billkeis.com

Perfect pitch means the ability to hear a sound and instantly recognize what the note is. In other words you can hear a sound and say, “that’s a G” or whatever the note is.

It is a fallacy that some people are born with it and that you can either do it or you can’t. This is a skill that can be acquired. I would say that it does seem to be less common that people learn late in life rather than earlier in life.

I realized that I had this skill when I was about six years old. My mother actually discovered it. She was playing the piano and I told her what note she was playing from the other room and she started testing me and she discovered that I had perfect pitch.

So what does that mean? Some people think that someone with perfect pitch can tell if something is out of tune better than someone who doesn’t have perfect pitch. That is not true, not necessarily. Something out of tune doesn’t bother me more than it bothers anyone else.

But basically it’s like this; perfect pitch is a kind of perception of the sound quality of a note. It is a fine perception of minute differences of quality. It’s not a question of the highness or lowness of the sound particularly. It’s more like the difference between orange and red, or the different shades of green, such as, bright green, pale green, pea green.

Someone working in art or say the subject of interior decorating or something like that would have a lot of experience with say being able to recognize colors. They may say something like, this color is sea green or this is lime green. Perfect pitch is similar to that, it’s a perception.

On a bigger scale it would be like being able to tell the difference between a piano verses a guitar. If you were playing the exact same note, same volume with your eyes closed it would be very obvious.

It’s the same thing with perfect pitch. There are 12 notes and you just have to memorize or learn to perceive that each one of them has something about it that gives it a certain quality that is different than the other notes.

“F” to me has a buzzing kind of quality. You could think of the shape of your mouth creating a zzz…, or ahh… whereas a “B flat” is a much more rounded sound, like an oohhh… It’s almost like the difference between the vowel sounds, a, e, i, o, u, or the different ways that you can make your voice sound. An E just has a certain sound – almost like the letter “E….” as opposed to “A”. C is a flat sound, not meaning low in pitch. Sort of “bland” is a better word to describe “C”, it is a more mundane sound.

Perfect pitch is what it is called, but a better name for it would be pitch recall or Absolute Pitch Recall. What that means is that you can remember what the A sounds like. Right now I could play an ”A” and have you sing the “A” and 10 seconds later I can ask you to sing an “A” and you could do it. That is because you remember what it sounds like.

But, what about 20 minutes from now, or an hour from now? What about tomorrow? You might not be able to do it. The point is if you have a very short- term memory with pitch, you probably don’t have perfect pitch.

So, if you could practice singing an “A” and then going back to the piano 5 minutes later and sing it again, and then 10 minutes later go back to the piano and sing it again, and then by gradually increasing the time you will begin to increase your certainty on what does an “A” actually sounds like. Then you’ll remember it. Then you could begin to start to develop perfect pitch.

The two main aspects are; 1) quality of the sound; trying to recognize the difference between pitches and 2) just increasing the time that you can actually remember one sound.

Perfect pitch is a very useful skill however it is not mandatory to becoming a successful musician. In fact, only about 10% of musicians I know have this skill.

Relative pitch, the ability to recognize notes after hearing a starting note, is more valuable and is easier to develop.

First of all, there is no such thing as a condition of being tone deaf. What I mean is that really anyone can learn to hear tones and sing in tune, unless of course you are actually deaf. It’s like anything else; if you can practice it you can get good at it.

Increasing one’s ability to sing in tune starts with practicing singing unisons. Unison means two notes at the same pitch. You can actually practice this with your voice by taking your keyboard and purposely singing out of tune and then go in tune or purposely start in tune and then go out high and then back to it or purposely go out low and then back to it. And just keep doing this over and over again and again.

In other words you are actually doing what violin players, or what guitar players or cello players do, they sit down and tune their instrument (nowadays they may bypass this step, because they buy an electric tuner, and it does it for them, and then they do not develop their ear, which is a bad thing). In actual fact violinists, guitar players, bass players and cello players do this everyday. They have to physically turn the knob and tune their instrument.

Play a note on the keyboard and then slide your voice up and down (aahaahaah). Purposely start a few notes out of tune and then gradually slide your voice to the correct note. You can come up to the correct note or down to it.

You could also do this for example, sing an “A” and sustain it and then purposely play another note like a “Bb”, then go back to the “A.” Then you could play a note and sing it and then play another one and then sing it, etc.

If you have never done this, never practiced tuning your voice you might not be good at it. But, as the old saying goes, practice makes perfect.

Another thing to talk about is beats. Not beats like beats on a drum. Piano tuners use this word to describe the sound caused by two notes played at the same time that are out of tune. If you have one note sounding, that note is going to be vibrating at a certain speed, such as note that is vibrating 440 times per second. (This would be “A” just above middle C)

Let’s say you come along and you sing just a note a little bit below that. In other words, you’re a little flat. The note you are singing is vibrating at maybe 437. The reason you’re not singing in tune is because the note is not vibrating at 440.

It’s impossible for you to count these numbers of vibrations, but what you can count is the sound created by the two notes sounding at the same time and the difference between them. The difference between 440 and 437 is 3 beats per seconds and you can hear 3 beats per second.

If you have an A440 and also a note that is a 437 that is trying to be an A, the difference is going to be 3 per second and you’re going to be able to hear that. If you play the 2 notes together you will hear a sound that sounds like a vibrato, a wowu, wowu, kind of sound and those are called beats. That’s what piano tuners call them.

The notes are beating, they are out of sync. What you need to do is try to develop your ability to hear those. They are somewhat subtle, but they are there. You can listen for that and then gradually move your voice a little up or down, whichever makes the beats slower. As you get more in tune, the beats will slow down. It’s going to be a sound like this, wowu, wowu, etc. until that vibrato eventually stops and that means you’re in tune.

Tone deafness can be cured!

Dear Bill, 

The book is great. Got me thinking that anyone can learn music 

and you really can use drills and practice to hone any level 

of innate talent you might have. 

Thanks, Matt