Let’s imagine three people are singing in the shower—no, not all in the same shower, this isn’t that sort of book. These three people are all singing in their (otherwise silent) bathrooms on different floors of an apartment building.
On the second floor we have Kim Normal: she has a gin and tonic in one hand and is belting out “Dancing Queen” by Abba at the top of her untrained voice. If we taped her song and compared it to the original recording, we would discover two things:
1. Although the notes go up and down in pitch at the right places, they sometimes jump a little too far and sometimes don’t jump quite far enough. This is how most of us sing (which is why we should stick to our day jobs).
2. The note she started on was not the same note that Abba started on. In fact, the note she started on doesn’t appear anywhere on a piano keyboard (why should it?). It’s just some note she picked from the middle of her vocal range and, if you checked, you would find that it was somewhere between two adjacent notes on a piano. Once again, this is what most of us do.
Up on the seventh floor lives James Singer: he is a trained member of his local church choir but he doesn’t have perfect pitch. Fortunately for this discussion, he is also singing “Dancing Queen.” If we compared his tune with the original, we would find that his vocal leaps up and down are very accurate. However, as in the case of his downstairs neighbor, the note he started on was not the same as the Abba original—it was one of those “in between” notes that most of us choose when we sing.
Up in a bathroom on the fifteenth floor, Cecilia Perfect is also reliving the 1970s, singing (wait for it)… “Dancing Queen.” Cecilia is a trained singer who also happens to have perfect pitch (or absolute pitch, as it is also known). When we compare her rendition with the original we will find that, not only are her vocal leaps accurate, but she started on exactly the right note. This, of course, means that she is singing all the same notes as the original Abba song.
Cecilia’s performance is remarkable and quite rare (only a very small percentage of people have perfect pitch), but it is not necessarily a sign that she has any special musical talent. It is possible that James is a better singer and that, if you wheeled a piano into his bathroom and played the first note of the song, he would be able to start from there and, like Cecilia, sing exactly the same notes as Abba.
What Cecilia is demonstrating is that she has memorized all the notes on a piano (or flute, or some other instrument) and it is just about certain that she managed this incredible memory feat before she was six years old. Young children remember things far more effectively than anyone else, which is how they learn to talk and acquire other skills (one minute they are sitting in the garden eating worms and going “ga ga goo goo” and a few months later they are strolling around making sarcastic comments about the quality of the cookies).
If you teach a small child a song, she will learn the tune and the words. A tune is not made up of specific notes—tunes simply involve a series of upward and downward jumps in pitch with a certain rhythm. “Baa Baa Black Sheep” sounds just as good whatever note you start on—and, don’t forget, nearly all of us start on a note which is between two piano notes.
It is only when the tunes are produced on an instrument that the child might start to develop perfect pitch. If one of the parents plays the same notes on a piano each time she sings “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” the child may start to remember the actual notes involved rather than just the up and down jumps of the tune. Eventually the child could build up a whole mental library of all the notes on a piano. If this happens, she might also learn that each of the memorized notes has a name such as “the F above middle C” (middle C is the C near the middle of a piano keyboard).
An interesting point here is that, although perfect pitch is rare in Europe and the USA, it is far more common in countries such as China and Vietnam, where the language involves an element of pitch control. The sound you make to produce a word in these tonal languages is a cross between singing and speaking. The pitch at which you “sing” a word in a language like Mandarin is vital to communication: each word has several unrelated meanings depending on its pitch. The word “ma,” for example, means “mother” if you sing/say it at a high, level pitch—but it means “hemp” if you start at a middle pitch that then rises; or “horse” if you start lower then fall and rise. If you start high and let the tone fall you are saying “lazy.” So an innocent question such as “Is lunch ready, Mother?” could easily become “Where’s my lunch, you horse?” if you get the pitches wrong. As this sort of mistake could result in a catastrophic failure of lunch supply, young children learning these tonal languages pay much closer attention to pitch than Westerners do—and young children who concentrate on pitch a lot are more likely to acquire perfect pitch.
The reason why very few Westerners develop this note memory is because it isn’t very useful to us—in fact, it can be a bit of a pain to have perfect pitch because it makes the whistling or singing of most people sound terribly out of tune. If you are an orchestral violinist, perfect pitch could be helpful in tuning your instrument to the correct pitch in the taxi on the way to a concert. If you are a professional singer, you could always be sure you were practicing the correct notes even if you were walking in the countryside—but those are about the only benefits. This lack of usefulness is one of the reasons that musical training never involves any attempt at perfect pitch acquisition. The other main reason is that it is very difficult to achieve after the age of six.
Having said all that, quite a few musicians (and some real people) have partial perfect pitch. What I mean by this is that they have remembered one or two notes. For example, most of the musicians in an orchestra have to tune their instrument at the beginning of each concert (unlike the smug, perfect-pitch violinist who can do his alone in the taxi). They always use the note “A” for this purpose. One instrument (usually the oboe) plays an “A” and the other players adjust their instruments so that their “A” sounds the same. (This produces the dreadful wailing racket you hear just before an orchestral concert.) This repeated concentration on the note “A” can lead a few of the musicians to remember it.
Other examples of partial perfect pitch are also related to repeated exposure to a particular note or song. Sometimes non-musicians can experience this and remember a note or notes even though they don’t know the names of them. Try it for yourself. Get out one of your favorite songs and sing what you think will be the first note to be played, and keep singing it or humming it as you start your CD player. You never know, you just might have partial perfect pitch.
This partial perfect pitch is not as surprising as it might seem at first. We can all remember a note for a few seconds (try this with your CD player) and a repeated short-term memory can sometimes develop into a long-term memory.
