Can Anyone Acquire Perfect Pitch?
What is Perfect Pitch? It is the ability to hear a musical note or chord and name it instantly. But can you acquire perfect pitch? I will get to that shortly. Actually, much more common is relative pitch. It is the ability to hear and comprehend the relationship between one note and another. In other words, a musical interval. There are many schools of thought on whether perfect pitch can be taught or if it is an inherent talent or merely genetic. One study suggests that we are all born with perfect pitch. Perfect Pitch and Language An interesting follow on from the above article is the fact that many more Asians acquire perfect pitch than Westerners. The reason that this would be has a lot to do with how Asian languages are constructed. In Cantonese (the language spoken by Chinese from Hong Kong and surrounding areas) their language has 9 different tones (word sounds that change pitch in different ways) for most of their words! This makes their language difficult for many to learn. (I should know I lived in Hong Kong for 3 years and only picked up a handful of basic words - "two beers please" being one of my most frequently used:)). In Mandarin (the Chinese language spoken by the rest of China) they have 4 different tones, so it's not quite as complex as Cantonese but is still a difficult language to learn.
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Because Asian children are always distinguishing between different pitches in their language their ears get used to hearing the differences in pitches in music and therefore develop perfect pitch more readily.
There are numerous software packages available on the internet which claim to teach you how to have perfect pitch. My choice out of all that's out there, is this product Click Here! Basically you learn how to recognise the differences in the quality of each note. (For the technical amongst you the differences in harmonics and timbre). And gradually you will begin to recognise a particular note by the "sound" it makes and so be able to tell what pitch the note is. As a professional musician myself, I have found that I developed relative pitch as my musical education progressed. When you have been playing your own instrument for many years you develop the skill of spotting notes very quickly.
There are many excellent musicians who don't have perfect pitch and I honestly feel it is more important to be aware of the pitches around you and to be able to adjust to your colleagues. In a perfect world everyone would have perfect pitch and tuning between instruments (or singers) would never be an issue. But we don't live in that world and there are so many variables in a performance of music that can affect pitch that we need to be sensitive to our fellow musicians and be willing to adjust when necessary.
Another interesting fact about perfect pitch is that the older you get the sharper your sense of pitch becomes. Interesting huh? I can't begin to understand why this would happen. Maybe as your ears grow in size the canal changes shape somehow? I'm sure someone has looked into this phenomenon. Actually a colleague of mine told me recently that it's because as you get older you lose the top of your hearing range and so lose the harmonics of the sound which means you over-compensate and end up playing sharper!
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