A lot of people arguing in this thread. I'm an adult who started learning piano about two years ago. I found that the following exercise was immediately easy for me with no special practice:
- Learn a piano song, memorize it, play it many times.
- My wife plays random keys on the keyboard.
- I tell her when she got to the opening note of the song by comparing what she played to my memory of the sound.
So then I was confused because aren't I not supposed to be able to do that?
After reading online it became clear to me that this is called "pitch memory" by musicians and it's a totally normal ability that anyone should be able to do if they remember a sound well enough, and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights.
The study linked is also aware of this distinction:
> It remains unclear whether the participants [in prior research] really learned the chroma of the tones, which is shared by notes that are one or more octave(s) apart with the same pitch name and considered the essence of AP (Bachem, 1955; Zatorre, 2003), or they merely learned to name a highly specific set of tones based on pitch height.
> and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights.
What you're describing is the same concept as fluency in a language. You're at the place where you are still translating the language in your head, but once someone becomes fluent it just comes out in the second language.
That there exists a lower bar of skill is actually evidence that it is a learned skill, not evidence that the higher bar is only attainable by some select few who were chosen by genetics or something. We'd expect it to be relatively teachable to young children and rather difficult to pick up as an adult, like languages, and that's pretty much what I've seen in my experience with a lot of very musical people.
- Learn a piano song, memorize it, play it many times.
- My wife plays random keys on the keyboard.
- I tell her when she got to the opening note of the song by comparing what she played to my memory of the sound.
So then I was confused because aren't I not supposed to be able to do that?
After reading online it became clear to me that this is called "pitch memory" by musicians and it's a totally normal ability that anyone should be able to do if they remember a sound well enough, and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights.
The study linked is also aware of this distinction:
> It remains unclear whether the participants [in prior research] really learned the chroma of the tones, which is shared by notes that are one or more octave(s) apart with the same pitch name and considered the essence of AP (Bachem, 1955; Zatorre, 2003), or they merely learned to name a highly specific set of tones based on pitch height.