I am very interested in this subject, as I have absolute pitch. At university, a sizeable minority of students in my year had it too.

Do you have it? Is it a help or does it cause problems? Do any of your students have it? (I have been surprised that only three over a twenty year period of teaching have had reliable absolute pitch - many more "nearly" people). I am surprised it is less common in the general "musical population".

If you have absolute pitch, do you also have synesthesia too? I hear in colour and associate many pitches with specific colours (e.g. and A is red, F sharp is dark purple). I know that much has been written on this subject, and my apologies if I am duplicating a prior discussion, but I would be fascinated to hear other personal experiences.

I don't have it and wouldn't want it - ah, the joys of playing a transposing instrument! That said, I've known of people who've developed perfect pitch in Bb

One of my closest friends at university had perfect pitch, and found it a mixed blessing. Some aural skills, particularly dictation, were a walk in the park, but transposing at sight, or performing at A=415, caused her all sorts of problems.

My teacher has perfect pitch but said he had to train himself to be able to "switch it off" as it made playing the cor anglais almost impossible and is not very useful when playing with others who don't have perfect pitch - if the rest of the orchestra is drifting you need to drift with them.

When I was younger, any transposing of an unknown passage from notation was a nightmare. Nowadays, I can kind of "switch it off" as previously mentioned, if I have to. Also, singing a long acapella choir part could be hard when others' pitch "drifted" through the work. I don't play a transposing instrument, so that's not a problem. It's certainly a mixed blessing. I also had to work hard at learning methods to teach aural work - as I had always found it obvious, I couldn't really understand why people couldn't just "do it"....

I'm a pianist with perfect pitch.

I've found it very useful for party tricks and aural tests.

A real liability when transposing, or playing a very out-of-tune instrument!

I have perfect pitch. When I was at school my head of music said I had the most perfect pitch she'd ever come across - whatever that means!
It is a mixed blessing - flat a Capella choirs, transposing instruments, as has already been mentioned (plus trying to teach on a Clavinova stuck on transpose the other day..), but it's part of me and I couldn't be without it. I lost it temporarily once due to a medication and it was like my whole world was tilted at an angle - horrible.

I have several pupils with pp and some with relative pitch, which seems a good useful one to have, and I tell them to be proud of relative pitch as it's a lot to do with their own hard work.

I also have synesthesia - I didn't know until I was at college that not everyone hears/sees this way.

I used to take a little autistic girl for informal music therapy sessions; I assumed she had perfect pitch as she couldn't cope if I didn't play a tune in the same key every time. She acted as though it was hurting her ears.

DD has absolute perfect pitch and synaesthesia and Aspergers. I think its quite common in musical Aspies. We certainly know another two like this. No one noticed the perfect pitch bit until she auditioned for something and the chap doing the interview looked for it. I just knew that she was fussy about harp tuning and always lliked it stretched. But she can turn her internal pitch to different frequencies it would appear - if she tunes to a different one she can adapt to it. I dont know if she can change her colours with the this too but I assume so. I have never asked if she can turn it off deliberately. She has one key that she will pretty much not play in - C major makes her very uneasy - not sure if it hurts or not but she avoids it - she transposes those to c flat major major on harp and anything she feels like on piano.

Do other people lilke this have keys that they avoid (and not just cos too many accidentals like us mere mortals!)?

I don't have it but a fellow member of a choir I used to sing in had it.
We found it quite useful when our coach broke dowm on the way to a competition leaving us with no warm up or rehearsal time before we had to sing.
We could sing through in exactly the right key while we waited to be rescued!

Alpha Male Jazz Cat has perfect pitch. Apparently most toilets flush in Ab and my vacuum cleaner is in F#.

How handy is that? (!)

Bx

I'm in a similar boat in that I can hear and say what pitch/key something is in - not sure about the party tricks! However, I've always found it very useful for aural tests. I would never have coped with playing a transposing instrument!

I'm not great at pitching my voice to sing a note without hearing it first although I will be quite close most of the time. I have think/hear the pitch in my head and then sing it but this is not as accurate as hearing, then identifying pitch the other way round.

I remember being told as a child that I had perfect pitch but I'm not completely convinced. When doing O Level music aural I could get the pitch for each note of the piece played straight away and can sing a note to order. Also can relate to Alpha Male Jazz Cat's comment about the pitch of the hoover. Playing Alto flute was hopeless as I kept trying to pitch the note as written by using harmonics and lip rather than the one a 5th(?) lower. Playing the sax however I just get on with it and can manage with fingering an F# and the sound coming out concert A. Just makes it harder to find where you are in an ensemble piece as I hear a part and think that's not mine as I haven't worked out how to do the mental sound conversion to what the notes are on the stave.

