Pitch Perfect

Alright, I’ll admit it: I don’t have perfect pitch.

I’m also perfectly happy not having it.
“What? Really? Why would you not want perfect pitch?”

[Before I start, I just want to throw it out there that I am in no way saying that people who don’t have perfect pitch are superior to those who do. I’m just writing the things I’ve noticed in my experience. I am also in no way painting all perfect pitch-ers with the same brush. Please don’t take offense to anything; I’m not mean, I promise!]

To be completely honest, when I was younger, I envied those who had perfect pitch. The first time I’d heard of the concept, I Googled it and read that only 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch. I wanted it so badly. I thought it was so cool, being able to know exactly what pitch is being played without seeing it being played. Then, I came to university to study piano performance. I found out recently that 9 out of the 12 people in my studio have perfect pitch. My best friend has perfect pitch. All of a sudden, not having perfect pitch was special. It wasn’t until I came to university that I really appreciated not having perfect pitch. Why? Because it has forced me to train my ear in ways that people with perfect pitch don’t necessarily have to, because they can already tell pitch without really trying.

Throughout my musical training growing up, I had to do a lot of “identification exercises”. I’m sure you’ve done these, too, if you’ve ever taken up music seriously at any point in your life. I’m talking about the identification of intervals, chords, and cadences. Someone would play you an interval, and you’d have to name it. Relative pitch is something that all musicians develop to some degree, and through lots of hard work, I’ve learned to hone that relative pitch. I always thought perfect pitch would solve all my problems, but I realized that my relative pitch was good enough to make up for the fact that I didn’t have perfect pitch. I’ve trained my ear in a way that I can hear a pitch and know what it is, not by perfect pitch, but by figuring it out quickly by using relative pitch, with my vocal range as a reference point.

The lowest note I can audibly sing is a C3. I know where the note sits in my throat. I’ve used it as a reference point so much, now, that I can physically place that note, not sing it, but still be able to hear it in my head. That’s the beauty of knowing your own body. You can feel where pitches are in your vocal tract without actually singing them, and make connections to that feeling. After being determined to develop some sort of “perfect pitch” for myself to use, I started trying to identify every sound I heard in everyday situations. The soft “ping” a bus makes when someone presses the button for the next stop is a G. I would hear the sound, hum a C3 to myself quietly, and then think back to the pitch I just heard. “Perfect fifth, it’s a G!” Gradually, this process started getting faster. Of course, it’s still not as fast as I’d like it to be (yet!!), but this is something I can continue to work on. Over the past two years, I’ve also managed to memorize where A440 is, mostly thanks to a job I had at a music store where people would come in to buy violin strings and ask me to restring their instruments. My counter was on the other side of the store from the shelf with the metronomes and tuners, and, being the lazy creature that I am, decided to memorize what A440 was so that I could tune their instruments without walking over to the other side of the store. Who said laziness doesn’t have benefits? (:

I’ve also learned to develop my relative pitch through playing things by ear. A lot. In Canada, our Royal Conservatory exams include melody playbacks, where someone plays you a phrase with your back to them, and you have to go to the keyboard (or your instrument, if you’re not a pianist) and play that same phrase back. This is the first step to doing something that lots of people find impressive: someone requests a popular song and you sit down and play it by ear. I started being able to play by ear many, many years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered how it worked in my head. First, of course, knowledge of chord progressions and harmonies will take you so far in this. But for me, personally, I realized that I’m able to play by ear well because I think of melody notes in terms of scale degrees. Instead of figuring out the intervals from each melody note to the next, I think of each individual pitch in terms of the key I’m in. This helps not only with learning the notes of the melody, but also with figuring out what harmonies to play along with that melody note. One of my favorite ways to develop this sense of scale degree recognition is to solfege every melody you hear. I’m not even kidding. I play a lot of video games, and I’ve realized that a lot of classic video game tunes are perfect for solfege exercise. Take the Tetris theme, or something from Super Mario Bros., or Pokemon… and just solfege the crap out of that stuff.

Another thing you could try training yourself to do is to hear things in your head. I don’t mean voices, because that means you’re just… probably going insane and need help. Or something. Being able to read music and hear it in your head is called audiating. I developed this skill mostly through sight-reading. I always remembered when teachers would put a piece of music in front of a student and ask them to sight-read it. “I’ll give you a moment to look through it, and you can start whenever you’re ready.” Sound familiar? Well, of course, this “moment” is for you to look at what you’re about to play. What you should be doing, though, is hearing it in your head. We learn music easier when we’ve heard it before, so if you can’t physically hear the piece before you play it, why not sing it to yourself in your head? Being able to hear what you see on the page is such a helpful skill to have in terms of learning music faster, but it also helps develop other musical skills. If you train yourself to hear more than one note at a time in your head, it makes it easier to figure out harmonies and chord progressions from that. When you can hear where a phrase goes in your head, it makes it easier for you to kind of “predict” where the music is going next, even if you’ve never heard it before. Of course, this is all assuming that your teachers or examiners aren’t being total jerks and giving you some kind of atonal sh*t to sight-read.

 

And for those of you who wish you had perfect pitch, but don’t, here’s a reason to love not having it.

We can transpose stuff more easily than those with perfect pitch (for the most part). I know so many people with perfect pitch who have trouble with transposition, because they see something on the page and they hear what it is in their heads with the exact pitches. The transposed key sounds totally awful to them. I’ve seen the faces of people with perfect pitch show discomfort when something is transposed. They also have issues with listening to Baroque tuning, because it’s so off from the usual 440 tuning we’re all used to hearing. Without perfect pitch, we hear the general contour of the piece we see on the page without being locked down to a specific tonal center, so we’re more comfortable with playing things in different keys. We can also listen to pieces that are transposed, or use instruments that are tuned differently, without feeling uneasy because, once again, we’re not locked down by specific pitches we hear in our minds. We might know that a key is in the ballpark of where it’s supposed to be, but being a semitone or two off in either direction isn’t going to bother us as much, if at all, as it will for those who have perfect pitch.

Personally, I’m a pretty awful person when it comes to practicing in practice rooms at school. Because practice rooms at my school are little individual cubicles with no windows and poor soundproofing, it’s easy to mess around with people without them knowing who you are. Unless, of course, they get so irritated that they come into your practice room to hunt you down. When I hear people practicing a certain piece that I’ve learned before, or I know well, I’ll do several things:

1) Find out what key the piece is in. If I’ve already learned the piece before, then I’ll know what it is. If I haven’t learned the piece before, but I know it well in my head, I will figure out what the key is, usually by thinking of that C3 at the bottom of my range and figuring out the key of the piece from there.

2) Figure out how the piece goes. If a piece is in my head and I can sing it to myself, figuring out the scale degrees and knowing intervals inside out will make figuring out the pitches a piece of cake. I usually make up the left hand, just filling in harmonies that work.

3) Transpose away. This is the fun part. I’m a horrible human being, I know. But usually, I’ll take other people’s pieces and be extremely mean and play either a semitone away or a tritone away. (:

My favorite thing about not having perfect pitch, though, is that when I hear something out in the blue, like a car horn, I’ll turn to my friend who has perfect pitch and say,

“That was an F, right?”

And when she says yes,

I feel like a million bucks.

 

So for those of you who don’t have perfect pitch, just keep workin’ on that relative pitch and own it! And to those of you who have perfect pitch… Well, let’s just hope you never practice in a room next to mine.

Dream big, music-makers! (: