Benefits of What Perfect Pitch Can Do

We have put together a series of ear training lessons for guitarists on the topic of Perfect Pitch. This lesson is a brief overview of the benefits of having Perfect Pitch. Stay tuned as we add more lessons over the next few months here.

Perfect pitch, also called “absolute pitch,” is the ability to accurately identify a tone without relying on a reference.  In other words, when someone hears a single note from a piano and knows right away that it’s an F, that person has perfect pitch.  That in itself sounds handy enough, but just what are the benefits of perfect pitch for musicians?
 
In its most basic sense, perfect pitch means that an individual is capable of correctly identifying a tone in any given musical context, regardless of instrument or timbre, just by hearing it.  People with perfect pitch can even identify the tones coming from everyday objects, like car horns or telephones, or speaking voices.

Having perfect pitch will allow you to identify not just single notes, but multiple simultaneous notes as well.  Thus, musicians with perfect pitch know immediately what chords they’re hearing.  If you have perfect pitch, you can even identify the key of a given piece of music.

The implications of these skills for musicians are significant.  Being able to identify tones instantly and correctly makes transcribing music relatively easy.  Similarly, instead of having to use the “trial-and-error” method of manually finding unknown notes on his or her instrument, a musician with perfect pitch already knows what the notes are, can truly play by ear, and is free to focus entirely on playing music instead of struggling just to hear it.  This is especially useful when playing with other musicians as, for example, jazz improvisation depends on the ability to anticipate what tones are about to be produced.

By the same token, if you have perfect pitch, you can hear notes in your mind as you read them on the sheet, which is particularly helpful to singers. Also, singers with perfect pitch have the ability to reproduce pitches accurately without a reference pitch, which allows them to handle unaccompanied passages as well as uncommon or “out” notes.

The benefits of perfect pitch are made even clearer by the knowledge of some of the musicians who have possessed it.  Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart are all thought to have had the ability, as well as modern musicians such as Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Yo-Yo Ma, Frank Sinatra, and Stevie Wonder.
 
Perfect pitch may not be a guarantee of musical talent, but it certainly takes care of a lot of the legwork involved, the tasks associated with listening and allowing musicians to focus on making music.  For those who have it, it’s essential.