Absolute Pitch - My Experience and Myths

Today's post is about the wonderful world of Absolute pitch, or Perfect pitch, or whatever you wanna call it. There is alot of debate online and in musical classrooms about it and well, while I'm not a scientist, I am a person who has absolute pitch.  I can't offer scientific experimentation but I can offer my personal experiences from a real person who is writing THIS article and not someone quoted from a book.  So take it from me, a real living-breathing absolute pitch guy.

What is Absolute Pitch?

Let me define what absolute pitch is.  Normally it's something like "The ability to name pitches on the piano without a fixed reference point." that is only have the story AND it's not even that accurate.
My best definition of absolute pitch is the internal sense of the color produced by musical tones and scales.

 It's not necessarily being able to identify any note without a second though, we do second guess ourselves, we can get confused. You still have to work at it, no one and I firmly will declare that it is a FACT that NO ONE was born with absolute pitch that allowed them to instantly name every pitch. It's all about developing a relationship with the notes and while I agree you can be gifted, it has far more to do with a mindset and experience than your freakin stupid genetics.

There is Psychological phenomenon called Anomic Aphasia which is the inability to always name colors or other things. You know what it is but you can't play the name with it. This phenomenon can occur with AP I think, I may have it and others don't, I really don't know. It's like seeing a cup and saying bowel, no plate, oh a cup.  

"bbut mozart had absolute pitch... " BLAH BLAH BLAH I'm tired of hearing about genetics being involved with it. It might play a small role but generally, it comes down to what you're paying attention to. I imagine talent might matter in your development of it but everyone, I mean everyone with musical training can name pitches without a reference tone, if you think hard enough.  That's not to say that I believe everyone can differentiate keys or tones but that's not important.

Tonal Color

With me, my experience with AP is that each musical tone and scale has a color to it, not a visual color, it's not freakin synethesia, I don't see colors when I hear sound. It's more like, if our ears heard colors, well that's what AP is like. It's like when you see blue and you feel that blue color right? Not a physical sensation, but it's BLUE, you don't doubt it.  So when I hear G, I will just know it's G. That's not to say I can't get it wrong time to time. But it's that feeling of G, sometimes I'll hear it and can't immediately think of what note or key but I just feel the texture of it.  I guess it's kind of like how someone with good AP can tell a major from a minor chord but it's a little more tricky than that.

I cannot fathom what it's like to hear sound in black and white, to hear a piece of music then the same one again in a different key and then not being able to tell that they have entirely different colors!   For me, hearing someone say G and F# sound the same is like saying Red and Blue look the same - it's nonsense and just ridiculous.

Literally every single major/minor key has a unique flavor. Trying to tell you what they sound like is like trying to describe to a blind man what colors look like. I can tell you that F# sounds a bit tinnier than say a robust D but alot of that is timbre specific such as F# is very metallic sounding on a piano and D is not. On other instruments it's not quite as noticeable but there still is that lingering flavor that is F# major.  I just can't imagine what it's like to not hear like this.

Generally keys that are a perfect fifth away are more like discolorations. C G and F share a few qualities but they also are quite different. The stranger part is that some keys are easier to name than others. I imagine this all comes from associating childhood experience of favorite songs or something. Like I could near always name a song in D major or F# major but B major or E major can throw me. It's not like I don't hear these keys extremely differently but they share similarities.

This is all really subjective though. All people with AP probably hear things differently. One thing is how complex it really it. Root note, timbre, and visual context all have an impact. It's like a super complex network of associations. This is why we can get confused, it's not set in stone. G major sounds different in different context but there is still that lingering familiarity with it.

Ah... Relative Pitch..... 

There's that thing I'm tired of hearing. Everytime someone tries to learn absolute pitch and makes mistakes, they're told they have relative pitch. This makes no sense. Relative pitch IS all about being able to feel musical space of intervals, chords, scales etc... this is a no brainer, you must have good relative pitch to survive in the music world.  

Relative pitch is about Space, Absolute pitch is about color. Relative pitch must be paired with absolute pitch to get any practical use out of absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is extremely useful but at the same time, optional in the music world. Absolute pitch without relative pitch is like Tamarind without the rest of the Pad Thai. It doesn't work well, it's not very functional, and it's really slow. I can feel notes all day long but I can't just name note after note in a piece of music in real time, that's stupid. Typically I will figure the root of the scale key first and use relative pitch for the rest.  

