It’s galling to admit this. I had no idea my daughter had perfect pitch until a week ago. Musical, but not a musician, she has a lovely singing voice, played a little guitar, and took piano lessons for a short while as a kid, but she probably couldn’t spell a major scale other than C.
Last week, she casually pointed out that whenever I hear her singing voice, just walking around the house, she’s singing the song in the correct key, without a reference note, out of thin air. She then demonstrated it repeatedly.
I can’t do that! And I’m a forensic musicologist!
A thousand corrupting things flood my mind’s ear whenever I try to pull pitches out of the air and, sure, sometimes I’m right, but I usually attribute it to luck. Other times, I might be off by four semitones or more.
So, perhaps best attribute this forthcoming bit to bitterness and envy but…
Perfect pitch is a musical superpower that arguably sounds more impressive and useful than it probably is. Charlie Puth, for example, is a highly capable musician and a charismatic performer, and he also has perfect pitch. His adoring fans probably tend to bundle those together and treat his absolute pitch as the secret ingredient in why he’s “so good.” As a musicologist who does not have perfect pitch, I’d say that while perfect pitch is interesting, occasionally useful, and definitely fun at parties — I kinda wish I had it, or at least I think I do, don’t get me wrong — Puth would be every bit as good as he is without it. It’s not, certainly not in itself, what makes a musician.
Perfect or absolute pitch is the ability to identify or produce a specific pitch (say, G♯) with no external reference. Someone with perfect pitch can hear a car horn and say “that’s an F,” (I looked that up; I guess it’s usually an F), but I’d need someone to give me a note as a reference point. Guitar in the backseat? Pluck the E string for me, then I’ll hear the car horn relative to it, but if the guitar happens to be out of tune, then all bets are off.
Relative pitch is about understanding the relationships between pitches: intervals, chords, progressions, key centers. Someone with strong relative pitch might not know that a melody starts on an A♭, but if you give them any starting note, they can reproduce the melody from there and most listeners would regard it indifferently with regard to whether that starting pitch is the one from the famous recording. Crooners weren’t married to the original key when they sang “Fly Me To The Moon”; they’d say to the pianist, “Play it in my key.”
What’s it matter?
In practice, nearly everything that matters in musicmaking lives in the relative: intervals, voice-leading, functional harmony, tension and release, contour, groove. Perfect pitch knows exactly where a star is in space, while relative pitch knows where the star is in the context of all the other stars. A forensic musicologist comparing two works almost invariably tranposes one or both to get them into the same key, and makes the comparisons from there. The note series A B C♯ D E is not the same as, but is the equivalent of C D E F G; when I transpose the former three semitones up, I’d get C D E F G and could compare apples to apples. In other words, at Musicologize, the workhorse musicology skills that courts care about rely more on relative pitch and structure than absolute pitch.
But Charlie Puth’s public persona leans on perfect pitch as a heck of a hook. He’ll be asked to sing G♯ out of nowhere, he nails it, and then proves it on a keyboard or a melodica. It’s impressive and somewhat rare, but I would expect without it he’d remain great at songwriting, arranging, voice-leading, production, and performance. It’s a calibration trick sort of. He’s sure good at it.
The parlor trick vs good music.
Take that G♯ demonstration. It would seem that if you have perfect pitch, you have long-term memory traces for the sound of each pitch class. You’ve learned, consciously or not, that some internal sensation corresponds to something called “G♯.” When someone says “sing G♯,” you retrieve that internal sound and reproduce it with your voice. Charlie’s melodica or pitch pipe confirms what he already knew. Never seen him sweat.
My daughter has perfect pitch, and she doesn’t even know the note values. She will learn them now, I expect, just for the sake of the parlor trick. I would. 🙂
I discovered her perfect pitch in a much more mundane way. She just announced it in passing. I was initially incredulous but she walks around the house singing and for a week, I’ve been jumping to my phone. She is indeed, every time, singing in the original key, dead on, not drifting sharp or flat. She is reproducing the correct key as if it were the only obvious possibility.
That’s what perfect pitch actually looks like in the wild: persistent, unconscious correctness about key and pitch, not a talent show bit tied to a specific note name.
Does perfect pitch make music better?
Now the important part: does this ability make the music intrinsically better? It would certainly speed up certain workflows. Transcribing a melody or chord progression from a recording would be a little faster from a blanket in the middle of Central Park if I instant knew “that chord is E♭ minor” rather than deducing it from relationships? But it’s 10 seconds up front finding out what key we’re in, finding a guitar tuning video on youtube and I’m gonna be keeping pace thereafter.
I suppose I might recognize modulations more easily and for better or worse I’d catch the off violinist being slightly sharp” before others do. That brings up another point though. Perfect pitch people, rightly or wrongly, can be sensitive (read: more easily annoyed) at a few cents sharp or flat, whereas you can hand me a guitar, I’ll tune it to itself, A=450 or whatever state I find the E string in, and I’ll get on with my life.
Maybe I don’t want it.
But it does not automatically supply: Taste, structural imagination, rhythmic feel, orchestration sense, dramatic pacing, lyric writing of course, conceptual clarity and general cleverness.
All of those live more in design and judgment. Perfect pitch is surely correlated with musical engagement because people with it show early musical interest and get extra feedback (“wow, you can do that!”), which can reinforce practice. That’s more correlation than causation I’d argue. And besides, somehow, I didn’t even think to look for it in my own house! But Charlie Puth is good because he has a sophisticated ear, strong relative pitch understanding even with the absolute ability, stylistic fluency, years of practice in songwriting and production, and can sing like crazy. Perfect pitch is one dimension of his musical ear, not its engine.
