Is Perfect Pitch Dying Out?

Perfect pitch refers to the ability of a person to identify or reproduce a note (tone) in the absence of any musical context. For example, if you play a single tone to a person with this ability, they will be able to correctly identify which note it is – and they may also be able to sing a requested note without any reference to an instrument or backing track. However, there have been some suggestions lately that these abilities may be in decline…

Out On The Pitch

Jim Leff recently remarked that a number of musicians have been losing their perfect pitch. This was picked up by Seth Godin, who attributed it to the fact that we are now better connected than ever before – meaning that such trends were probably always the case, but it’s just now that we are hearing about them due to the free exhange of information via the Internet.

Perfect Pitch And Your Ears

Jim countered this ‘information flow’ argument by stating that musicians have always been a tightly-connected community, and the loss of perfect pitch in this manner would have been recorded quite prominently throughout the ages.

It makes sense that perfect pitch abilities might decline with age – it is a fact that hearing deteriorates as we get older, and being able to hear a note must impact one’s ability to identify it. In fact, most adults over 30 cannot hear any frequencies above 15kHz.

Let’s All Pitch In…

Perfect pitch is said to be more common in users of languages which contain more tonal information, such as Mandarin or Cantonese. However, our concept of perfect pitch is very much a Western one, and is usually measured on the A440 scale – where the note of A below middle C vibrates at a frequency of 440 Hz.

If there is actually something going on which is impacting people’s perfect pitch, then it would be very important to identify it. I would be surprised if this were actually the case – the broader stream of information flow seems a more plausible explanation. However, it’s also important to remember that the computer age is only thirty (roughly) years old, and there may well be side-effects to computer usage that were never anticipated…



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