What I don't like it people dismissing absolute pitch as useless when they don't possess it themselves. Absolute pitch to me is like having an enriched musical experience. I don't get what it's like to not have it, to not hear tonal color. I'm not trying to brag, I just can't wrap my head around people having Relative pitch but not able to hear tonal qualities of pitches. It's weird to me.  

Point is, you determine if you have AP not some teacher. If you have AP you will have no doubt that C and G# sound totally different, if you cannot hear an audible difference in color, you don't have it. 

The Joys and Annoyances of Absolute Pitch 

 TRANSPOSING 

One of the most annoying aspects of having AP is that you care about transposition while the majority of the population doesn't give a crap. If a song I know is in D major, for the love of cats, play the song in D! I know singers have to transpose but it's very annoying when your the only one who seems to care. Sometimes changing the key can have an interesting effect but most of the time, it's just cheesy, because the song's color changes.  Cheesy is how I would describe it, it seems fake, like not genuine when it's in the wrong key. 

TUNING 

A common belief is that people with AP are seriously annoyed by retuning music. As if retuning a guitar 1/4 step down will annoy us. If anything, it sounds cool to people like me. I do have an interest in alternate tunings so that may be why but quite literally, I don't see how someone with AP would see playing in a different reference pitch such as A 432 as anything but a good thing.  If all the regular keys sound unique, the 1/4 step down keys sound EXTREMELY different. They are quite literally hard to identify, they sound fresh yet foreign to me. They also don't retain qualities much of the key that is 1/4 step higher or lower.  C major tunes 1/4 step higher sounds nothing like C major at 440 hz to me.  

IDENTIFYING PITCH 

A thing that happens with AP is we hear things as musical, period.  More than the average musician person I imagine. Like I'll hear a lawn mower and my brain has a habit of wanting to know what the key sounds like. Heck, if someone farts, I'll normally be able to identify the pitch, I don't try, it just happens. 

LISTENING TO MUSIC

One annoying aspect of AP is that I need variety. I cannot stand to hear too many songs in the same key! I will not listen to 4 songs in a row in G# major, it's boring to me.  This causes issues because my brain tends to pay attention to the tonal color rather than other elements making two songs sound more similar than other people hear them as. 

Another thing is key preference, I like songs in B major, F#, and D major best. I think E major is my least favorite major key, like it's pretty definite, I don't like E major, sounds cheesy to me, I don't know why. 

Can you learn it as an adult? 

While I cannot prove this considering I've had an ability to hear musical color since I was 13, I imagine you can. If you want to develop AP, you have to make your brain think it needs to know the difference.  I developed it mainly from arranging pieces, I quickly noticed there were very different tonal qualities to the different songs I was arranging.  It became useful to me to know what key it was in, I tried to guess it not to hunt and peck till i found it. Well, honestly at first I did hunt and peck but I started needing to do it less. 

To be honest, the ability to name pitches out of thin air is extremely learnable, it's no different from learning to identify symbols. But being able to feel the musical color that people with AP experience, that may not be learnable but I honestly have no idea.  

Thing is, if I stop practicing it, I lose it. I cannot name pitches as fast, I can figure it out without any reference pitch but it takes a bit of time and confusion.  What never goes away is how I hear music, and I'm not sure if that's something you can teach yourself or not. 

Crap Microtonal Musicians Do

This is not to be offensive, just to be funny. I'm not meaning to hurt anyone or offend anyone, these are just some of the quirks about the xen community.

Putting the XEN in Xen. 

Microtonal music can be an incredibly enriching experience for adventurous souls, and while it can very easily be made to sound good to the average listener, we all know who those guys are who try TOO hard to make something sound xenharmonic. 

"Hmm, I like this musical phrase but let's change guitar to Bouzuki to make it cooler."

"Hmm, that works but let's make it more rhythmically weird."

" I don't like it, this sounds way too consonant, time to throw in some clashing notes!!"  

"AH! This Brings back memories, I must have done something wrong." 

"I don't like this tuning anymore, it sounds too familiar to me." 

"This is too melodic, it needs more ambience" 

"Screw this, it sounds too much like music." 

Yes we all know you want to sound xen but it doesn't have to sound like a machine running to be microtonal. 

