How Musicians Hear Music Differently 

I love all the ways in which you acknowledge disability and sensorial/neurological difference.

As someone with unperfect pitch, this is very insightful Great video!

Thank you so much for this video! I knew I didn't have perfect pitch, but I've memorized A, D, G, and C well enough to sing them accurately without an external reference (because I've been playing viola in my high school's orchestra long enough to do that). Those are the only notes I know and it takes a _lot_ of effort to think of those notes in suboptimal environments (for example, when there's a lot of noise around me). I didn't know what to call this before, but thanks to you I now know it's called pitch memorization (which is a pretty obvious name now that I think about it)! And on a side note, the production quality of this whole video is off the charts considering how small your channel currently is. I see you're pouring your heart and soul into this content, so I'mma subscribe to you so you'll (hopefully) get picked up by the algorithm and receive the attention you deserve. Have a great day, and God bless you!

Great video. As a side note, I would highly recommend increasing the volume.

This was a really great explanation and comparison between the differences in these types of musical skills or 'talents'. You've got a knack for being able to explain and articulate these ideas/concepts in a really well organized and logical type of way that makes it easy to understand. Keep on making more videos. We could always use more RU-vidrs making high quality musical content.

I had piano lessons from the age of 5 to 17. The first two years of my music education, I barely even touch the piano. It was focused on recognizing pitch and chords. We basically were trained to be sensitive to music. Even now I can recognize different pitches quite accurately. I didn’t know until I was in high school that not everyone hears music like I do. Although I think that ability gets weaker as I get older. I don’t think it’s entirely a gift, I think it can be trained if you learned it very young. I don’t know if it’s perfect pitch or memorization, but it’s certainly is a cool party trick for me. I do recognize pitches beyond the instruments that I play though. I’m not very musically gifted, like I’ve never wrote songs and my piano skill is just average. But I enjoy music a lot, and particularly classical music.

good video i totally agree i play guitar and working on my relative pitch and i can see is really usefull by figuring out the keys of songs with my instrument and interacting with my instrument

The other downside that perfect pitch has is that, like you said, it's as instant as recognizing a color. So when our band or a choir is slightly sharp/flat (not including purposeful microtonal harmonies of course), it's much harder for me personally to enjoy the music, because the only thing my ear recognizes is the fact that they are sharp/flat. Sometimes when creating music, perfect pitch can't get out of it's own way. So it's a blessing and a curse.

I actually have True Pitch! I demonstrate it to people sometimes, and they think it's wild. It's strange, since I've never really felt that special because I feel like anyone can do it. I think it mostly developed from being in high school choir and reading sheet music constantly in a theory class. I think about notes, intervals, etc. all the time by default. Just how my brain works I guess. So it just sort of formed naturally over several years. I really believe anyone who is passionate about music, or even just sound in general can do it, it just takes some time! I really recommend taking the time to listen to your instrument, learning a little theory, and having fun analyzing your favorite tunes! You'll be speaking music notes before you can say "Jacob Collier."

Very instructive and integrative about the phenomenon. Absolute pitch is a game changer nobody can't deny that. A gift in every sense of the word.

