Glad to be of service! How did “Schizoid Man” go, if you got to it?

“Crimson King” was another of those prog albums which seemed to come out of nowhere and reflect a new genre going from strength to strength. However, prog turned out to be a tougher music to make and to keep an audience with.

I don’t find it strange at all. You had played a lot of notes on that instrument. Just like with singing or whistling there was a biological, muscle memory link. You had just never thought of it that way before. Assuming the instrument involved your mouth and fingers; they knew what to do when they heard the note, you just had to learn to relax and let them.

And doing it more makes the muscle memory connection stronger.

I’m amazed by folks who can hear a song in a certain key (that’s the part you wrote about it, hearing then playing), and then instantly transpose to another key (that’s the mental part; note names and fingering). I get how people can read music and I get how people can think pitches and reproduce them, but to use both parts of the brain simultaneously?! Incredible!

On the show, “Who’s Line is it, Anyway” they often do song improvisations. A comedian is given a topic and a style of music and has to compose song lyrics on the spot, instantly. It’s an amazing conglomeration of those multiple, different areas of the brain. Sing along with a piano player; hit pitches, think about tempo, number of measures… But, create lyrics on the fly. AND, structure the lyrics into a poem that ends with a punchline based on the topic!! Comedian Wayne Brady is especially good at this style of comedic improv. He must have a big brain!

Shorter good copy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK3OUCw0H8Y

Longer with context. Poorer copy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5n0pkNpDWY

Normally, you think the note, choose the fingering, and play it. In this case, my fingers did something and I played it. What fingering was that? Very strange.

I like your last paragraph. I concur.

If Rick Beato says he doesn’t have perfect pitch, and I do recall him saying that at least once, then I suspect professional musicians have a very high bar for perfect pitch.

To make it professionally as a musician requires an insane amount of talent and hard work.

(Today I was listening to an HD version of “In the Court of the Crimson King” and noticing how incredibly precise Michael Giles’s drumming was. As well as the precision of the other Crimson players when it came to perfect melodic and contrapuntal figures.

A shame they couldn’t produce other albums IMO as interesting beyond impeccable musicianship.)

Regarding your joke about looking up the definition, I intentionally didn’t do that because I was trying to reason it out. There’s no question “perfect pitch” as it relates to hearing ability has a natural, DNA component. But I also wonder how many people have really tried, and of those who have tried, how many have spent any time associating note names with sounds?

I imagine fewer than 1 in 10,000 people can read Icelandic. But it’s also true fewer than 1 in 10,000 people have ever tried to read Icelandic.

I’ll bet if a 3rd grade music teacher did what your music teacher did with a piano for 5 minutes at the start of each class, saying the note aloud as she strikes it and having the class sing the note name back to her; 50% or more of the class would be accurate regarding the diatonic scale 80% or more of the time.

Fascinating story!

If he played a piano note could you hum it? I’ll bet you could, or at least get real close. Thing of everything that’s going on with humming; vocal chord speed, jaw position, breath control… Almost certainly more complicated than playing the instrument you held in your hand. But most of us develop incredible vocal skill. Speaking, singing, humming, whistling… those are extremely complex mechanical/biological processes. And, like you discovered, the less we think about it the more accurate we are.

What you were doing wasn’t perfect pitch, per se, but ear playing. Some great musicians never learned to read music but they knew where every sound was on their instrument and how to reproduce it. They can hum or sing with their instrument.

There are two instruments I’m most adroit with and one I play completely by ear and the other is all sheet music. It’s a long story why they evolved that way with me, but I recently started working on playing the second one (the all sheet music one) by ear and, as you discovered with your teacher, it’s coming along better than I anticipated and the less I think about it the better I do.

Thing One
It would make sense that hearing would be like sight and smell/taste. Some people have 20/20 vision, some have better than 20/20, some worse. Some can see shades of colors, others cannot, etc. Some people can smell and/or taste much more deeply and richly than others. Wine tasters, beer tasters, food tasters… People are certainly born with abilities and can learn to refine them. Why would sound be any different?

