learning jazz: "Ah yes, the apple is red".
Jazz: "Actually, it's a green apple".
Actually it's a pear
@@thomas.thomas Or study Improv Jazz.... It's a Papple
Perfect pitch: is 80% red, 10% yellow and 10% green
Jazz: "The red is plant."
Actually it's every color except red
That moment when you realize that “The Giver” is actually about a kid being trained to have perfect pitch
This is such an underrated comment
O: I have to read that book again
had to read it for my grade 7 lit. Yeah, thats pretty much it.
@@pwnwin same
So the givers are actually killing people with RP? LOL
This explains how the pich of A, Bb, and C are ingrained in my mind. A and Bb from tuning and C from teaching beginning piano.
I went through a "pitch cleanse" a long time ago. I had spent many years fighting the tuner trying to teach myself A=440hz but one year I just felt like I needed a mental break. I found a recording set at a different standard and it felt so good to hear new colors with the same relative intervals. I think the full spectrum of pitch needs to be enjoyed so that our ears get "more" equal stimulation across the smooth gradient.
I KNOW that Adam’s hair is brown...but I see it as pink. What does that mean for me? 😉 Killer video Adam.
And he looks great with pink hair
Pink light above him
I thought it was purple??🤣
I like Adam’s hair. I don’t know what you are all on about. It’s always been purple.
Why dye your hair when you can just shine a studio light on it? 😆
Relative pitch is like being shown a hue shifted image, being told that the plant is green, and being able to figure out that the apple is red by the fact that the plant and apple are complementary colors.
Yeah instantly thought about that.
right. like:
this is an apple
this is a fern
you are looking into a room lit by an amber light and the window you're looking through is reflecting a sunset behind you.
(you are looking at jazz)
what if there is also a green apple??
just use melodyne lol
Exactly!
Seeing the difference between the wavelengths and calculating based on that
It's like you have a Hue slider and you change it until the apple is red and therefore the plant is green
Fascinating. As a non-musician music lover, I find it so entertaining to witness how music is created and performed. Thank you, Adam and Rick.
We tuned so much to Bb in my band due to poor overall tuning that I developed Quasi-Absolute Pitch, because I can always sing Bb and hear Bb without thought, but I need it to recognize where another note is. I don’t need a proper reference to name a note, I make my own with Concert Bb. I literally tuned so much to that note in band and on my own time while practicing that I couldn’t un-hear it. Helped on the AP Exam too😂
But seriously. My school had like 7 kids with Absolute pitch, 5 in choir and 2 in Band. Go figure, they were all in their top ensembles respectively. 3 were 2 time All State students.
I’d still take Quasi over that disease any day, cause I’d rather recognize melody and note relationships faster than just knowing the note. When you’re good at what you do, that’s not entirely necessary to know a note. It IS necessary to understand melody and pitch relationships.
Soapbox finished, I’ve restated FAR too much already.
wait bc same
Yeah people think perfect pitch is an instant musical leg up, but it can make intuitive learning or self taught autodidactic stuff way harder for the reasons in your second paragraph
I imagine ProZD himself watching this video and being like: "Damn it, now I'll have to subscribe to Nebula!"
I was thinking the same thing.
Incoming ProZD meme response video.
My guess is that he got the exact pitches of the lines right
@@ts4gv It sounded like ProZD was a semitone flat (using my excellent Relative Pitch)
@@ts4gv I'm guessing that he's ever-so-slightly off, like his perfect pitch is starting to distort as he's ageing.
Can you please do "Why you don't want to be good at your instrument" for my self-esteem?
Please do this lmao. These instagram guitarists make me insecure af
Hahaha yes please! "Why you should buy new instruments and be barely fluent in all of them instead of being good in any one"
@@hmarci I think David Bruce has talked on occasion about that in terms of being a composer. Knowing a little bit about every instrument is better than knowing nothing about any outside of your favorite one.
@@1980rlquinn Interesting! Do you remember in which one of his videos he's referenced that specifically? I'd love to see him discuss this.
@@thedoodlingcellist8907 Sorry, not off the top of my head. I remember the camera showing the space of his office with instruments everywhere, and he would pull them down and play them a bit. When he talked about knowing how to play them even just a little bit, it was to help understand the limitations and logistics of playing the instrument and how the music being composed would be perceived from the point of view of the player, how practical the composition was and whether it played to the instrument's strengths, etc. It was a matter of being familiar enough with the instruments to do his job of composing well. And also, it's fun.
I've had very natural relative pitch all my life. 76 now, and that has not gone away.
This gift took me to bass playing, because I just knew where to go. Another ability is to play through the basic chord progression of all kinds of popular songs and music, even if I haven't heard them for decades. The only downside? It was too easy..didn’t have to work much on it.
Thanks for telling my why my perfect pitch is gone. I am 72 yrs. old. When I was younger I could not only identify notes, but many types of chords. Major and minor triads. Minor 6th, Minor 7th or Major 6th, Dominant 7th, Dominant 9th, Major 7th, Major 9th, Diminished, Augmented, and even the sharped 11. I got tripped on the flat 5. In a Gary Lewis And The Playboys song, Count Me In, there was a chord that gave me trouble. Gb7-5. The song was in the key of F major. Back in those days a 45 RPM played on a phonograph had weaker bass. The Gb7-5 is spelled Gb Bb Dbb, and Fb. My ear was picking the notes C and E. I thought that maybe it was a C Aug. But it never worked out. In 2010 I happened to think back on it and I looked up the chords to the song and that's when I discovered Gb7-5. As good as perfect pitch is to have, you can't always hear it all on more complex chords. I heard part of the chord, but couldn't identify all of the chord.