My own relative pitch, built through years of analysis and practical work, lets me navigate harmony and structure. I may not know instantly that a song’s in F♯ major before touching an instrument, but I know what the chords are doing, how they function, and how they could be changed. That’s the musical work. Perfect pitch would not replace that; at best, it would sit on top of it as an enhancement for some tasks. As is, I was just this morning writing out a song for a Musicologize project as it went by, and I jotted everything in A minor for the sake of speed; fewer likely accidentals means more readily keeping up with the recording as it goes and not having to stop and start.
I still don’t know what key those two songs are actually in, stop to think of it. I’ll find out eventually. The point is, it wasn’t paramount at the time.
The transposition question: who has the advantage?
Here’s a fun asymmetry that I’m pondering: perfect pitch can actually be a liability in some contexts.
Ask this: Never mind being a few cents sharp or flat. Can my daughter, with perfect pitch, sing a transposition less easily than I can?
Suppose she knows a song in G major. Ask her to sing the song in A♭. For someone whose internal representation is tightly bound to “this song equals these absolute notes,” that can feel like cognitive dissonance and be irksome. The “right” key is in their head while they’re asked to produce a “wrong” one.
Someone with strong relative pitch but no perfect pitch (me, for instance) does something different. I encode the song mostly as a sequence of scale degrees and intervals: “it starts on the third, goes up a step, up a third from there, up a fourth, resolves to the tonic,” and so on. If you tell me “sing it starting on LAAAAAAAA,” I’ll shift the underlying scale and keep the relationships constant. I don’t feel like I’m corrupting anything. I’m just running the same pattern but starting from somewhere else.
So the perfect pitch musician may be advantaged in recognizing and labeling pitches but disadvantaged when they’re asked to detach a song from its original key. Relative pitch people live natively in that detached world. When the room starts “Happy Birthday,” there’s no telling where it might start. “Happy Birthday” in D and in F are the same thing, functionally.
In other words, transposition is a task where relative pitch is the main skill and perfect pitch may actually get in the way until the musician learns to override their absolute association.
What happens when I’m asked to sing a G?
I do not recall a precise G from nowhere the way a perfect pitch singer does. Instead, several things might happen:
I might consciously or subconsciously reach for a memorized tune whose key I know (“the first note of “All The Things You Are” is an Ab”). But since my memory of that key might itself be off by a semitone, this is unreliable.
It happens though that I just hummed and walked to the guitar in the corner. Dead on. Ab. Hmmmm.
But last night I was asked to sing a B, and I thought, “The Eagles Take It Easy” is in G. So, imagine that and sing the major third above tonic.” I don’t remember what I sang, but it wasn’t B. It didn’t happen. I imagined “Take It Easy” incorrectly.
I just tried again, and was within a semitone. But that’s more like calibrated estimation than genuine absolute pitch.
Perfect pitch as “color names,” relative pitch as “design sense”
A useful analogy seems to be color. Perfect pitch is like being able to look at a wall and say “that’s Pantone 320 C” or do the Devil Wears Prada thing and say “that’s teal, not cyan.” It’s a labeling skill. That sounds awesome.
Relative pitch derives its value from understanding how colors interact; contrasts, saturation, and how warm and cool tones play together. That’s what allows you to design something that looks good. The starting point is less important.
Say you’re an artist; a painter. The ability to name exact shades is cool, but it’s not the same thing as being a good painter. A great painter might not know or care that a particular mix is crimson and ultramarine in certain values. They care more how it behaves on the canvas and in the composition.
Still, they might care a bit.
As a forensic musicologist, I’m asked all the time, “Does key matter?” “Does tempo matter?” I used to answer, “no” to both, mostly to emphasize that it’s closer to “no” than one might think. But now I’m more patient and I’ll indulge the relative importance and forensic value I can thoughtfully apply to it. It’s not zero, that would be stubborn and coarse.
Perfect pitch is dazzling because most people can’t do it. But the craft behind a well-written pop song is more about taste, pattern learning, and usually iterative work.
The psychological halo around perfect pitch
Perfect pitch also feels like a “born with it” trait, which fits the romantic narrative of musical genius. You either have it or you don’t, but as we’ve learned, it can be at least partly developed.
Relative pitch, nevertheless, comparatively anyway, sounds like work. Plus, it’s not called “Perfect!” But in my world, it’s the workhorse skill. When I analyze two songs for potential infringement, I am not thinking, “this melody starts on an E” so much as I am thinking, “this melody starts on the third scale degree, climbs to the fifth, dips to the second, and descends to tonic, and all of that over a chord, let’s say C major — “The People’s Key” as a terrific professor of mine used to call it. Now those notes are E G D C to me for my purposes for the time being. Transpose either song, and the legal-adjacent musicology questions do not change much.
I have never considered my lack of perfect pitch a deficiency in my professional life. If anything, it serves to keep me focused on the structural relationships courts actually care about: melodic contour, rhythms, harmonic functions, and so forth.
So what should we really value?
If I could flip a switch and add perfect pitch on top of my existing ear, I don’t know if I would take it. It would scratch a personal curiosity for sure, but I’d need to test drive it before I’d commit.
What do you think?