Perfect pitch

Dad, when you told us about the Doppler effect before, you explained that people with perfect pitch can tell the speed of something moving while making a sound, right? Today in music class, the teacher talked about perfect pitch. Apparently, during World War II, schools at the time taught students to have perfect pitch so they could distinguish between friend and foe. I wonder if they really did that?

Yeah, my dad's heard that story too. People with perfect pitch can identify not only sounds of specific frequencies, like the siren we talked about before, but also noises coming from machines. That's called "labeling," and I guess that kind of training was done with the intention of being able to distinguish between different types of enemy aircraft. I doubt it was that effective, though.

Can you really acquire such special abilities through education?

Apparently, perfect pitch is an ability that can be developed later in life through specialized musical training from a young age. The proportion of people with perfect pitch among music majors is far higher than that of the general population. However, it could also be said that such people are simply drawn to that field.

It must be fun to be able to recognize the musical scale of any sound, no matter what it is.

Certainly, it's undoubtedly an advantageous ability for someone specializing in music. However, there's also this story: some musicians find that the more they concentrate on playing, the more the background noise in the hall seems to emerge as musical notes. Others can't read a book while listening to music, or when listening to classical music, they hear everything as words like "do-re-mi." In short, having perfect pitch can sometimes be a disadvantage.

Wow, so it's not all convenient, huh?

There are other situations where having perfect pitch can be a disadvantage. Musical notation can't represent notes smaller than a semitone, right? But there are musical expressions that use notes smaller than a semitone. Traditional Okinawan music isn't written using musical notation, but rather using a system of symbols called "kunkunshi," which uses kanji characters to represent scales. You know the sanshin, an instrument in Okinawa, right? Playing the sanshin uses notes that are like semitones of semitones, notes that don't exist in perfect pitch. Apparently, for people with perfect pitch, these notes that don't exist in musical notation can sound off, or they may not be able to produce those subtle notes even when they play it themselves.

Perfect pitch reminds me of the "digital" aspect of the "analog and digital" analogy my dad talked about before; it feels rather bland.

Hmm, that might be a little different, but you could say that if musical scales are fixed and imprinted in your head, you lack flexibility. I seem to have only talked about the disadvantages of perfect pitch. Many famous performers are said to have had perfect pitch, but there's an anecdote about Beethoven, who, when playing his Horn Sonata on a piano tuned a semitone lower, raised the piano part himself by a semitone. Perfect pitch has its good and bad points, even for musicians.