Using lots of clashing pitches on purpose 

I realize that those smooth comma pumps, and melodic shifts are cool but not everyone is impressed by a piece of music that says "Hey, look how many notes I have!!" Keep it chill, you can throw it out all you want but the groundhogs in the woods just aren't impressed my that. We can hear those microtonal-virgins now saying "Who wrote this crap? It sounds like a kid banging on a piano."  

Just because you write a love song in a 34 notes per octave tuning doesn't mean you need 31 of them in one vocal line to get your point across.

Using alternate tunings as an excuse for bad music

Yes it's microtonal but that doesn't change the fact that writing a piece of music in 20 minutes isn't generally going to be a mozart masterpiece. Try writing one piece of music in an alternate tuning that you spend at least a week or two on. Most will not be able to do this because we all know that microtonal guys have ADHD. Trying to ask them to spend even three days on the same 13 EDO composition is like asking an engaged couple to hold off on tweeting about it till they are sure they want to go through with it. 

We're so excited about the idea, we don't really care about the execution. After all, it's MICROTONAL MUSIC, that's enough to make it worth listening to right?  

Making music too harsh for microtonal virgins

I do understand that many alternative tuning enthusiast love a good 20th century piece. The dirtier the better! It's not enough to serialism, and it's not enough to be microtonal, it must be MICROTONAL SERIALISM! And if you think we're stopping there oh ho oho, you have no idea. We're gonna make the piece so thick with walls of rich dissonance that it transcends your ear to a new place. You will enter microtonal val-hala, a place where normal music will sound as boring as a door bell.  If you don't like it, you obviously don't have the ear it takes.

When 'regular' music goes sour

While the world of alternate tunings is a breath taking journey, it comes at a cost. Yes, almost certainly, once you step foot on the microtonal express, any of the music you used to like will become  a stick in the mud.  

"I used to love this band! Man, I can't believe that, I mean, all they're music's in 12 of course so it's not that great anymore. I guess I've 'moved on'." 

And it's that thing to where anyone outside the Xen community is suddenly uneducated and simply in the "musical dark ages". 

"I feel sorry for you that you can't enjoy this piece by Partch, I guess you'll have to go back to your Miley Cyrus."

Trying to be a Musical Hipster

It's always fun when your at a music major party with your microtonal loving friend. When one of the hosts asks you what types of music do you like the most?  You respond with 

YOU  "I listen to alot of Indie and Mathrock".    

HOSTESS  "Oh mathrock, what is that?"   

YOU "It's a style that is a subgenre of Indie which has a very liberal use of a time signature."'

HOSTESS  "That sound's really cool."  She turns to your friend who is busy eating a cupcake.  "How about you." 

YOUR FRIEND "Oh I like Sevish and Last Sacrament, they don't use regular pitches, they use tunings they invent themselves with a whole array of new chords and intervals." 

HOSTESS  "Interesting, I've never heard of that." 

YOUR FRIEND "Yeeah, they're rrreeaallly underground, so, you probably haven't heard of them." 

HOSTESS "Oh, do you like any Jazz or classical?" 

YOUR FRIEND "Umm, no, I don't really like things that sound 'twelvish'" 

Things turn awkward.. 

 

Tuning ADD

Even though there are many tunings to pick from, composers of xen music typically jump around from tuning to tuning. In fact, just when we're onto something, BAM we lose interest and look at something shiny.

"I finally found a cool way to work with this temperament in 14 EDO, it sounds sooo good I'm ready... OH 17 EDO looks so cool!! Screw 14 EDO."   Only to result in "I don't do anything in 17 EDO these days, I'm all about 31."  Then...  "31 is too mainstream, I'm a 13 ET guy, it may be close to 12 but it's not at all."

We would all get alot more done with this mess if we would sit down, shut up, and actually spend a month extensively studying one tuning/temperament.  For most people, once they've found all the surface bells and whistles, the tuning's old hat and it's time for a new toy.

Those Annoying Tuning Fundamentalist

While most people pursue microtonality for it's appeal in new sounds and flavors, there are some who are what I call "Tuning Fundamentalist". We know who you are. You walk about in your screen printed T-shirts labeled "Pythagorean will take the world by storm!" You're special ideal tuning society to where all music is written in this holy and sacred tuning created by God himself.  And they all will preach the same message. "Anything but this tuning is fire and brimstone."  God forbid you use a strange chord as consonance, a piece resolving to a neutral seventh chord will crack open the gates of Hell and damn the world to darkness for 1000 years as we know it.   

