[mcnichol]

I feel like this article is more of a "Here's all the things I think about perfect pitch and my journey with music"

Maybe I took the title too literally.

As someone who wants to gain perfect pitch (and still feels mildly distant from this ability) one thing I can say has been the most helpful:

* Get a string instrument

* Strum the strings

* Try to tune the first string by ear

* Once you think you have it, check it against a chromatic tuner.

This way will you see how progressively your feeling of "in tune" can be measured in hertz.

I can get pretty pretty close (within about 5hz).

I used to have competitions with my children on who could get the note closest without a tuner. One of my kids got pretty good where they could almost nail it within 1 hz. It made things fun and a little less "maintenance".

The best way I can describe the process is you have a sensitivity to a threshold of being in tune. I hear the note but there is something inside myself, it almost feels like anxiousness that kinda peaks right before I hit the note and then stops when I "feel" I've hit that note I'm aiming for. As I've said, I can get within about 5hz which to a musician they can probably notice it is off but for the average ear, it feels muddy but close.

Long story short, practice with a tuner and within a year you'll surprise yourself.

[junar]

Why would you measure in Hz and not cents [1]?

5 Hz is going to be larger practical pitch difference at G3 (196 Hz) compared to E5 (659 Hz).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music)

[mcnichol]

Tell me you don't understand how the ear perceives music without telling me you don't understand.

Don't be pretentious man, we are tuning guitars and violins not prepping the kids for Juliard.

The same as how you use hz to talk about a specific note, your ear understands hz when listening. Cents are just ratios of intervals subject to a given scale. Do you think we are so bad we are messing up A3 as being close to B5?

How about we use Just Intonation or 12-TET? But then should we base it on 5 limit[0] or Pythagorean[1] tuning.

See where being a pedant gets you.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-limit_tuning

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning

Most tuners work in hz. Your ear works in hz. That's all the thought that went into it.

If any of us are consistently getting to within a hertz I'll consider switching to cents.

[evertedsphere]

…the ear perceives pitch logarithmically (not linearly: this is why you double the pitch when you go up an octave, instead of adding some constant, and this is why we use semitones and not hertz to talk about what we hear), hertz is linear so the "meaning" of 1 Hz is inconsistent at different points in the range of pitches, cents are logarithmic (just like semitones or tones) and don't suffer from this problem, that's all gp was saying

[mcnichol]

Now that you are caught up with the rest of us, read my response.

Am I saying I don't understand or am I saying I understand but the response is too nitpicky for me and what I feel is reasonably acceptable by the average person.

[fuzzfactor]

Mechanical strobe tuners work in Hz. Many "digital" electronic tuners are likely to be calibrated in Hz but display cents of deviation to the user.

One way I look at it when tuning two A4's to match 440, cents are always a fraction of where you are at the time. So a 439 vs 440 is by definition 1 Hz off and here that's a little less than 0.25%. Once you get the beat note below 1 per second (actually not often so easy) you're within 1/4 cent. At this range of pitch.

You can detect the cents by ear that way and when the deviations are minimized as optimally as you can get for the particular instrument mechanics, that one instrument is going to sound about as good as you can get.

When you get down to the bass notes like A1 at 55 Hz (conveniently annoying when accompanied by the hum from either 60 Hz American power transformers as well as overseas 50 Hz) a beat note of 1 per second means you are still about 2 cents off, or 8x the deviation you had at 440. IOW at the bass end you will have to aurally integrate the beat-note signal itself for about 8 times as long as you would for the 440 tuning fork, in order to make sure the beat is not occurring any more often than once per 8 seconds, for you to be as equally in tune in both of those octaves. A practical example would be a 440 tuning fork boldly serving as reference, and starting with a proper gage string a little flat at 435. Five beats per second difference is some serious flutter and anybody can turn the knob slightly and slowly until it's within 1 beat per second and in about 5 to 10 seconds of listening confirm it's pretty well identical, and you're within 1/4 cent.

But for ear tuning of bass like this you need to listen for about 40 to 80 seconds to reach equivalent confirmation.

You're so right though, no matter how you do the math, the physics don't change :)

I have not seen any electronic tuners having AI and whether or not they would beat a human, regardless, like regular tuners they would need to be given way more time to "integrate" the signal coming in from bass notes than most musicians expect. At least 30 to 60 seconds of clean detection. With no interference from other undampened notes, background noise, or stray vibrations for the input mic or contact tuners either. Even more challenging on notes that decay within a 30 to 60 second comparison period, where a good tuner can crumble even though it seems so miraculous when it's not bass.

Not to mention limited bass frequency response of transducers which tend to roll off bass like any other imperfect audio component.

[mcnichol]

I'll be blunt, a lot of what you explained went over my head.

I saw some charts that expressed 1hz in the A4 range a bit higher but essentially what you explained. The lower in the scale the more cents per hz but each "scale" has 1200 cents broken up evenly per semitone.

We could create a reference chart that shows the "increase" in the scale in hz which would be a logarithmic curve while the cents would be growing linearly based on an underlying logarithmic scale.

In my previous response I was being prickly with the previous responder because they came off with strong "well awkshually..." energy.

I get what they are saying but I don't think it's outlandish to speak in hz when the extra precision from cents is arguably beyond the average musically trained ear.

[golly_ned]

I appreciated the detail of the article and its structure as a narrative rather than as a simple step-by-step presentation of a how-to.

The article also presents different senses of perfect pitch, and categorizes your sense as being at the lowest threshold (or lower).

[mcnichol]

I'm not saying I didn't appreciate it. It just read like a story of their journey and reflection.

I think "My journey of learning perfect pitch over 15 years" is more apt

Learn perfect pitch in 15 years sounds more like a step by step article.

I would have clicked both, just expect something closer to the latter.