I'm an aging Perfect Pitch person and I'm glad this is finally being talked about. I'm 46 and always had perfect pitch but about 3 years ago I was at the opera and suddenly couldn't tell what key it was in. I knew it had to be either C or Db (or whatever it was) but couldn't tell which. I couldn't concentrate on the stage because I was freaking out at suddenly not knowing. I've always listened to music knowing what key it was in without even really realizing it, and suddenly once I didn't it was completely disorienting. At intermission I pulled up the score online to check what key the next act started in so I'd at least have a reference.
Around that time another musician friend around the same age who also has/had PP posted about how she was losing hers and it started a whole long thread of people talking about how they were getting older and losing theirs too, but nobody had ever talked about it. When you have it it becomes sort of this superpower that people think makes you a better musician (it totally doesn't) but then when you don't have it anymore it's like a part of your identity is gone.
I've gotten over it and for all the reasons Adam mentions in the video I'm actually totally cool with it. I can pin things down to within a half-step but I tend to aim low. If I really concentrate, knowing that I have a tendency to hear things low, I can "correct" and find the real pitch about 90% of the time. I'll sing what I think is an F and go, "wait - that's probably low, is that really an F?" and then try and find it and I usually can and then once I'm oriented I'm okay.
But I fully expect to eventually lose that too. In a way it's sort of freeing, though I've had to relearn how to listen to music.
I'm 42... never knew I was going to lose it. Starting to worry a bit now!
@@yvindVevang That sounds kind of terrifying, like if I just got up, looked down at my shoes, and suddenly they were in greyscale
I have it too and have noticed it fading as I age -- HOWEVER this is only true when I'm not actively playing music. I recently started playing music again after a multi-year break and within a couple of weeks my PP was as sharp as ever.
@@iamthepinkylifter hehe
@@yvindVevang you might not, just go with the flow. not everyone loses it
The truck was actually an F.
I was about to say
Yeah get your true pitch straight Adam! 😂
He sent a tweet saying that post production he realized that the truck was a F, but he didn’t change it because the video would get more engagement
@@bernardosantos8020 Playin' the game. what a legend
F is the only reliable note I have memorized and when he said E I was questioning if I had lost that
A friend in college had perfect pitch while we were studying music. I was so in awe of what he could hear!!!! Fast forward 22years later. He’s the Asst. band director at the college were graduated from. I was helping out the jazz band and I was playing a tune in Ab and his ears heard A. I was shocked!!! He said yea, I’m losing my perfect pitch!!!😢
A very well-researched video. Thank you
eddy from twoset is crying in a corner now
*laughs in Brett*
😭✋🏻✋🏻✋🏻
You can also tell by the many videos he is referencing it that he has quasi-absolute pitch (Still love you Eddy! ^^)
I wish they’d react to this
Crying in A minor
I’m sure he already realizes this judging by his expression... Adam’s poll numbers are likely skewed due to the sample population being made up of people drawn to his content, which is most likely musicians or people interested in music on a deeper level. Likely people with perfect pitch are more likely to be interested in music and drawn to such content than people without perfect pitch would be. Therefore the poll numbers would be skewed to have a higher percentage of perfect pitch and true pitch vs a better randomized sample population.
Amongs that sample there will be a certain number of people who believe thay have perfect pitch. I knew a kid at college who always swore blind he had perfect pitch and never seemed to pass up an opportunity to prove himself wrong.
Not only that, but the kinds of people drawn to a channel like this are likely to see perfect pitch as a positive attribute. Illusory superiority (a cognitive bias which affects us all) will then drive some proportion of respondents to misidentify themselves as possessing this desirable attribute, further skewing the result.
@@ButzPunk For that same reason, it wouldn't surprise me if people with perfect pitch were more likely to respond to the poll than those without it.
Yes
@@ButzPunk and NOT ONLY that but people with perfect pitch are more proud of that and thus will make sure to answer the polls, while someone with regular pitch might just not answer the poll at all
thank you for this! i definitely, absolutely have the levitin effect and i've always wondered what it was. in college, if our a capella choir director gave us our starting pitches in a slightly higher or lower key than normal (which he did sometimes to keep us from going flat) i was always so mad about it because i couldn't stop hearing the song in the original key lol. and growing up i thought i was crazy because i kept hearing this one radio station play pieces slightly faster and in a slightly higher key than the original, but it turned out that was true. i always just assumed that that was some form of perfect pitch, like i thought maybe if i had stuck with piano or clarinet for more than a year each i'd probably be able to tell you oh, that's an A, rather than just remembering it as the starting pitch of a song i've heard before. years later i can still sing a b-flat on demand because one choir director always started a specific warmup on that note. it's nice to have a term to explain it. it's a skill that makes me a pretty effective human pitch pipe, haha.
Wow dude, props on composing your own score for your video essays....making true usage of being a musician/youtuber!