"This is how our ancestors did it 1000 years ago, and this is how the arabs did it so DANG IT! I'm going to do it too." Forget experimentation, musical history is set in stone, don't pass go and don't collect 200 dollars! 

The Secret of Life - X-EDO

We get it, you travelled to a remote island near the Bermuda triangle only to discover that what we've thought about tuning theory has been way off base all along. Now you're back telling us your discovery of how this equal temperament is the best tuning for the brain to hear because it was carved in stone by the Myans some 10000 years ago.  "It's not enough though", you say, "Let me explain it to you with the universal language of science." Then you proceed to talking about how this tuning resonates with the internal vibrations of the universe allowing the best possible music.  

Being a Math Genius

Tuning theory generally is heavily math based, however, that doesn't mean that everyone interested in it will be a math-wiz kid like you. You probably greased through calculus and algebra like smooth butter in July. Physics was like a walk in the park, and tuning theory with acoustics was simply the icing on the cake. But please keep in mind, not everyone gets you when you talk in a highly mathematical manner about something. Wise Otter-spirits know a thing you're talking about, much less the general musical population. 

The Historian 

Tuning history can be helpful in exploration of new tunings but there are some guys who just know too much about it. One question asked and there they go, off in a frenzy of "The iranians did it like this with this melodic resolution. 000-232-700-650, was a chord commonly used as a resolution to 000-500-750-955 in the Swahilian era. "  You've lost me, my question became from simple to a mess of confusing trivia about the Iranians.  Not real helpful. 

Hyper Scale Extensions

If you've had alot of training with jazz, you should know the theory that is involved with BIG chords like Cmaj9#11b13 or the like. However, this lesson takes it a step further. Keep in mind, this is a freakin advanced lesson, no one hear will understand anything on this post unless you know a heck alot about chords, harmony and scales. IF you do, then keep reading!

Let's ask a question, is there a difference between a major 3rd and a diminished 4th? Well seeing how diminished means to lower a perfect interval by one semitone, that would mean they are the same interval right? Yes and no. Although they are exactly the same thing physically (at least in 12tet), the difference is in function. If you play a major scale and play C and E, you get that bright, lame, major third sound haha. But now try playing the scale C Db Eb Fb and do this alternating playing the C and Fb. Fb is the same note but now it feels different, more dark and dissonant, not like before. This is what I call functional difference. There is physical and contextual difference. Although there are only 12 intervals physically in our musical tuning system, there are far more functional intervals. For practicality, we don't consider every one of these intervals though, some we use more than others, or is it that we're just lazy.

Now let's talk about Hyper Extensions or HSE's. What are they? It's not some shoulder exercise. They are hypothetical extensions that exist beyond the 13th of the major scale.  I'm going to make up a term that we will call the scale's limit.  This is not like the harmonic limit of a tuning so bear with me. When I say scale limit, I'm talking about the note at which the scale stops going up in fifths. If you read the beginner theory course, you should know that a major scale is created by building a cycle of 6 fifths and making the 2nd note of the cycle the tonic, the collapsing it into a single octave.

Like this: F C G D A E B  into C G D A E B F into C D E F G A B. 

However, notice how B is where it stops? This is what we call the scale's limit. The major scale has 6 fifths as a limit. But if we wanted to go higher, can we? Of course, there are no rules in music after all.
We can extend it to add a fifth between B and F# which changes alot.
F C G D A E B F#    So what did we do here? We added a note logically to the major scale. Though it's not exactly a major scale anymore, or it is but it's got a new note now. This is what we call a Hyper Scale Extension. Hyper meaning beyond the scale.

Putting Hyper Extensions into extended harmony 

The easiest way to do something with Hyper Extension is to put them into an extended chord. 

This is where things get a bit complicated though because we now have to think beyond two octaves. 

Look at this F C G D A E B, in this we learned that half steps are five notes above the lower note in the half step. That means that F# is a half step from F. That means that it's F# not Gb! Why does it matter? Because if we called it Gb, it would get confusing. So just call it F# for now and you'll see in a minute why it's not Gb. 