A in the middle range is 440 hertz. The next note on a diatonic scale is B, which is about 54 cycles per second faster. That’s 12% faster. The note above A on a chromatic scale is A# (or Bflat) which is 26 cycles per second, or 6% faster than A. Like vision and smell/taste, some folks’ hearing is likely more sensitive than others. Many can distinguish between 12% more vibrations in a second and some can even distinguish between 6% (and a few can’t even do 12%).

So, a part of pitch recognition is how good are your ears at sensing vibration speeds? It’s a physical thing. As neo indicated in today’s vision post, one can only read whatever line(s) on an eye chart one can read. Our visual systems are all limited and can vary based on physical constraints. Hearing is the same.

Thing Two
I think most folks have very good pitch recognition but many are either unfamiliar with musical notation and terminology and/or have not spent time associating sounds with that terminology.

If you heard three different Frank Sinatra impersonators you would not only be able to distinguish if one was singing a bit higher or lower than Frank’s range (pitch), you’d be able to judge the accuracy of his intonation, tone, emotion, timbre, vibrato… People’s hearing is so incredible we hear much more than pitch. I could play you a recording of 50 women reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and you’d recognize your own mother’s voice. Even if half the other women had a similar pitch.

Unfortunately, he’s seemed to stop recording new episodes, but Frank Caliendo and John Holmberg’s podcast https://www.thefrankcaliendocast.com/ was often quite funny, and they would often dissect impersonations of famous people. It is fascinating to hear the two of them break down a voice into unique characteristics. They’ll even say things like, “to get this guy you do Barack Obama but a little higher and further back in your throat.” They have all kinds of terms for producing human voice I’ve never thought about. They make their living at it and have put a lot of time into it.

If we had physicsguy or one of the other guitarists strum an E major chord a few times and a C minor chord a few times, and you hummed along and concentrated on them you would quickly be able to pick them out the next time you heard one strummed. So why not an A major or E minor? Seventh? Suspension? Diminished? Augmented? I think most folks who were introduced to the different chord types (minor, diminished…) and spent some time attempting to internalize them would be able to recognize different types when played later. Picking out the root note is an additional skill and fewer would likely be good at that, but note and chord names are not innate.

Think of it this way. I know very few color names. If you show me a paint swatch that is burnt umber* and another that is chestnut* I would likely refer to each as “brown.” My eyes see two different shades, but I simply lack the words to distinguish them. If you show me both together I might say one is lighter or darker, or shinier or flatter? (This is similar to the aural exercise in neo’s post video.) If I spent 10 minutes looking at brown paint swatches and memorizing which names to associate with which swatches I would speak more accurately the next time I saw them.

My vision has a limit (for example, my wife and I quickly learned that she sees more variations of color than I do), but my vocabulary also has a limit (my wife also has a much more advanced color vocabulary than I do). I can’t do much to improve the first part, but I can do something to improve the second part.

Most people haven’t worked on the looking at swatches and memorizing color names part of “perfect pitch.”

*I literally had to google “shades of brown” to get those two names. I have a very limited color vocabulary.

neo’s definition seems to match #’s 1 and 4 on huxley’s list. I can do that. I’m not always spot on. I usually am, but when I’m not I’m within a note. I remember after taking the 3 days to memorize the note names of the diatonic scale sounds I heard an alarm. I think it was a microwave timer. I wondered if I could name the note. I thought of my diatonic scale. It sounded a little higher than F but a little lower than G. F#? I grabbed a chromatic harmonica and played F#. Yup!

And I contend many, many people could do the same if they practiced. (More on this in another comment.)

2 and 3 in huxley’s list do seem hard. Regarding key, I can often recognize C major and D minor, but I haven’t worked on this much. I’ve recently started messing around with this with one of the instruments I play and am definitely improving, but I have to think about it. I haven’t tried 3 much, but I can do the ones I play most often. I would think it’s the same for most musicians.