Imagine for a moment that your friends all see the world differently. They can see everything fine, the shapes, the shadows, the textures. The colors are there too: the sky glows blue, the leaves on trees look pretty green, and the earth is a homely brown. All is well.

But wait! They look away for a moment then back at the same scene. The sky’s purple now! The trees have turned teal, and the earth’s a sickly yellow. Good thing they’re still all different colors, though, or else it’d probably be hard to see. Your friends look again and now the sky’s green, the leaves brown, and the ground blue. What in the world?! It’s like the color wheels in their heads are rotating!

The world always looks resolutely normal to you, no changing color shenanigans, so sometimes your friends ask you to tell them what color the sky actually is. You say it’s blue. They’re all amazed that you know the sky is blue and you look at them funny, puzzled by how their shifting notion of color doesn’t bother them in the slightest.

That’s what it’s like having perfect pitch.

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The world seems totally in order for me; like how you always know blue is blue, I always know D-flat is D-flat. Like how everyone else in the analogy quickly loses track of absolute coloring but can always keep the colors distinct and in order, that’s how having relative pitch but not absolute pitch (i.e. what most people have) would be like in my mind: weird!

Having relative pitch but not absolute pitch seems like it’d be more difficult to develop too, yet that’s how it is. Well, it makes sense though. Turns out that surfaces tend to reflect the same wavelength photons all the time (i.e. stay the same color) but the physical motions give rise to vibrations in the air (i.e. sound) that have different frequencies all the time (e.g. rustles, thuds, screams). Thus, absolute color is useful, but absolute pitch? Not as much.

Similarly, evolution taught us to communicate by vibrating our vocal cords and modulating pitch by stretching or relaxing them. Since pitch also varies between resonant cavities in their chests, it’s quite practical for our understanding to be flexible between absolute pitches. On the other hand, everyone always looks sorta brownish, so flexible color sensitivity is pointless unless we start communicating with biological LEDs or something.

Note that colorblindness is more analogous to the loss of relative pitch, not absolute pitch; seeing green and red the same is like hearing adjacent octaves as overlapping.

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Anyway, in the real world, perfect pitch is a key component of my musical talent, and I am grateful to have it. It enabled me to learn piano and violin starting at 4, progress quickly, and always play in tune. Combined with my muscle memory, perfect pitch also gave me exceptional musical memory.

As concertmaster in high school, to know my intonation was always correct, to tune the orchestra by myself, to lead sectionals with confidence… perfect pitch was such a blessing.
In my community orchestra, I met many people with perfect pitch (evidently it’s correlated with musical interest), and I learned that there are different varieties of perfect pitch (see below). I lucked out and got instantaneous and accurate perfect pitch, so that’s cool, I guess?

Unlike many people with perfect pitch, hearing out of tune music doesn’t bother me. The current 440Hz-based scale is arbitrary, after all. The only downside is that my relative pitch is underdeveloped. I sometimes have to count out intervals when others can do it naturally, and I’m significantly worse at transposition because my sense of pitch is inflexibly anchored to the absolute scale.

 

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Here are some humorously marginal uses of perfect pitch. With perfect pitch, you can…

• join a vocal group and serve as a walking, talking, singing, dancing pitch pipe.
• figure out if someone stole a sip out of your crystal wine glass.
• be your own tachometer (RPM gauge).
• selectively identify tastier fruits by striking them and listening.
• know when to stop filling up your water bottle without looking at it.
• identify people by the pitch of their cars’ engines and horns, the intonation of their footsteps, or the rumbling of their cellphones (assuming they don’t all have identical iPhone cases).
• eavesdrop on a phone number being dialed on a touch-tone pad.
• estimate the length of a whistling tube. Well, down to two or three possibilities, anyway.
• readily identify videos that have been pitch-shifted to dodge copyright.
• know when to recharge electric razors, toothbrushes, and other motor-driven devices.
• detect imperfections in dishware, windows, walls, and other regular surfaces.
• approximate the flow rate of rivers or waterfalls without seeing them.
• have advanced warning if a string or rope at high tension will snap.
• use it as a party trick and impress people by naming random notes.
• annoy your friends by showing off. Then alienate your friends by flaunting it. Then start losing your friends.

 

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Okay, that’s it, but my third big post about perfect pitch was about the different types I’ve encountered. Back when I played in my community youth orchestra (in the SF Bay Area) for kids 12-18 years old, I estimated that around 25% of our 80-person orchestra had perfect pitch. Compared to the 0.001% prevalence in the general population, yeah… there were a lot of us. Some of us had perfect pitch for as long as we could remember, but a few of us acquired it through practicing and memorizing pitches. Our perfect pitch abilities came in different flavors.
The perfect pitch varied in speed. Some of us needed a few seconds to recognize a note while others could do it instantaneously.

It varied in flexibility too. Most of us could produce a pitch on command, but some couldn’t do so reliably. Interestingly, some could produce “favorite” pitches easily and had to work off that to produce the other pitches (all of us had fantastic relative pitch). Only some could identify the pitches of lawnmowers, door squeaks, and other random noises; the rest could only identify the discrete and well-behaved tones of instruments.

It varied in precision. Some could tune their own instruments while others only had a rough approximation of precise tuning. They could probably be tricked or thrown off with semi-tones and non-standard frequencies. Of course, we all tuned by the oboist’s electronic tuner, which was 440 Hz or 444 Hz, depending on the day (dang it, bassoons).

As for how far our abilities extended, it’s difficult to say. My data sample is confounded by the fact that we were all skilled ensemble musicians. We could probably readily identify all the notes of a well-behaved group of simultaneous notes, but that relied on our musical knowledge of chords.
We could reproduce an entire melody if we could remembered it, but that is no different from any other musician. An analogy: we could memorize every digit in 12345432123454321 discretely, but it’s simpler to just remember the up-down pattern. The difference perfect pitch makes is that while most people would eventually forget that the sequence began with “1”, we’d still remember. That is, we could reproduce the correct key of the music.

 

Originally written on Quora: main post, humorous uses, different types.