“It’s as if you wake up and all the sudden my hair is lit with purple backlighting.”
adam needs to just dye his hair that color
@@cookie0329 it looks good on him
I feel so bad for Charlie Puth, he probably never wants to go on interviews because he knows they'll always always test his perfect pitch
Okay so thank you for mentioning Quazi absolute pitch with relation to clarinet players because I always thought I had a much better ear when I was actively playing; I could ALWAYS find Bb and could was much more proficient at identifying notes from there; I was always wondering why that was, and if something like "perfect instrument pitch" existed, and this is pretty much it
I don’t have perfect pitch… but I can easily recognize notes played on the piano and violin, not perfectly all the time, but I can do it easier. I think this might be true pitch because I “memorize” the notes from the piano (as I’ve played it for 7 years) and recognize them as I hear them. Kind weird, but when I’m reading music I always think “do re mi fa so la si do” (si because I orginally started my piano training in China) and I accosiate C with do because when I first started I played in nothing but C major. I am working on my relative pitch because it’s very useful for tuning the violin, but like I said I can recognize a pitch pretty quickly from a piano.
You may instantly and innately recognise the colour 🔴, but how do you know that the word for it is "red". That is something you learned at some point, and if you learn a new language, you have to learn a new word for it. If you are trying to think of the word for 🔴 in that other language, you might for example first recognise it as "red" then have to think about what the other language's word for "red" is.
Maybe what is happening here is that you are having to translate from your own internal language what the note names are?
@@katrinabryce That probably is, but I will usually only translate to the letter names if I have to, like if I’m saying it outloud or it’s for a test or some other situation where you would need to say the note names outloud. What you said is probably what’s happening, since that is usually what I hear internally. Like if you play an E I will automatically think “mi” before E because that is what I memorized when I started reading music.
"I can recognise notes without any reference, but I don't have Perfect Pitch" 🤓
@@GabriTell well its only for piano and some violin notes, not for everything and I can’t sing the pitches without reference
Wait, this is the exact same for me… my main instrument is piano and I learned the “do re mi fa so la ti do” before the “C D E F G A B C” system, and when I hear a piano note, I can instantly recognize what note it is because my brain has somehow encoded piano notes to sound like “do re mi…”. Like if someone plays C, the piano note’s timbre or something sounds exactly like “do” to my ears. Which is freaky because I’m pretty sure piano notes don’t actually have different timbres like that.
However, I am less good at recognizing pitches with any other instrument or type of timbre. It’s so weird.
I'm a colourblind musician and after decades of struggling to describe to people what it's like I finally stumbled onto the "its like everyone has perfect pitch except you but with colour" argument a couple weeks ago.
What type of colorblindness do you have? I have a red/green type so I feel like the analogy would be more complicated. For me it's more like having crude pitch perception... being able to narrow it down within a couple semitones or so. Like "I know both of those notes are between G and Bb, but that's all I can tell you."
I think Adam's analogy is backwards. Colorblindness≈tone-deafness is more accurate (although he didn't directly make that comparison). Someone with perfect pitch would be more analogous to someone who claimed to have either tetrachromatic vision, or be able to identify the Pantone or hexadecimal number of any color without comparing it to swatches.
On a side note, anecdotally, it seems to me that a lot of musicians have some degree of colorblindness. I've often wondered if there's some deeper connection there with how perception works (or is shaped) in the brain.
Also, (sigh) most colorblind people do not see in black and white.
@@ElectrotypeMusic Exactly. If you see black and white, the analogy might work a bit. But you would not be able to remember that apples are red, because 'red' had no meaning to you. Colors are perceived in such a different way than pitch. Perfect pitch is very hard to really understand if don't have it yourself. So is color blindness.
Ditto!
How do you buy bananas?
Ok. Since l was about 4, l would play violin because it was part of my school curriculum. I didn’t know any music theory and reading music was a pain so l decided that I’d rather just hear what the teacher played and play it back. And so l did. For 7 years. For 7 years l pretended to know how to read music, but in reality I’ve been playing palladio and stuff by ear. Thought that’s how everyone else did it, so l just kept silent. I’m now 19 years old, still barely reading music, found out l had synesthesia, and only found out a couple years ago that l had a talent. All because l thought everyone else was doing it too.
Tl;dr. Wish l did something more with my life
With that talent you surely could get pretty far into professional music training, no?
Ok but like how is playing stuff like tchaikovsky violin concerto by ear easier than just reading the notes lol. At a certain point written music just becomes the most efficient way of communication
Also if you're in an orchestra you don't get the liberty of playing by ear since you must play WITH the group, not after hearing the part and copying it. And you can't play the other parts either. Just your section
I have been playing guitar for 6 years (I’m 12) and I have perfect pitch. When I first started playing guitar and taking lessons, my guitar teacher would play something for me and I could play it straight back to him. He thought I knew the song so I kept silent. He then played another harder song and I played it perfectly back to him. I think he realized that I could have perfect pitch and here I am now watching a video about why it is bad to have perfect pitch.
“Did something more with your life”? You’re 19! You have all of your life still. You can get back into music now if you want
@@MattsMusic Hey I’m 25 (as of today, actually!) and there’s plenty of “why x is bad” videos on CZcams. The thing is they’re a general source of information. They don’t know your life, and heck now that you’ve seen this you’re more aware of potential issues.
Fascinating! Also explains why my quasi absolute improved considerably when I started playing guitar, despite having played numerous instruments prior to that.
I am so fascinated by this subject. I would also use the color analogy to describe Perfect Pitch and Relative Pitch. If you follow through with that analogy you can see Perfect Pitch as being able to call red "red", while Relative Pitch is similar to having the ability to imagine hue shifts, like when you do it in photoshop you can shift the hue of the entire image so that your face turns green, and all the other colors move relatively together.
The 12 tone equal temperament point you mentioned is also very interesting because I can't help but to imagine if somebody from ancient China or Japan was raised with a musical culture using pentatonic or heptatonic scale, would they develop a perfect pitch that is different from the perfect of today? What about people who grew up listening to Indian music with all those microtones, would their perfect pitch trump people who have perfect pitch in 12 tone equal temperament?