I haven't got it, though I consider I've got excellent relative pitch. But when I first went to university, several people in my year had it, and they'd mostly been the big fish in th small pond in their school, and were used to being able to show off tht they could tell. In one early lecture rom the baroque period we were played a recording and shown a piece of score and the preformance wasn't at the written pitch, or rather not at the pitch they would have got their ears tuned mto. I was quietly laughing afterwards at the number of them who ere trying to impres one another with the fact that they'd noticed this. (I hadn't, of course, I wouldn't have kown). They soon realised that they were not now exceptional.

We sang an unaccompanied double choir piece when I was in the Schola Cantorum, joined by another choir from the university who weren't quite such superior singers. Although the two halves were mixed, the pitch sank (it wouldn't have sunk with just us) and two of our number, with excellent perfect pitch, just had to stop completely. They managed to get back in again once it had sunk far enough for them to transpose down an entire semitone

I have absolute pitch, but no synaesthesia.

It was very useful for playing the piano actually (I think it might have made it easier for me to memorise pieces), and of course aural... But now that I'm learning the violin, it's both a blessing - can tune without tuning fork or tuner or piano - and a curse - never really developed good relative pitch! I'm steering well clear of transposing instruments - think they might drive me mad...

Also, when I listen to music I will either consciously or subconsciously identify the notes being played - leads to a lot of thinking along the lines of "A F C A A F C E C G"...

Son No.1 has perfect pitch to a degree (if that makes sense): ie he can pitch a concert middle C without a reference pitch, and then works out other pitches from there.

His perfect pitch does sometimes get confused by the fact that he also plays Bb trumpet: sometimes when asked to hum a middle C he will give a Bb instead!

I've just come across this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKipZjrkohA&sns=fb

Probably from about 8 minutes is the most fascinating...

You've got to be kidding!!!!

I know...have to say what really freaked me was the change octave between the pipe and the keyboard...

That's awesome. Clearly I need to do more training of Liber-Archie

What really freaked me was that it wasn't a whole octave between the pipe and the keyboard

That dog's not even looking at his hands (paws)!!

I sent it to all my dog-loving family so they can get to work with theirs!

My 5 year old has perfect pitch. I thought she had a good ear because she refused to play our piano when we got it out of storage until we had it tuned. We found out when she went for a piano lesson, the teacher sat at one piano and asked her if she could copy cat what he was playing on her piano and she could find the correct notes. She can also tell you the names of single notes played on the piano and chords. I am not sure if she sees the notes as colours though.

She has said that playing on an untuned instrument makes her 'feel funny' so she has taken to trying to tune her own violin to get it just right. She had the chance to play on a harpsichord and afterwards she told me it was tricky to play on because the notes did not sound like what they should sound like.

When her sister is playing the piano and it is a piece she has heard, if her sister gets stuck, she will shout out the name of the next note for her from across the room.

We also found out that she can sight sing but I assume the two are related.

She memorises all of her music after playing it a few times and she said she can see what notes she has to play in her head. She doesn't seem to have any trouble transposing music and quite enjoys moving from one key to another.

That is all very impressive for 5 years old!

I play instruments variably at modern and baroque pitch, so am very glad that I don't have absolute pitch: it'd be a total pain. It's bad enough trying to learn to play instruments which have the same sets of fingerings to denote different notes: I'm still only a little way into learning to play my voice flute, in D, when normally I play recorders either in F or in C. Even learning those two sets was complicated by having to learn them in bass and treble clef.

When I came down to Egham, I handed the voice flute over to one of the forums members who has absolute pitch.... and I have a feeling the experience of playing that may have been just a little traumatic for her, as it's in baroque pitch as well as in D.

Yesterday I was being accompanied by another forums member who has absolute pitch: he had a full strings score from which to collate his accompaniment, we were again playing in baroque pitch, and he was putting together most of his part from the viola line, ie from alto clef . A more remarkable achievement as he hasn't formally learned to play from that, and couldn't use his absolute pitch to help. He tells me that he can "shift" his pitch perception a little after a while, thanks to having listened to a lot of early music, but hates "playing between the cracks" - so a'=415Hz is okay because that is a semitone out of his reference range, but quarter tones hurt.