absolute pitch
Oto-kun
"Dad, when you talked about the Doppler effect before, you explained that people with absolute pitch can tell the speed of something moving while making a sound, right? Today, in music class, the teacher talked about absolute pitch. They said that during World War II, schools taught people to have absolute pitch to distinguish between enemy and friendly aircraft. Did they really do that?"
father
Yeah, I've heard that story from my dad too. People with absolute pitch can identify not only specific frequencies of sound, like the sound of a siren we talked about before, but also the noise produced by machines, and they have the ability to name those sounds. This is called 'labeling,' and it seems that such training was conducted with the intention of distinguishing different types of enemy aircraft. However, the effectiveness of that training is questionable.
Oto-kun
Can such special abilities really be acquired through education?
father
From a young age, it seems that the ability to develop skills can grow through specialized auditory training. The proportion of music major students who possess absolute pitch is much higher compared to the general population. However, it can also be said that this is because people with such abilities tend to gather together.
Oto-kun
That being said, it must be fun to be able to recognize any sound and its musical scale.
father
Indeed, it is undeniable that having perfect pitch is an advantageous ability for those who specialize in music. However, there are also stories like this: some performers find that the more they concentrate on their playing, the more the noise in the hall emerges as musical notes. There are also those who cannot read books while listening to music, or who hear everything in classical music as just the words of do-re-mi, indicating that having perfect pitch can sometimes work against them.
Oto-kun
Oh, really? It's not just all convenient things, is it?
father
There are also times when having absolute pitch can be a disadvantage. Musical notes in sheet music cannot express pitches smaller than a semitone. However, there are expressions in music that use pitches smaller than a semitone. Traditional Okinawan music is not written in standard sheet music but is represented by a notation system using kanji called 'kunkunshi' that expresses scales. You know that there is an instrument called the sanshin in Okinawa. The performance of the sanshin uses sounds that are like microtones, which are smaller than a semitone and not found in standard notation. For someone with absolute pitch, these sounds that are not represented in the notation can often sound off or be difficult to produce accurately.
Oto-kun
Absolute pitch gives me the impression of being like the digital aspect of what my father talked about before regarding 'analog and digital', and it feels somewhat bland.
father
Hmm, it might be a bit different from that, but if the scale is fixed in your mind, it could be said that you lack flexibility. It seems we've only talked about the disadvantages of absolute pitch. Many famous performers are said to have absolute pitch, but there's an anecdote about Beethoven: when he played the horn sonata on a piano that was tuned a half step lower, he raised the piano part by a half step himself. For musicians, absolute pitch has both good and bad aspects.