Perfect pitch study: Why can’t we identify music notes as well as colors?
I had the “misfortune” of having a friend in high school who was preternaturally gifted in being able to not only identify pitches, but be able to pick out individual pitches in a complex arrangement. One time, at band camp (no, <i>that</i> time), he was sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a pencil, pad of manuscript paper and portable cassette deck. He was transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago&#x27;s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” by playing a few seconds, writing down all the parts, and then repeating the process.<p>My take away from this was that this was something that either you could or couldn’t do and there was no in-between.<p>Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7 days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for rehearsals.¹ By the end of the process, I was transcribing straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head.<p>So, it is a learnable experience.<p>But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I&#x27;m older, I&#x27;m slowly losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear implants. One of the things I&#x27;ve learned from this is that my ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In researching this and learning it, I&#x27;ve also found that tone deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case with a CI.<p>———<p>1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music at rehearsal.