Can adults develop perfect pitch?

thecolourbox

I think I'd be described as having decent relative pitch but I do also have a certain amount of ability to remember certain pitches from imagining a context for them. For example when I restring a guitar I do it completely by ear until I've stretched them enough not to move too much, then final check with a tuner - but this is based on me knowing what the Low E and A strings sound like by running through Ball and Biscuit and Hardest Button to Button by the White Stripes in my head. However I doubt they are exactly in tune (Jack White isn't known for his attention to detail in this regard), so it can't be this A440 perfect pitch, but it's certainly some form of pitch memory and using that with relative pitch seems to get me somewhere close, close enough to be useful for my purposes anyway. I'm normally only a little bit out, mostly on the B string bizarrely, always struggled with that one for some reason.

And I would also go as far as to say the above CAN be learnt, very much so, even if actualy Perfect Pitch may not be able to be. Especially by guitarists in my experience much more than piano players for example, which is my background. Any guitarist that has ever improvised anything will have attempted some sort of interval of notes that required it (I can't imagine all of you lot play verything only to the letter from what you read on a tab or notation and do so only from muscle memory?

But it is something you have to work at in various different ways, through listening, transcribing, humming, joining in with tunes etc I think. I wouldn't know where to start in teaching somebody personally as I learnt it as I went with my piano stuff. In fact my piano playing in general always feels somewhat fraudulent to a certain extent as whilst I sound like I know what I'm doing musically, i've always felt a bit like I did so by learning parrot fashion how to sound like you're jamming it or what not.

Interesting stuff though, the explanation above from Viz was quite an interesting read in itself

bingefeller

merlin said:

Check out David L. Burge.  He has a course published that can train you to have perfect pitch. Apparently. 

haha, I remember seeing ads for that course in Guitar World. 

Dan_Halen

Funkfingers said:

Perfect pitch is a function of memory. 

If the ability were truly innate, it ought to be applicable to any musical scale from this planet. Somebody who had never heard the degrees of, say, an Arabic scale, should still be able to identify them. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_equal_temperament

Simply not true. Having the ability to differentiate between pitch without an anchor point to relate to (i.e. relative pitch) and the musical knowledge to state which scale tone it is are different things. A person with perfect pitch would still need to learn what the hell the notes are called, it's just once they have a grasp of musical basics they wouldn't need any context to tell you what random note you were playing.

Doesn't mean it is or isn't innate, just your reasoning is off.

Funkfingers

Dan_Halen said:
A person with perfect pitch would still need to learn what the hell the notes are called

The nomenclature is irrelevant.

A person familiar only with Western equal temperament scaling should be able to detect that some degrees of an Arabic scale lie between the degrees of a Western scale. That listener should be able to state which two Western semi-tone pitches the Arabic note lies between.

For the purpose of this thought experiment, there is no requirement to know to which of the two Western pitches the Arabic pitch is closer.

Dan_Halen

...and who said they couldn't?