Comment by sudo_cowsay
20 hours ago
Colors are useful. Perfect pitch is pretty much useless. The exception being a composer or school conductor (you really gotta scold those children, haha). While it is a fun trick to have, the practicality of it is very different from knowing what different colors are. The most useful application of perfect pitch I’ve seen is my high school orchestra teacher honing our intonation.
Do you have it? I've gotten a lot of use out of it, and I find there's a lot of people without it that love to dismiss it in these kinds of threads as useless. It helps me improvise with others, learn things quickly, play in tune on my fretless instrument, to name a few.
I’ll admit, I don’t have perfect pitch. I do however have 2 friends with perfect pitch and a teacher with it. One of my friends says it is useless (they also play an instrument). The other 2 find that they are the exception to the “useless” rule. The other friend is training to be a composer and the teacher teaches students relative pitch with it. I’m sure if you used it properly it would indeed help with improv and learning. However, I don’t understand how it would help you play in tune. I feel like that’s more of relative pitch (which is what most professional musicians use). I also play a fretless instrument and I feel like playing in tune is more of muscle memory and subtly adjusting your fingers by the millimeter, and less about having perfect pitch. The areas between using perfect and relative pitch blurs a little though (which I think you might be confusing(?)).
For example, you can go like: Wham! “Oh that’s a little too high” and adjust (relative pitch)
Rather then: Wham! “Hmmmmmmm, that’s an an E not an F” (perfect pitch)
Fun fact: Itzhak Perlman promotes relative pitch and knowing the distance between notes rather than perfect pitch.