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.
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