By the way, your singing or humming will probably be much more accurate if you stick a finger in one of your ears—which is why you will see some solo singers doing this. This works because we are designed not to hear our own voices too loudly, in case they drown out any other noises we should be paying attention to—lions, avalanches, the last-call bell, etc. Sticking a finger in your ear improves the feedback between your mouth and brain and helps you monitor your own pitch much more carefully. You may have noticed that your voice–ear feedback also improves if you have blocked sinuses, which can be very annoying. (I once made the mistake of complaining about this to my girlfriend. “My voice sounds really loud and it’s getting on my nerves.” Her response was a single eyebrow twitch and, “Now you know what the rest of us have to put up with…”)
I want to go back to our three singers and imagine what’s going on in their heads as they sing, but first you need to know that the jumps in pitch between the notes in a tune are called intervals and the different intervals have names that describe how big they are. The smallest interval is the distance between two adjacent* piano keys and is called the semitone, twice this jump is called a tone (not surprisingly). You don’t need to know the names of all the intervals, but you can find them—and a trick showing you how to identify them—in “Fiddly Details” at the back of the book (here).
So what are our singers subconsciously thinking as they start singing the song?
Kim Normal’s brain is sending out the following signals:
James Singer’s brain is sending out the following signals:
Cecilia Perfect’s brain is sending out the following signals:
But, as I said earlier, the fact that Cecilia’s notes agree with the ones chosen by a committee in 1939 doesn’t mean that she is a better singer than James. Being a good singer is not just a matter of hitting the right notes—you have to sing them clearly, with the appropriate stress, and you have to make sure that you don’t run out of breath before the final note of a phrase ends. On top of all this, the quality of your voice is affected by the shape and size of the equipment you have: your vocal cords, mouth, throat and so on. Almost any one of us could be trained to be a reasonable singer, but to be really good you need training and the correct equipment.
In chapter 1 I mentioned that German flutes used to be a different length from English ones and this meant that German orchestras and English orchestras would be playing different notes. In fact, every country (and even some cities) had their own notes. In the nineteenth century an “A” in London would be more like an “A flat” in Milan and a “B flat” in Weimar. We know this because historians have uncovered various tuning forks from these confused times and we can also compare the notes of church organs and flutes from different places. Just to add to the chaos, the local standard notes also went up and down in pitch from decade to decade.
Imagine the scene: it is 1803, Anton Schwarz, the famous German singer, meets Luigi Streptococci, the famous Italian singer, in a pub in Bolton:
“Hey Luigi, you’re singing every note flat—I know because I have perfect pitch.”
“No, Anton, it’s you—you’re singing sharp. I know because I truly have perfect pitch.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“Flat, flat, flat.”
“Sharp, sharp, sharp.”
And so on—until the landlord chucks them out of the pub because neither of them is singing in tune with his piano (which is tuned to Bolton standard pitch for 1803). No wonder we used to have so many European wars in those days.
This is a weird situation. Professional musicians were (and still are) often trained from a very early age, and some of them would have developed “perfect” pitch, which agreed with the pitch chosen by a local piano tuner or organ builder. As soon as they began to travel they would discover other highly trained professionals with different “perfect” pitch. It’s a bit like everyone declaring that their favorite shade of pink is the perfect pink. All these “perfect” pitches were equally valid. To have perfect pitch all you need is a set of pitches etched into your long-term memory. You don’t even need to know what the notes are called—you might have stored all the notes on your mom’s piano without ever being told that this one is B flat and that one is D, etc.
Nowadays, people with perfect pitch have usually memorized the standard Western pitches that were decided on in 1939 because that’s how all pianos, clarinets and other Western instruments are tuned. This means that, if you have it, your perfect pitch is the same as everyone else’s. Most people with perfect pitch will also know the names of the notes involved because they generally acquired their perfect pitch during some sort of musical training at an early age.
The historical facts make life difficult for the musical pedants among us. A typical pedantic view would be that we should play Mozart’s music exactly as he wrote it. Another, equally understandable, pedantic view would be that we should play Mozart’s music exactly as he heard it in his head as he wrote it down. Now here we have a problem, because although Mozart had “perfect” pitch, the notes he had memorized were not the same as those chosen by the committee in 1939. In fact, the note we know as “A” would be called a “slightly out of tune B flat” by Mozart (we know this because we have the tuning fork Mozart used). So when we listen to Mozart’s music nowadays, we are hearing it all about a semitone higher than he would have intended—a fact which is guaranteed to annoy some musical pedants. Some of his most difficult, high-reaching songs would actually be much easier to sing if we lowered them in pitch by a semitone, which is closer to how Mozart intended them to sound. On the other hand, this would involve writing out all the music again in a lower key, which would irritate an entirely different set of pedants.
So if you are ever discussing perfect pitch, you need to bear the following points in mind:
• If people have perfect pitch, it merely means that they memorized all the notes on a particular instrument before they were around six years old. These people generally have high levels of musical skill, but this has nothing to do with their perfect pitch ability (which is rather useless). They usually have excellent musical skills simply because they started their musical training before they were six years old. Most musical skill comes as a result of training rather than inspiration: the earlier you begin, the better you will be.
• Any talk of someone having “perfect” pitch before 1939 doesn’t tell us anything about the pitches of the notes involved, because there were no agreed international standard notes. On the other hand anyone who had local “perfect” pitch was probably a very good musician because he had obviously begun his musical training very early.
As to the question of whether or not you have perfect pitch, it’s easy to find out by the method I mentioned earlier. Pick out a few of your favorite songs from your CD collection and try to sing the first note of each one before you play it. (Remember to put a finger in one of your ears so you can hear yourself more clearly, and don’t wait for the first word to be sung because the introductory music will warn you what note is coming up. What you have to sing is the very first note on the track.)