And to think about it, even if it is the same 12 tone equal temperament, composers like Mozart and Beethoven, who are known to have perfect pitch, had it differently because back in the days concert tuning was not standardized to A4=440Hz, and it was more like ~410hz So if they were to travel to 2022 with a time machine, their perfect pitch would make everything sound 'sharp' today.
Ultimately, music is inherently relative. If you have a guitar, you can have the strings tuned in accord with each other, and that's all that is required to make music work, A does not have to be 440hz for music to work.
They only had to travel to a different town in their own age. Or different country.Their age was not digital, so instruments were tuned to tuning forks. And tuning forks were not absolute. They varied.
I wondered about people with absolute pitch in former times myself, because tuning was not at all standardised.
"the noted epidemiologist Jimmy Fallon" *consider me deceased*
Someone keyed music notes into my car
The damage appears to B Minor
BuT b MiNoR iS nOt A nOtE
@@cursedcliff7562 how to fix the joke:
Someone keyed *3 music notes* into my car
Good one
Someone keyed a musical 'score' on my car...
(Merriam-Webster Def. #2.)
@@DragonWinter36 shouldn't it be 7 notes. the *key* of b minor, not the chord?
Another really interesting video. Thanks. (I enjoyed the bass intervals. ;)
I feel much better already, thank you so very much 😊
as someone with perfect pitch, i agree
So this is why your mashups are so on point.
+1, perfect pitch may be useful to take note when e.g. a machine has a problem than for music.
Me toi
As someone with a tick next to their name, you get likes
nice seeing you here
While I don't have perfect pitch, I have synaethisia. I can literally "see" notes. When I hear a musical note, or really any noise or sound, I see an abstract, colorful image in my brain. So I don't know what note is being played by hearing it, but by seeing it. The "look" of the note is also different depending on what instrument it is being played on.
On a given instrument, are you able to memorize what image you see in order to identify what note was played?
@@benmeron5993 It pretty much works like that. I can remember what a note looks like in order to identify it, but it takes a while to memorize it on an instrument I've never heard before, since they all have a unique sound and "look".
@@spaghettiman3757 Thanks!
@@spaghettiman3757 wait so if someone played an fir would appear as a color like "brown" for you?
f*
This is absolutely interesting. Thank you! 🙏
I am 74 years old and still performing. My hearing is still as good as it was when I was in my twenties. I had perfect pitch in my childhood but didn't realize that it was anything unusual until I got into college. I also had synesthesia from the beginning. For me, each tonal environment had its own color impression.
For instance, the key of D-major was gold and yellow like the midday sun. The key of A-major was a vibrant green like the color of new growth in springtime, and so on. I had these impressions from childhood. Now, I am in my seventh decade, and I can say with great pleasure that none of these capabilities are fading. now but still as sharp as ever. I had friends in music school tgat taught themselves relative pitch by walking around for two weeks hitting everything with an A tuning fork. After that, they could always come up with an accurate A. The abilities we either discover or develop are gifts from heaven.
So live, live, live and enjoy!
I've never been classically taught and I don't play instruments so I can't assign notes to keys, but I have very strong audio-tactile synesthesia that I make use of in singing a lot. The physical sensations and textures of music are why I enjoy it as much as I do, and I love music with all my heart, so the video gave me a surge of very aggressive existential dread since... You know. I don't want to lose that experience before my death. Thank you for sharing this, it made me feel a lot better. Bless you.
Me: man i wish i had perfect pitch
Adam: nah
Me: yeah, nah.
This video seriously shook me.
I've had absolute pitch since a young age but felt like I was starting to lose it. I don't play or listen to much music nearly as much as I used to, so I figured that it might be like a muscle, where I just haven't exercised it in too long and it's out of shape, but if I need to I can "whip it back into shape" and be back to my old self.
I didn't want to tell anyone that I felt like I was losing it because I was worried they'd think that I used to be faking it or something. This was the first time I've ever heard of other people losing it as well.
It's a *little* comforting to know I'm not alone...but it feels like you just told me for the first time as a grown adult that people die when they get old and it'll happen to me too.
So...yeah...you joke, but this kind of *did* seriously devastate me right now and I honestly wasn't ready for it.
I'm fairly young and still accurate with my tones, but hearing that I'll eventually lose it is *terrifying* to me
I have no musical training, other than choir. I developed quasi-perfect pitch in college, just by listening to pop music, and using a virtual piano to learn the notes on a piano, along with different keys and chord progressions. This video is really cool to put all that in perspective!
I just wanted to point out that the truck that was beeping at around 6:12 was an F, not an E
I've got some bad news for you...
@@hiryu64he’s right
Thank you! I'm 63 and I have been wondering why my perfect pitch isn't perfect anymore. I first noticed when I thought a cellist was playing the Prelude to Bach's G-major 'cello suite in A-major. Even though I knew that couldn't be the case, my brain refused to "hear" G-major. I never had much use for perfect pitch; in the words of my RCT ear-training teacher, "Absolute pitch is relatively necessary, but relative pitch is absolutely necessary." She said absolute pitch made you lazy, by which she meant you risked not developing a comprehensive understanding of chord and pitch relationships. I think she may have been right. Losing perfect pitch hasn't changed anything. Give me a reference tone and I hear music the same as always--usually with the correct chroma, which is, I admit, reassuring. And by the way, you didn't give the main reason for not wanting perfect pitch: transposing instruments. It's headache-inducing, seeing a C and playing a C and hearing a B-flat.