Where perfect pitch was a curse for me was when I went to learning to play the horn in F: It took me 1-1/2 years to be able to understand that when I'm supposed to play a horn G, it was actually a C in concert pitch! Very frustrating to director and me alike! Where I think I learned perfect pitch was during my copious amounts of time alone, I would sit at a piano and just play one note (say, a middle C). I would just let it roll around in my head. Then to reinforce it, I would play it again, maybe louder or softer, or whatever. Then I would analyze how it made me "feel." The "feeling" part of it was more evident in chords, however: The difference between a C minor triad and a B minor triad in terms of "feeling" for me would be like night and day, as the C minor would certainly "feel" somber, but the B minor would be more "haunting." To be honest, I didn't know that there even was such a thing as "perfect pitch," or how rare it is. When I first found out I had perfect pitch was when I was listening to this excellent harp player in a fancy restaurant when I was in 8th grade. During a set break, I commented to her (instead of complimenting her on her fine playing), "I noticed that your C# was a tad high!" Yes, she was taken aback, and yes, she was kind of insulted! (Way to go, Mr. Autism [which I also have])! Another time, as a 19-year-old or so, I was in a music (guitar) store, and I wanted to try out a guitar. But being it was late spring, with the temperature and humidity changes, the guitar was quite out-of-tune. So I immediately proceeded to tune the guitar without a tuner. The shopowner was HORRIFIED! In fairness, I'm sure he had more than his share of kids coming in and saying "I know how to tune a guitar!" with the resultant damage done... But while he insisted that I use a tuner, I continued in my quest to get it tuned quickly. He got out the tuner, and honest to Pete, the needle read straight up and down! 🙂He was blown away with that! Typically, I am within about 5-10 cents of being correct (using A=440Hz tuning), and usually on the flatter side, if anything. The two notes that give me the most trouble are G#/Ab and F#/Gb. I have no clue as to why that is. The two other things that defy my sense of pitch are "non-tonal"/mechanical sounds, unless there is a distinctive tone, and "block" chords or mega-dissonances; I simply cannot discern the notes, outside of maybe the top and bottom notes. I have never really tried discerning microtonality, other than to get in the vicinity of the note on a 12-tone scale. To me, a microtone is merely a way of making an interval sound more in-tune with itself -- true-tone scale as opposed to tempered-tuning scale. I have often wondered if I can subconsciously count the frequency "pulses," even though I am not aware that I am doing that or not, let alone able to put a number to the note (Hz). Just a couple of observations on my own musical and perfect-pitch journey, other than to say that now that I'm in my early 60s, I have become very aware that I am losing this ability -- an occurrence shared by many other musicians. I used to be an *excellent* sight-reader back in the day, but now, if I can't hear the pitch in my head, I blow both the interval and the pitch itself (missing wildly, in some cases) -- VERY frustrating to me!

great video thanks for covering! i know i don’t have perfect pitch, but i have always been able to identify any pitch drawing it back to the open string tuning on my guitar. thanks for helping me discover that this is different from relative pitch! 😊

lovely video, thank you for sharing!

Man so awesome!

Lovely video and great insight, learned something new today 😆 thank you!

Having perfect pitch and relative pitch working together is nice. Both ways of listening have unique colors. 👍 excellent video btw 🙏

You are a great explainer! Keep it coming!

Great presentation

I LOVE YOUR VIDEO! This answered a question of mine, so thank you 😁

I am unable to hear sounds in my head, and thanks to this, the only somewhat reliable way I've found to determine a note is to learn what each note feels like to hum and try to find the octave from there.

MCR fans literally noticed that the live version of "Welcome to the Black Parade" that was played in the recent tours is not in the original key just from hearing very the first note.

Amazing video!! Subscribed and shared with my musician friends🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

Very interesting video dude! Very insightful!

I developed perfect pitch when I was about 5 or maybe even 4. Later, when I was about 11, my composition teacher had an instrument that could be retuned to various microtonal tunings. Still later, I myself was able to do microtonal stuff on my keyboard as well. And then one day I started searching for online articles about some historical tunings or other similar topics. This was a very influential period of my life because suddenly I understood the different meanings of, let's say, a major third and a diminished fourth; or a minor third and an augmented second. So today, after having composed numerous microtonal pieces myself, I can say that perfect pitch does indeed help in many cases. But I still think that a good sense of relative pitch should be what one should primarily be focusing on. The reason why I don't have trouble with the famous 31-tone division of the octave is not my ability to remember the proper pitch of an Ab or of a G# (even though I often try to do that) but rather my ability to distinguish all those intervals found in that tuning. 31 per octave is still not as hard as, say, 50 or even 53 per octave (two other microtonal systems, again pretty famous). But still, if the intervals are played like dyads and not like melodic intervals, I think I might even be able to learn those of the 50-tone or the 53-tone scale, if I really wanted to. The thing is, I don't need to remember one particular system because there are lots of microtonal systems out there, most of them unequal. So sticking to just one of them makes little sense. Instead, I view it as a pitch continuum, or rather as an interval continuum. I've never had the chance to properly measure how well I could distinguish different interval sizes if they were very similar but not quite the same and if they were played like melodic intervals, not like dyads. But I think that if I listened very carefully, I might be able to hear differences as small as 6 cents or something like that.

