Can you guess this note? Perfect Pitch and Physics

I am rather pleased I never learned perfect pitch but have reasonably good relative pitch.

Perfect pitch for musicians can be a curse - it really depends on the kind of music you play.

For example if I play cello music with a piano and have perfect pitch I am locked into equal temperament tuning - which is the modern way keyboards are tuned and is an out of tune compromise to make the piano 'work' in all keys. ('Real' tuning depends on the physics of the harmonic series - maybe worth a video 😂)

If I play in a string quartet I have to adjust the tuning of notes to make a consistent harmonic language - for someone with 'perfect' pitch this is going to be painful.

Even worse if I play with a baroque orchestra they will play at different tuning pitches from the baroque era - commonly (but not always) a note written as A would sound to modern 'perfect' pitch as G#. Reading notes at one pitch and hearing them at another pitch is really difficult (if not impossible) for many musicians with 'perfect pitch'.

Finally many instruments retune parts of their instruments to different pitches - eg. Bach asks the cellist to tune down their A string to G for the 5th solo suite. However the music is written as though the tuning is normal. That means the A in the music sounds as a G. Someone with perfect pitch pitch will have a permanent mismatch between what they see, play and hear. This example is relatively easy to deal with (use normal tuning and write out the music is correct pitch) but some pieces (eg. the sonata by Kodaly which retunes two strings would be unplayable - some notes in normal tuning would not even exist on the instrument).

People with relative pitch can deal with all of these anomalies but people with perfect pitch can find them very disturbing and restrictons on the repertoire they play.