Let's build a cycle of thirds on C. C E G B D F A, this is as high as we've gone, but now let's go another third higher. If you remember how the cycle of thirds moves Major third to minor third forever. That means the next highest note is C. So we have C E G B D F A C right? Ok so what does this mean? C is just the octave right? Yes but not exactly, because this C is Two octaves, we'll treat it like extended harmony which mean we will call this a 15th not an octave. Ok so, there isn't a difference between the 15 and the 8 but there's a huge difference in the #15 from the 8. So what we're doing is adding an aug15th to our chord which gives us C E G B D F A C# which is called a Maj13#15 chord. Now that's a huge chord so we can omit certain notes. The fifth isn't needed so we can leave that out. We can also leave out the 11th because that doesn't sound good with the #15.  Can we leave out the ninth? Nope, without context, leaving out the ninth, the C# becomes a b9 which is a Db.  It's the sounds of the major seventh from D to Db that gives it it's flavor so the D is very much needed.  The A can also be left out but then we would just have a Maj9#15 chord.  One other thing, every interval higher than an octave will be altered either diminished or augmented and you just have to figure them out. 

So that's it right? Nope, we can go higher if you want all the way until you return back to the Root. I will warn you though, the colors higher up than the #15 are more exotic sounding which is fun but not useful in every aspect. They are cool though, but the world of using the last five notes in extended harmony is uncharted by 99 percent of musicans. If you want the relative minor to the Maj9#15 chord, all you have to do is create a minor scale from the 7 fifths and throw in the 7th fifth. 

If we take C E G B D F A and make it A B C D E F G A then add the HSE #15, A B C D E F F# G. 

Now just throw in the F# up high. Now you get a Min13#20. Gah, that's a high number.  

Have fun!

Looking at our new color pallet

Slicing up the Octave into Sixteen Parts

Before we begin our journey to understand and play in a different tuning, we should first roughly understand what we mean when we say split the octave into 16 parts. Think of an octave as a loaf of something good like french bread. mmmm  Now, imagine cutting the bread in such a way that all pieces including the ends are the same size. In our case, the french bread, or italian bread or whatever, would be cut into 12 pieces. On on each end, and 10 in the middle.  Now, let's say we wanted to cut the bread into 16 pieces, all the same size. That would leave one on each end and 14 in the middle. That's alot smaller pieces! The term, "Microtonal" would refer to any loaf of bread that has pieces smaller than than one-twelfth of a piece of bread. As weird as it sounds, our bread (tuning scale) of 12 equal pieces is the standard by which we measure EVERYTHING else. Wow! Anyway, now we have a loaf of bread with 16 equal pieces. We could have taken the bread before we sliced into twelve and cut each slice in half making 24 equally sized pieces but that's another blog post. :D     Moving on, now we have 16 pieces of bread. Think of the two ends of the bread (the one's I like to eat) as the same. They are on opposite sides of the bread, yet they are both ends. This is how the octave works. This means that essentially, there are only 15 pieces of bread plus one duplicate of the first on the end making 16. So 16 notes in an octave technically is 15 unique notes plus one stuck on the end as a higher version of the bottom note.  So we have 16 pieces of bread here, what do we do with it? Good question, I'm going to write about my investigation on here for all y'all to read!

Why 16? Why not 19, 22, 36 or 108? Why 16? OR more importantly, WHY 12?! I picked 16 because A. It's easier cuz it doesn't have too many notes to start out with. B. It's cool, and it has some neat intervals before we get into bigger scales.  Why 12? Well long story short, we had a scale called the diatonic scale and the people wanted to make it transposable to 12 keys. Why not 13 or 18? I dunno, they just wanted to. But we can do whatever we want right!?

Let's assume a few things here about our goals.

Since music all over the world uses different methods of arranging pitch to make music. We will say we're mainly going in terms of the "western approach" meaning focusing on chords and tonal movement, perhaps tension and resolution but may'be not yet. We may focus on color first.

We want to make pretty melodies as well.

So we generally are going for a chord + melody approach.

Etude in a Four-Tone Scale

This is an etude I wrote experimenting with the idea of writing music in smaller subsets of the major scale. The result was pretty cool. It uses quartal harmony and complicated melodic ideas and it doesn't really sound boring even though the song only uses four notes with a small transposition at one point for variation.

Melodic Minor Etude

This is a melodic minor etude written in extended pentadic harmony. You can clearly hear the sound of the mode without problems from diminished and augmented chords getting in the way.