Soapbox: On Perfect Pitch and its Imperfections

I have been thinking about perfect pitch for a couple of weeks since an interesting conversation about it with a barbershop friend. It’s one of those things that is often – well, usually – taken as an indicator of high musical skill, with connotations of special talent not vouchsafed to ordinary folk. Its very name suggests that it is not merely a Good Thing to have, but The Best. I think some of these assumptions bear a bit of interrogation.

First off, let’s think about what perfect pitch is: essentially an unusually reliable and accurate memory for pitch. It is a rare capacity when it manifests with the level of consistency that allows someone to identify and/or produce notes immediately and intuitively and be confident that they are right. But it is this consistency rather than the fact of pitch memory itself that is unusual.

Lots of people have milder forms of pitch memory. If you ask members of a choir to sing a song they know well without giving them the key to sing it in, they’ll quite often sing it at the pitch they have practised it. And if you give them the wrong key, they’ll look distinctly confused and upset. Likewise, people with no musical training to speak of will pick the same key to sing a song in as the recording they’ve been singing along to on the radio, again just intuitively. I frequently recognise what key a piece of music is in without really knowing how, but can’t do it reliably enough to make a useful party trick out of it.

So the word ‘perfect’ is a bit misleading as it makes it sound like a binary: you either have it or you don’t. Whereas most people probably have some form of pitch memory, it just varies as to how strong it is, and thus the ways in which it can be useful will also vary.

Perfect pitch is often also seen as the kind of wild talent that is inborn, visited upon special individuals by fate. The capacity to develop it may indeed be innate (how can one tell?), but the content is clearly learned, since pitch labels are culture-specific and have changed over time.

When we’re talking about someone with perfect pitch being able to pluck any note out of the air, we’re generally thinking of those notes being relative to modern concert pitch of A=440, and relating to it by means of equal temperament. If you plonked them into a choir of Bach’s day, they’d be a bit of a liability because the notes they’d be plucking out of the air would be getting on for a semitone too high, and probably wouldn’t go with the temperament the accompanying keyboard instrument was tuned in.

And of course, there’s the cliché among choral directors, particularly of a cappella genres, that having a singer with perfect pitch can be awkward if the rest of the choir goes flat. The person with perfect pitch either gets stranded in the original key, making the music sound increasingly clashy and dissonant, or they get very grumpy at having to try and adjust to the shifting tonal centre, or indeed both.

Obviously, one always hopes that someone with perfect pitch might help everyone else avoid drifting downwards, but one doesn’t always get everything you want in life, and if you can’t have a choir that maintains tonal integrity on any particular occasion, the next best thing would be a choir that at least stays in tune with each other.

Anyways, my references to different tuning systems may have flagged up to you the interesting point that came out of the conversation that sparked this point.* The capacity of pitch memory pegged to concert pitch in equal temperament is only actually perfect if you are working in a genre that tunes to the piano. If you are working in an a cappella world, you’ll almost certainly be wanting to use tuning that maps a little more closely onto the harmonic series. Your 5ths will want to be a bit wider than the piano’s to really lock in well, your major 3rds a fraction narrower.

If you are one of the really hard-core types (such as barbershoppers) who aspire to fully-fledged just intonation, you’ll also be sitting down deeply on your flat 7ths, while making the tone from the first to the second degree of the scale much bigger than that between the second and third (major and minor tones, as I learned to call them from Jay Dougherty). Your semitones will also all be of different sizes.

So, your A may be tuned to 440 Hz when it is the root of the tonic chord in a song in A major. But when it’s the 3rd of a flat VI chord in that same song it’s probably going to want to be a smidgeon lower. It is possible to quantify by how much in cents but I am far too lazy to do the maths. I know it sits a shade lower though because I’ve helped singers make this adjustment in my coaching life, and that’s what needs to happen to make it lock into tune. I like understanding the theory, but in practical situations it’s your ears you need.

(And also your kinaesthesia; I find that homing in on the pure intervals is as much a matter of feel as listening. When you’re nearly but not quite there the beats can feel like running your thumb down a comb.)

In these situations, if you navigate by a fixed pitch system held internally, rather than in real-time interaction with the pitches sounding around you, the results will be anything but perfect. Everything will be a bit out of tune, as a piano is, though with a piano you can get away with it because all the other notes are participating in the same set of compromises to make the chromatic system work. But if everyone else in your a cappella ensemble is smooshing the intervals to minimise beats, insisting on your remembered equally-tempered notes will add a perpetual grating edge to the harmonies, giving rattle rather than ring to the sound.

Extraordinarily reliable pitch memory remains a useful skill in all kinds of situations of course. But calling it ‘perfect’ leads those who possess it into an unrealistic concept of how skilled they are. It is a single, one-dimensional element of the complex and nuanced aspect of music we call pitch, and having it does not make you a finished product.

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*Btw, I’m feeling bad about not giving credit to the friend I had the conversation with, but I don’t want to make it easy to identify a third party – with perfect pitch – about whom we were talking.