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0 pointsvunderba1y ago0 comments

In fact, there is an interesting historical anecdote about polish-american pianistic prodigy Josef Hofmann related to absolute pitch:

"Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear. Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and it was."

This is incredibly impressive for two reasons:

- It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely to semitone identification

- A pure tone from a tuning fork doesn't have any of the characteristic overtones, timbre, etc. that you'd get from an instrument to help identify the sound

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4 comments · 2 top-level

dhruvrajvanshi1y ago· 1 in thread

- It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely to semitone identification

Why would it be? There's nothing fundamental about a semitone. It's an arbitrary division that varies across different musical systems.

vunderbaOP1y ago

I'm not saying that it is but MOST people when they think of perfect pitch - they think in terms of note identification (e.g. semitones), A, A#, etc.

My point was more about how everyone's ability falls along a "Hz Range Level".

bennettnate51y ago· 1 in thread

I imagine the gold standard of perfect pitch would be identifying exactly how many cents sharp or flat a given sound is--you could tune a piano by ear if you had that.

ithkuil1y ago

You can tune a piano by ear by listening to the beating. You need one note to be tuned according to a given reference but that reference doesn't have to be 440 hz

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