Transposing instruments is always such a pain for me, but I guess I know why now. Thank you for your wisdom!
Now we know: Adam would look pretty great with pink highlights.
I always imagined the notes were brushstrokes, but your analogy makes it easy for me to understand how people hear the sound around them.
I have perfect pitch, and I'm now just gonna enjoy it while it lasts. I'm only 21 so I still got a few more decades left of having it. It certainly is very useful, I'm a composer myself and I like being able to just come up with musical ideas in my head and then writing them down later.
you don't have a smartphone? just kiddin
It's also a huge help in memorizing music. If you know how the tunes goes, you automatically know what the notes are. Btw, I'm 60 and it's still as good as ever. The only thing that compromises it is being tired or stressed; get your sleep!
Another disadvantage of having AP is that you experience the discomfort of having to work around the rest of the orchestra being slightly out of tune even when they are perfectly in tune with each other. Several members of the Bristol Bach Choir suffer it, and when even a world-class choir sings a capella, they will slip in pitch together over a long motet. All of those with AP find they have to "transcribe on the fly" the quarter or semitone to the new key everyone else has agreed is now acceptably correct. This gets harder to do the more "out of tune" the quorum becomes :-(
this depends from person to person. I've got it and out of tune notes don't bother me. In fact I quite like hearing displaced keys from time to time.
@@lukaskuipers7791 Yeah this isn't about listening pleasure (and I admit that when I hear someone playing/singing distinctly out of tune I physically cringe, my ears feel like they're being abused), this is about performing and having to adjust your perception to match a consensus that you have learned is "wrong" and in some situations that can be hard work.
Bla bla bla Is It a disadvantage? and something to really complain about?
Rubbish talk
If people in the western culture would pull their finger out and started teaching young children early on music properly there would not be any nonsense discussion anymore cause most of them would be on pitch
It's not a big deal to achieve only if it wasn't for people like Neely who spread that rubbish nonsense view on the subject
@@stewedfaster439 Hey tiger calm down
First of all don't accuse me of discounting achievements made by great musicians who don't have perfect pitch
So don't talk rubbish accusing me of that tiger!! Your abusive language is inappropriate All that I'm saying is that the bar is going up and people who are musicians of the future need to readjust to be able to play or just to follow the music with microtones Are you going to dismiss Jacob Collier and his lectures on the new wave in music composition and music perception?
Your relative pitch will not be good enough and just too slow to follow the topic. For too long it has been fed in our brains that you have to be born with it So what happened? People just got brainwashed and gave up And if people like Mr Neely continue to discount the desire of other people who want something more in music as unwanted waste of time then it will still be a subject taboo among the western population
I don't have perfect pitch and I know that I can go by with relative one But don't redicule the desire of others who want to try out and follow other paths in music that forbidden taboo like the medieval inquisition that would brainwash everyone into thinking that the Earth is flat Whoever though differently awas a tall poppy to be burnt on stake There is a similarity here You tiger are showing your claws in a very aggressive way You have to calm down first and let others do what they want And my opinion is that the social media leading figures should shut up and stop spreading propaganda on this subject dismissing it as a tall poppy and as some say a party trick
This is nothing else but keeping people in dark ages It's all fine we can enjoy music the way we are now and that brings us joy That's all true However let's think about the future as well I hope You big tiger are going to calm down and give it a good thought before you become paranoid about this topic and tell me again to pull my head out of my arse
You ve got a foul mouth mate You're big with your vocabulary Looks like youre a regular in comments section or maybe even a part of a secret death squad Wait wait don't kill me!!! I'm pulling my head out
@@lukaskuipers7791 Hello Sir what a relief to read someone's Sensible and wise comment. There is so much hate and abuse amongst the readers on the subject of perfect pitch People who are agaist it must be in some sort of a secret political party or society They I'm afraid might be storming on the Capital very soon and go through the bulletproof door One thing for sure they want to behead anyone who brings up the subject Do You have perfect pitch Sir?
I don't and I'm too old for it but I'm interested and want to know more about it Would You be able to answer one or two questions?
Regards and Happy New year for you and family
Jack
This leads to an interesting theory: What if everyone's pitch perception changes slightly for everyone in their 50s or 60s? Only the people with perfect pitch would ever notice it. Almost no one else would ever notice a "B" slowly sounding like a "C" as they get older.
This is exactly what I thought. It makes an interesting point for the classic "is the color red that I see the same as the color red that you see" debate.
It would be interesting to know what happens to people with quasi-absolute pitch as they age. Does their memory of their reference note also shift?
@@ruthsteen6943 well my father is 61 years old right now, and i can say is no, my father still remember those tunes perfectly
I actually had days where familiar songs sounded off. So even without perfect/absolute pitch stuff can feel wrong. Can't imagine how that must be when a permanent shift sets it. Especially since I'm actually getting better at feeling notes.
Rick Beato (He doesn't have perfect pitch) also said that he mixed E and Eb. I think it's definitely an age thing. The difference could be that he doesn't suffer.
Having perfect pitch is very useful at times but, I’ve discovered over my high school career, it is mostly a burden.
Being able to call out specific notes, keys, chords, etc for people is useful and I’m glad that I can be of use for those reasons, but one of the main drawbacks, for me at least, is being able to notice nuances in music (especially in vocal music).