Hey man! Great video and I appreciated your explanation. Saw it recommended and it's a shame you're not more popular. I was always fascinated by those that can play anything by ear. It's nice to know that this can be practiced through ear training and you don't necessarily need perfect pitch. Thanks again!

Great video! I have perfect pitch and I really enjoyed how well you explained the topic, thank you for this video, greetings from Italy!!

A very informative video.

Excellent video and well explained. Liked and Subscribed!👍

Amazing Video!!!!! ❤

The explanation of perfect pitch reminds me of my great-grandfather. He wasn’t a musician, but could tell by the pitch of the whistle which line the trains running past our house were from. My father (his grandson) had excellent pitch memory until he was in his 60’s. I’m not sure where mine fits in. I can recognize a note within half a step by how it “feels” to play it on my instrument.

Awesome video! The amount of research you showed is awesome! My parents thought for a while that I had perfect pitch (which I definitely don’t) but I do have pitch memorization.

Great work! Good to hear you also mention the rarity of perfect pitch is somewhat specific to western nations. Among other things, Oliver Sacks wrote about perfect pitch in his book 'Musicophilia' - and that perfect pitch is much more prevalent in (Asian) cultures with tonal languages.

Rock on dude, cool video

I know that accent from a mile away 🇧🇸🇧🇸 good stuff bro, definitely subscribed!!

Sean Wilson’s channels nuts! his ear is amazing to figure out those complex chords is wild

Mines memory. My mind literally records full FULL snippets of music. They appear / pop up randomly without prompting too.

After watching this video with a new perspective on singing and music etc, I highly recommend watching Qin Xianglian a 4:45min clip of the Chinese opera, singing he hits many notes for each word, similar to Indian gamakas, thought everyone who saw this video would also get a kick outta the Beijing opera Qin Xianglian

Cool vid

You just got a new subscriber!!

Loved this video! If I can point something you could easily improve I would ask you to tune your volume a bit higher. Just telling because I notice the sound lower than usual videos. It sounds very clear, I appreciate the sound quality, this advice is just to give you some ideia about what you may improve to make your work even better. Good job! Thanks for share your content with us!

perfect pitch (absolute pitch) has been proven to actually be just an incredibly long-term memory for pitch. They did experiments wherein musicians with perfect pitch were played a song in a certain key, and then slowly, ever so slowly, without the musicians knowing, the song's pitch was changed. When they reached the end of the song, the examiners would then play them the same song from the beginning, and their reaction was always "it's out of tune"! Thus, this proves that perfect pitch is not truly *absolute*, and it's not based on some weird translation of frequencies by their brains. It's simply ... incredible memory for pitch.

From my own experience, pitch recognition exists on a spectrum, and it IS possible to go too far.... What do I mean? Well, I knew someone with perfect pitch so precise that he could tell just how in or out of tune a particular note was. So much so that it was a hindrance at times when he listened to stuff.

I play a few different instruments mostly by ear and have found that my perception of pitch varies quite drastically depending on the instrument. On sax, I often rely on pitch memorization because each note has a slightly different timbre. On guitar, I mostly use relative pitch to find my way around due to the consistent placement of intervals. On piano, on a good night, I often just know when notes will be correct without operating in any theoretical framework and with no muscle memory. The hard part for me is squaring these pitch-finding skills with the technique that I have. It feels as if they live in two separate parts of my brain and I can rarely bridge that gap. When it happens, it’s the best feeling in the world, though.

