[cascades42]

Wow this is so interesting! So you are saying that the person with absolute pitch often has lost the ability to intuitively follow relative pitch, such that they are having to transpose in their heads?

I had always assumed they could still intuitively match pitch and just had an extra information overlay.

Do these people you know who dislike transposed covers also dislike genres of music with dissonant elements, such as certain types of jazz or microtonal music?

[gnulinux]

It's not losing relative pitch at all[0], it's actually kind of the opposite. Relative pitch and absolute pitch are at odds with each other in some contexts. There are many reasons as to why, and if you search tuning theory [1] you can find some amount of technical information. In this post I'll only cover a tiny portion of the reason, there are many other reasons, but this is one fundamental reason why.

To give a basic gist, two of the most fundamental intervals in music are octave (2:1 frequency ratio) which is 1200 cents, and perfect fifth (3:2 frequency ratio) which is about 702 cents. You'll find that if you stack 12 of these perfect fifths you come back to the same note (seven octaves up) but 23.46 cents off. 23.46 cents off is very much audible by every human being who is not speech impaired, so it'll sound extremely jarring (dissonant). This makes musical composition within the tradition of Western art/church music challenging. So, to fix this, we use 700 cents as the interval of approximate perfect fifth and each semitones apart by 100 cents (so that perfect fifth is 7th note and octave the 12th). We call this system "12 tone equal temperement" which is standard in all genres of Western music (from classical to jazz to pop to rock... but other cultures have many other systems). Now your piano will be tuned to these notes (0, 100, 200, 300... cents) such that it's impossible to play other notes. When people learn absolute pitch, they learn these notes are C, C#, D, D# etc. But when an instrument with continuous pitch plays (such as violin, cello, human voice etc) you do not need to be bound by this tempering. So you can actually play a perfect fifth as 702 cents. As long as the piece is not so chromatic/atonal such that you need 12 perfect fifths to add up to seven octaves, it'll work out. But when someone with perfect pitch listens to this effect, it can feel jarring, particularly because music is "out of tune". This can make piano music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to just intonation (e.g. violinists) and violin music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to 12TET (e.g. pianists with perfect pitch).

[0] Note that relative pitch is required to understand spoken human language, so as long as you don't have a speech impediment, you can likely understand relative pitch just fine. Of course, ear training can help you label the intervals you hear and associate them with names, not something all laymen can do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tuning

[pclmulqdq]

Most professional violinists play in perfect equal temperament. I never got that deep into string playing, but I assume that a lot of study of "intonation" is actually about unlearning the natural frequency ratios (3/2 for 5ths, 5/4 for 3rds, etc) and learning to use the equal tempered counterparts (2^(7/12) and 2^(1/3) respectively).

However, there are a lot of times when you can make music more interesting and exciting by adding some pure thirds (equal temperament is off by the most on thirds, and thirds are very harmonically important) at strategic places. You just can't do this on a keyboard instrument.

[plaguuuuuu]

I think I find it a bit dull when violinists stick purely to ET. It sounds a bit less lyrical.

Otherwise the hard part must be choosing just the right pitch vs the other instruments.

For cadenzas or solo, do what you want I guess

[gnulinux]

I think this very much depends on the context, and being a good virtuoso violinist (or cellist, or singer etc) picking the right temperament for the right effect. If you're playing in an orchestra with many other instruments, you likely have to stick with 12TET. If you're playing a violin concerto cadenza, if you're playing a piece for solo violin, you likely want to play in just intonation as much as possible. If you're playing a piece for accompanied solo violin (violin + accompanying piano or orchestra i.e. sonata or concerto) then it very much depends on the moment and what sounds good for the music. Especially for an instrument like violin, which is extremely sensitive to every tiny expression performer can add, it's hard to make blanket generalizations. Ultimately, it's all about the artistic style of the performer, and composer's vision.

[musicale]

> You just can't do this on a keyboard instrument

Excepting split sharp/flat keys (as seen in some non-equal-tempered harpsichords and organs), or some electronic instruments/plugins which can dynamically vary the pitch of each note.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

It gets worse than that. It can drift over time so that even if you're in the right key, you end up as much as a half step out of tune.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4