I can pinpoint if someone is singing a wrong note in a melody, and I can even hear when someone shifts between keys within a melody, like if someone is singing in the key of C and about halfway through the song obliviously changes to G sharp or something (probably as a result of not being able to find the right note to go up, or down, to).
I don’t like to point these things out to people because it makes me sound rude, so I have to suffer in my head lol.
I literally commented this same exact thing 🤣
It really sucks because it isn't our fault that we hear things that way but often it takes enjoyment or impressiveness away from performances because I hyperfocus on that c7 being slightly flat
Don't let people who don't have it make you hate it. I have it, and it's how I enjoy various genres of music even without having learned music in a formal setting. Makes you feel alone when you have no one to share it with and you have to brace the persecution all by yourself. Still I can enjoy my lonesomeness, understanding that not everyone has it and giving them their space.
@@avigailomichael of course! I’d say it’s more of a love/hate relationship, and being in college where I’m actually around others with perfect or relative pitch is certainly good; I don’t feel so alone now! Also, I guess I’m partially exaggerating when I say it’s a burden. It is genuinely useful and I certainly find pleasure in listening to and finding the intricacies within music, especially classical :)
I played clarinet since grade school and been surrounded by music since the womb. The clarinet was challenging, but it helped me SO much in learning other instruments (I’m learning guitar right now) especially with tuning and knowing what note is what. My high school band instructor used me as a tuner when the tuner broke since I had perfect pitch and I didn’t find this out until I graduated kekeke
I saw someone in another video say people who grew up with wind instruments can’t have it, only pianos, and I was like “that sounds like BS”, and indeed it only takes one to disprove it so you’ve just done it!
@@kaitlyn__L Somebody done lied! My band instructor made sure we knew how to stay in tune by ear and that was since sixth grade for me (I had the same instructor through high school). He said that not always will we have a tuner and he was right. The only annoying thing is I can tell when someone is in pitch or out of it. It drives me nuts when someone is flatter than a tire or is in the wrong key. But I forget that not everyone has an ear for music and I have to let it go.
@@LyssieLysse haha yeah, listening to people whistle out of key is so frustrating to me, especially because I can whistle quite well (not gonna say I’m amazing) as a side effect of playing sax 😅
The worst is when people only can whistle 3 notes though, and they think they’re doing a melody but really they just have their low note for “descending” and their high for “ascending” and really they’re encoding the motion of the melody rather than the melody itself.
It’s pretty frustrating when people try to compress 2 octaves into their natural range so that everything is off key, but it doesn’t bother me quite as badly as that “3 notes” thing! Since I can at least try to imagine it’s some avant-garde tuning rather than clearly just 3 notes.
I like how Adam has the Generic "CZcams Personality Neon Hair Highlights" without dyeing his hair thanks to that purple light.
Purple backlight is often used in greenscreen work as it’s the opposite colour to green so makes for less fringing / spill. Although I don’t think he’s using greenscreen here.
The best "I was an emo in a past life" Levitin effect is the first note of Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.
I was looking for this comment....
Oh how many times I've heard that G note
100%
I was listening to it earlier!
Same, G is a meme for a reason :D.
Damn right.
I find the pitch-color analogy so very interesting. I'm an artist so I use color a lot in my work, and I tend to think in relative color the way one might think of relative pitch. So long as the color relationships are correct, the exact color of something doesn't really matter to me. Especially helpful is the overlap of color and music in my head, so that certain color ratios equivalate to musical intervals. For example, the ratio between the red of the apple and the subtly yellow-green of that plant is approximately 4:3 (a perfect fourth), hence why that image looks so... harmonious(?). If the plant were a tad bluer (sharper) though it'd really clash, like a diminished fifth.
I’m pretty sure I have perfect pitch and learning to see colours as complementary etc instead of just “as they are” was literally like rewiring my brain.
I’m glad I can do it now tho, eg I’ll see purple and orange, next to blue and yellow, and understand it’s just shifted a little cooler.
It’s really useful in identifying when a screen is calibrated wrongly too, I used to just flail around until it matches but now I know which direction to go.
my dad claims that he doesn't believe perfect pitch exists. this is extremely funny to me, because he demonstrably Has Perfect Pitch. the other day, he mentioned that he was losing his ability to hum songs in the correct key, which was just sort of an "damn that sucks" moment. now i know it'll happen to me too! i'm existentially terrified! thanks, adam!
The music I've listened to a lot I remember in the correct pitch, i.e I can "listen" to Bohemian Rhapsody in my mind, and it has Freddie singing and Brian playing the guitar solo and it's almost like a recording of the music. From that I could, if I knew the starting note or some significant note that stands out, figure out the others and, to a point, use that memory of a recorded song to get an absolute pitch to use as a reference for my relative pitch. It'd be interesting to know if these memories of songs shift in pitch based on age in the same way that perfect pitch does? I guess most of us with relative pitch don't rely on these memories, and so we don't really find out. Plus if we listen to the original it's not really clashing because we don't have perfect pitch. i.e if Queen performed live one time playing their songs a semitone lower I wouldn't be thinking "They're flat" so it would be less obvious if my memory of their recorded songs - which is strong has pitch drifted or not. Most of the time, of course, I don't have a strong reference for a melody or harmony. e.g if I think of the song 'twinkle twinkle little star' I can hear the melody in my mind and easily recreate that on a piano or other instrument, but not at any particular starting note. I can imagine it with any starting note but it's all relative (which I think is the more important thing to know anyway - if I'm hearing some band vamping and I want to solo over it, I imagine a melody that goes over the top of what they are playing and then find it on the guitar - and, to the extent that I can do that, I'm not thinking "He's playing Dm7' at all, and it would take far too long to think in those terms and then play - the band would be 3 chords further along. And the real struggle to play music is that most of us, I imagine, can hear far better solos than we can play, and I think that's both in the sense that we lack the musical chops and virtuosity to play what we imagine as well as being unable to 'imagine do be dop a doo be doo' and then find all those pitches on our instrument in real time. I imagine even Guthrie probably has an ability to imagine stuff he can't play albeit he is obviously a lot further down the path of 'playing what he imagines' than most of us. Whereas I imagine Collier's biggest frustration will be that he lacks the chops and technical ability on all the instruments he uses to be able to physically play what he's imagining, even if his perfect pitch means he knows exactly what notes he wants to play - but the latter is easier to solve because you can write down your music and get someone else to play it (as Beethoven et al did) or, in the modern day, you can plug the notes one by one into a DAW.