Perfect pitch is like speaking a language as native language. But it doesn't necessary mean you will be a great poet or actor, however a foreign speaker can practice enough the language to be able to write great poetries or interpret well monologs. It's all about work.

Nice video

Man, his accent is so cool, so chill)

Great video - relative vs perfect pitch... Agree relative pitch is good enough, the main thing is being able to create the songs we know and love. Interesting analogy with the colors, a step further 90% of all people have "perfect color" so that does not make us all legendary renaissance painters 🤔... could it be just like we learned colors through association and then all by themselves maybe the same process happens for musical notes? Maybe a missing link somewhere in music education? I know guitar notes based off the low E A strings, then find my way...while others took the time to memorize each note by rote... same for typing...is hunt and peck good enough? A lot of folks are advanced " hunt and peck" but it looks like they have taken typing classes...ha ha ha :) Anyone else type things and realize your fingers are just going and you are not thinking about where the keys are? You do it I guarantee it, BUT soon as you start thinking about it you start looking at the keyboard...mind is a funny thing...

Shout out the 🇧🇸 great video

Through this video I realised I had relative pitch, pitch memorisation most of my life and developed perfect pitch at 15 yr😊.

I learned this one SIMPLE TRICK to becoming a PRO MUSICIAN: Practice. It’s practice.

As someone who has perfect pitch, I die inside every time someone sings a song in the wrong key

My piano teacher recognized that I had perfect pitch at the age of 8 and now I just use it to impress people but it also helps when I am producing music 😊 🎶

Very interesting! I have decent relative pitch. I can play songs by ear without much trouble, but nothing too complicated. I can't tell you what chord progression it is or what key the song is in, but I play by estimation and I can 'hear' patterns that go together. In fact, my parents put me in a piano class when I was a little child, because they heard me figure out some melodies by ear on a toy piano. I didn't go through with it for very long due to life issues though. But picked up another instrument recently and I still have the skill.

As someone with perfect pitch, it's very helpful for composition cause I can hear music in my head and instantly write it down without needing an instrument, but that can also be done with good relative pitch. To be honest, in general it's pretty damn useless. Having said that though, I wouldn't give it up for anything cause it's just a part of how I experience music

And always remember… nothing of this makes you a better musician. Better think about what kind of musician you want to be.

Love this video! You need more subscribers -- there you go. BTW, the sound level seems kind of low compared to the other youtube videos I'm listening to -- could you adjust going forward?

The quality of this video looks like it’s made by someone with 2M+ followers! Your video editing skill is outstanding, keep it up! One minor suggestion might be to make the content even more concise and go straight to the points. But it’s really minor though.

If you like dci menes you knew it was 3 and would never get E confused with any other note. Only E...

10:59 Thanks, I've been working out ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

great video dude! I hear a hint of an accent in your voice..are you Trinidadian by any chance?

I keep hearing "air" instead of "ear", but other than that i think I'm good.

I use pitch memorization from my farts and then use relative pitch from that! My low pitch farts an F# and the high pitch Squeeler is B flat 🤘

10:59 really disappointed there wasn't an image inserted here

Clicked because I saw John Mayer

i hear that cyc accent brother

👀👀👀you have to be Bahamian. Automatic subscription from me🇧🇸🇧🇸

So if someone didn't have perfect pitch, but had memorised a particular note and could figure out any other note from that memorised note, what would that be called? It's not perfect pitch per-say, neither is it really relative

Odd question are you from the Caribbean?

Very interesting. 🙂 As one who's losing that little bit of "ear" I counted on in the last 60 years, I wonder if there's a physiological reason for the fact that it's something one loses with age. 🙂 Anyway... I'm no musician, just curious 🙂

You Bahamian?

Tip, You throw up alot of 666 signs. WAY more then most people might wanna look it up what it really means....