I am Different...and that is okay.

What it's Like To Have Perfect Pitch (Part 1)

There's one little secret about me that I don't like to tell people. I have perfect pitch. If you don't know what perfect pitch is, it is basically a rare phenomenon in which someone can accurately identify a pitch, or sing a pitch (or as I call it, "pull a pitch out of nowhere") without a reference note. Being a musician of multiple instruments and a composer, this literally puts me at a great advantage in my music career. However, there are some negative things associated with it as well.

Let's talk about how I know I have it. First of all, when I was young, like, elementary school age, and before all my musical training, I would be able to pick out small little details in music that none of my friends or family could. They thought I was crazy, which made me shut up about noticing these small details in music, but I could always pick them out.

1. I could always tell when a radio had "pitched" or changed the key of a song. We would be sitting in the car, with the radio on, and then a song would come on. If it was pitched, I would be able to tell, and I would exclaim to my mom and sister, "THIS SOUNDS DIFFERENT!" because I had the unique ability to distinguish this at such a young age, with no musical training beforehand, I could not exactly pinpoint that "the key was changed". All I could tell was that "the song sounded higher than original". It wasn't until I began my music training when I was 11, that I could say, "oh, the radio changed the key of this song!" In which, still, many of my friends could not understand. This annoyed me very much.

2. I always had the ability to pick apart music, before I had any music training. For fun, I would actually listen to a song, multiple times, and listen to each different part (harmony, chords, bass) This became immensely trickier once I started my classical studies and had to listen to full symphonies and each instrument's parts, but I could still do it.

2. I could play things by ear. Also before all my musical training, I had a keyboard in which I would sit at, play a song, and then try to learn it by ear. I did not know how to read music or play the paino whatsoever, I was only six or seven; I would just sit there, listen to the song a few times, and then have the ability to reproduce it without any music in front of me. When I became musically trained I began to produce music and covers of music with multiple instrument parts all by ear. They're always fun to do, but without sheet music it literally takes me hours to put together. That's why I don't record music by ear very often.

My parents and myself all thought that this was a pretty normal trait at first. It wasn't until my sister tried doing the same thing, and struggled, that I discovered that what I had was a rare ability. I remember sitting down with my sister at the piano and playing a tune off the radio that I heard earlier in the day, and when I asked my sister to play it she would hit all the wrong notes and get so frustrated. I would say, "why can't you do this? It's just this this and this," and she would try again, and fail, and then give up. That's when I realized that not everyone could do what I had the natural ability to do.

And this was all way before my music training.

Once I began my studies on the Viola when I was 11, I quickly learned that I was going to be one of the best students in the class.

And I was.

Now that I look back on it, my orchestra teacher must've known that I had perfect pitch as a little 11 year old, but he never told me. He himself had perfect pitch, and I remember being able to relate to him on a lot of levels.

So this is what I could do now, after some formal musical training, with my ability.

1. I was able to tell when things were out of tune. As the years went by, this ability became more refined. I was able to tune myself with such great accuracy, that my beginning level orchestra class would all look at me when we each individually tuned our instruments, and I would hand-motion to every student in that class as to whether or not they were sharp or flat. As an 11 year old with little music training behind her, it was like a superpower. One day in class my D string was really out of tune (who knows why) and I raised my hand to tell my director. I said "my string isn't in tune." and then he went on this long lecture to the class on how "your finger tapes will one day not be accurate anymore because they slowly shift down the fingerboard." to which I said "um, actually, I just think it's my string." He plucked my D string and went "oh." then he tuned me back up, in which the whole class was like "how could she tell that her string was out of tune? I couldn't!" I was like HAHAhaha I have power over you.

2. On the subject of tuning, when I became older and more experienced in tuning, I became to able to tune myself without a tuner. I had the 440 A engraved in my head so well, that I didn't need a tuner to tune myself. However, having a drone always made it ten times easier because I would always listen for the wavelengths to match up and lock together. When I was a freshman in high school, (and when I used to have fine tuners on my viola) I scored a perfect on my tuning test. I was 0 cents off on all four of my strings. I remember my director giving me this shocked look, and almost laughing. She told me, "Amanda, you're the only person in this program that is perfectly in tune." And when you're a 14 year old competing against 18 year old prodigies, it was a pretty sweet moment for me.

3. I could tune others in a matter of seconds. As a sophomore in high school now, I could grab someone's instrument, and tune them in two seconds. It was always really funny to watch the freshmen's looks on their faces. They would come up to me, ask to be tuned, and I would grab their violin/viola, strum all the strings at once, and fine tune them all within two seconds. They would always whip out their phones and say, "I've got a tuner!" but I always shrugged, and say, "nah, I've got it." and hand them back their instruments a couple seconds later. One girl asked me how I could do it so fast and accurately and without a tuner. She was so amazed by it. I didn't want to tell her I had perfect pitch, so I just said "eh, it's something you'll learn." Even though it's not really.

It's also become very much a good thing in my music career. I could always critique music, even professional symphonies (though I try not to.) and one of the best assets of having Perfect Pitch is the fact that I can sight sing music in my head, right before I play it for the first time. This really works well at MPAs because I can already tell what the music is supposed to sound like before I play it (if I purposely try to sight sing it in my head though. That usually takes a lot of work and time that I don't have, so I usually don't use that when I'm given music to sight read)

While this is a great ability to have as a musician, there are also numerous negative things associated with Perfect Pitch. I'll explain those in the next chapter.