I think Brett is waiting for the time when Eddy's perfect pitch goes away
Doesn't he have quasi absolute pitch?
I am talking about Eddy. He acquired it very late(High school I think?) and he doesn't know the notes immediately upon hearing but has to think for few seconds.
Therefore he will never lose it.
@@temp2424 Yeah, I'm pretty sure Brett has quasi absolute pitch.
@@pranaynatvarlal they said he doesn't
@@temp2424 Eddy has perfect pitch. He didn't acquire it late, he trained it, so I guess he always has had the ability. Rick Beato also talked about this in one of his videos. If you train your perfect pitch on a detuned piano, you will then have the wrong reference tones in your head.
And in the comment section of the video where Eddy thinks about what note is what there are some users who also have perfect pitch where they talk about just that: That they have the reference tone in their head, just like a tuner. They hear a tone and just know how it relates to their reference tone.
I guess that's also the explanation why people who start losing their perfect pitch will hear notes "wrong", because the reference tones in their minds start to get "out of tune", so to speak.
@@wohlhabendermanager I see, thx for clearing it up
I feel like having perfect pitch is like being very traditionally good looking. Since you can rely on this one trait you may not feel the need to work hard to develop relevant skills and as you get older it eventually goes away and you’re forced to live the rest of your life without a major part of your identity.
God I’ve fallen into that trap :(
yeah, cus good looking people are naturally good at things.
@@smugler1 I think you might want to look a little bit more closely for the point of my comment.
That's a good analogy
But I think like Adam said there’s also side effects that make thing like relative pitch harder for people with perfect pitch
The work done in making this video must be INSANE.
Thanks for this analogy of how we hear tones and music. I am a Relative Pitch person like yourself (Play guitar and keyboard) and use it allot when hearing songs and being able to hum or play them back after listening to them a few times. I don't know the actual notes without going to my guitar or keyboard, but I do recognize most of the intervals. Then over a few times I can play or hum the song correctly.
Nice to know that Absolute Pitch people have their problems and figured they may lose that ability as they get older. I always thought having absolute pitch, they could listen to a song (chords, notes) and be able to then sit at a piano and them correctly or write down the music without any help from an instrument. It is interesting that you say they might not know one note is higher than the other.
Anyway, thanks for all your information on Pitch.
I’ve wished I had perfect pitch ever since I was a child. I never was able to convince myself that I wasn’t somehow inferior as a musician because I didn’t have it. I didn’t expect this video to change how I feel, but it did. I can’t believe there are aspects of being born without perfect pitch to be genuinely grateful for. 😳😊🙏🏻
I'm tone-deaf between a quarter-step and sometimes a half-step. Everything I make focuses a lot more on rhythm, meter, and noise harmonic filtering than it ever does on melody. I use tuners and frequency graphs to help me form chords and keep stuff in tune, but it's rarely necessary, since I usually use percussion, programmed synthesizers, and atonal filtered noise samples.
I can tell who has perfect pitch because they absolutely hate everything I make, while people without perfect pitch usually land anywhere from "meh" to "this is amazing".
I genuinely don't think I would benefit from having perfect pitch, especially since it seems that perfect pitch locks people out of an entire collection of music genres as a result.
It used to really bother me because I had zero music friends (all the music majors avoided me and treated me as less than them), but then I realized they can only listen to and talk about stuff that has clean tones and crystal pitches, while I have the opportunity to explore the vast range of emotions found in atonal noise and percussion music, and if they refuse to go with me, then it's their loss, lol.
@@jasonyesmarc309 This is such a fantastic take 😮 🫡
Bumping this comment in hopes the algorithm lifts it higher.
@@bunbynoy Thanks man! 😃
@@AdrienMelody heck yeah!
As someone with perfect pitch, this feels like being told I have dementia and that I only have a few years left before I forget everything :,(
@Ethan Deister I think @Flynn made a good analogy. With dementia, it's more like you get lost in yourself than just having everything going blank in your mind.
@@ethandeister6567 ...as someone with perfect pitch, I won't be able to enjoy it transposed, it's painful :(
@@ethandeister6567 I don't have perfect pitch amd my hearing is rather poor (untrained) but people always tell me if I did have it I would just be bugged all the time by everything that is out of tune. And I just kept wondering ok but what if I don't care? Out of tune is not wrong, it's just not any of the 12 notes. If something is between idk F and F# why should I be bugged by that? I could just perceive it as neither and move on, idk. Like being bugged that a color is neither purple nor blue and you just can't asign either to it. Why care?
Everywhere at the end of time starts playing
🥺
As a musician who has never had perfect pitch this was nice to know. I mainly play trumpet and if I hear a note I can usually get within a semi tone of it if I try to play it on the trumpet if I don’t stop to think. I’m not too bad at picking a note out on the piano either. When I’ve been playing the guitar consistently I also find I can sense if it is in tune. I also find that because a guitar requires frequent tuning it has improved my intonation on the trumpet. I believe this shows they are all learned skills.
ive seen this video on my recommended for a very long time and never clicked because i didn’t expect it would extend any further than “it’s so annoying to hear the pitch of every sound! you don’t want perfect pitch”… but honestly, the amount of research and the quality of explanation was awesome, i learned a lot and enjoyed it! and i can confidently say now that i in fact do not want perfect pitch 😌
As someone who is colorblind with perfect pitch, I enjoyed this video.
As someone who is colorblind without perfect pitch, I hate my life
@@aw11348 as someone who has neither colorblindness nor perfect pitch, I do too
As someone who is colorblind with quasi-perfect pitch, my brain huts
HEY SAME what are the chances of that! :D
WHOA!
By the way, the beeping of the truck you said was an E at 6:23 is actually an F
Scrolled too long to find this, but I thought so too
Was waiting to see this
Well, sure. But hey, he then gave us that awesome Steve Perry imitation (6:30), which, I think, _more_ than made up for it.
Yes! I wasn't crazy hahahha
yep
This explanation makes a lot of sense to me and I think me being colourblind helps with the colour comparison
Im a retired musician, singer, percussion, piano, guitar.lost my abilities 9 years ago after neuro surgery. never had perfect pitch b4, but got every tone right watching you.....
So every emo kid has quasi perfect pitch, they just need to figure out the intervallic distance from G.
WHEN I WAS
TUUUUN TUUN TUUN TUNN TUUN TUN TUNN TUN TUUN TUUN...TUUUN
@@joshjams1978 A YOUNG BOY
@@Spladoinkal to see a father..
@KvAT TOOK ME INTO THE CITY
Having listened to The Black Parade means that the note G5 is stuck in my head forever, so it's close enough.
Dude I thought I was the only one! That is legendary!
I was looking for this comment. I knew there would be someone
Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day is my G reference
Interesting to learn about the upward pitch shift with old age. I've had a theory for a while that our perception of time changes as we age. I remember as a schoolchild being taught to count off seconds as "one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand." That ended up being too short for me so I had to insert a small extra beat into it to get it to work. "One a-one thousand, two a-one thousand, three a-one thousand." Now that I'm in my 50s, I have to rush through "one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand" to get it to match a second. (This is all in my head, so there's no mechanical action of mouthing the words involved.) I'm guessing the messages passing between the neurons in our brain gets slower as we age.
A compression of time perception corresponds to an upward shift in pitch. If I'm right, that would suggest absolute pitch does not come from specific hair cells in the cochlea triggering specific brain cells which code for that pitch. But rather, pitch is measured later in the brain's auditory processing.
That’s also why eg people who grew up with a piano tuned flat to A438 will have their perfect pitch “tuned” to A438 too! It’s all about a deep-seated memory
The color analogy actually holds perfectly when explaining relative pitch. The visual clue to what that means would be to not look at grayscale, but at an image where the overall hue is shifted through all colors of the rainbow. By being told that the plant is green the correct hue shift which makes the plant green also locks the color of the apple to be red.
Everyone who has listened to THAT mcr song has quasi absolute pitch
This was exactly the first thing that came to my mind during that segment of the video
G
tw// G note
One thing i always think about is if we got 11 more songs of equal importance that emphasize a note the same way black parade does we would all have perfect pitch
@@dr.seesaw8894 Is it a G? I played through the opening progression by ear but started on C. Could be I transposed it, I didn't check it against the original.
i have perfect pitch, and one of the downfalls of it for me was that i had a harder time identifying intervals than my peers in my music theory class. my classmates could tell a C and an E is a 3rd interval because they know what a 3rd interval sounds like, but for me, i would identify each note and then do the math so i was slower. so i really identified with the first section of this video 😂 it’s a curse
I relate. I just wanna be able to hear intervals without having to identify each note first.
Intresting. So it's like you guys have relative intervals. That makes sense. I was doing interval training with a person that has perfect pitch, and I was surprised that they were so slow
There is another curse with absolute pitch, you know something is out of tune when you hear it. It’s hell, trust.
I feel that as someone with absolute pitch. Other people can hear the notes and identify the interval instantly because of the distance, but I just hear two notes and then have to count the amount of semitones between each note lol.
That's not a downfall at all. It means you had one skill (absolute pitch) and so never bothered to develop the other (relative pitch). That's not the fault of the first skill. The other musicians saw that they were lacking, and they did what they could to fix it.
Adam, I'm 74, and started learning piano at 4ish. I have absolute pitch and it has not seemed to fade with age YET... :) One reason you didn't mention that one would not want it is that it makes playing any transposing instrument very difficult/impossible. I see that C on the page, and if it comes out B-flat, or E-flat or F it just confuses the heck outta me. I did have a friend years ago who had absolute pitch, yet was raised playing French horn as well as piano, and he was not confused by the discrepancy at all. I was always jealous of his ablility to ignore the visual association with sound. Thanks for all the interesting videos!
I got the first question correct, but I did have to think about it. My immediate reaction on hearing the second note was one of pain due to it being out of tune, and it is slightly too sharp.
Transposing a melody does make it completely different. There are for example many great works in C# minor that would just lose their magic if they were played in another key.