What is the difference between relative and perfect pitch? - Which one is better?

The terms “relative pitch” and “perfect pitch” are often confusing for beginners. Many musicians want to know how to get perfect pitch or wonder if they need perfect pitch to be a good player or singer.

In this article, we’ll discuss the differences between the relative pitch definition and the perfect pitch definition. We’ll also learn why perfect pitch isn’t a necessary skill, and can actually be a curse when performing some musical tasks.

What Is Relative Pitch?

“Relative pitch” means the ability to produce or identify a note when given another note as a reference point. The musician is able to produce the note because they are aware of the note’s position in the scale, relative to the given note.

For example, when a choir performs a capella (without accompaniment), one of the singers or the conductor brings a tuning fork or pitch pipe. The tuning fork or pitch pipe produces a specific tone, which all the performers can then use to find their starting pitches.

Relative Pitch Test

There are two ways to test your relative pitch:

1. Play a note on an instrument, and then use that note as a reference to create another note. For example, play middle C on the piano, and then try to sing the G a fifth above it.

2. Sing a specific degree of the major scale. For this, you don’t need an instrument: just sing a major scale (Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do), and then try to sing a specific degree from that scale. For example, the third degree, then the fifth, and so on with different degrees.

Both of these methods test your ability to recognize scale degrees and tonality, both of which are crucial components of good relative pitch.

What Is Perfect Pitch?

“Perfect pitch” is the ability of a musician to produce a note “from thin air,” without the benefit of a reference note. For example, a singer could be told, “sing A,” and will be able to sing the note without any accompaniment or help.

It is uncommon to find people with perfect pitch in the general population. According to scientific findings, it is impossible to find someone who learned perfect pitch as an adult, people who claim to have done that likely had already developed it to a great extent in their childhood. Great relative pitch skills, on the other hand, can be developed at any age.

Types of Perfect Pitch

Perfect pitch is often referred to as “absolute pitch”. This fact sometimes leads people to think that absolute pitch is somehow different than perfect pitch. However, there is no difference whatsoever between perfect pitch and absolute pitch; these two terms are synonyms.

Where Does Perfect Pitch Come From?

A person develops perfect pitch in very early childhood, often by accident, or without studying. It is learned the same way language is learned: through repeated exposure to the notes and association to their name.

Is Perfect Pitch Rare?

The answer to “how common is perfect pitch” is “not very.” There is no hard evidence to support exactly how many people in the general population have perfect pitch, but it’s estimated by some to be around 1 in 10,000, which is very low. The percentage of musicians who perfect pitch is low, about 4% of music students report having it.

How Do I Know If I Have Perfect Pitch?

There are two ways to test perfect pitch:

1. Have someone ask you to sing a random note, then check your pitch against the pitch from an instrument, like a piano, pitch pipe, or tuner.

If your friend tells you to “sing the F#” and you can, you may have some degree of perfect pitch. However, if, for example, you have memorized what C sounds like, and are using C to get to F#, you are using relative pitch, not perfect pitch.

2. Have someone play a note, and then see if you can identify the exact note that has been played. There are many apps and websites around that can help you do this if you don’t have access to an instrument.

Can You Develop Perfect Pitch?

According to scientific findings, it’s not possible to develop perfect pitch after early childhood. The reason for this is “brain plasticity.” The brain in children who are less than five or six years old is much more “plastic” (i.e. malleable and flexible) than an adult brain, and can form associations that an adult brain can’t.

But this shouldn’t be a concern for you, since, contrary to popular belief, perfect pitch is not at all necessary to become musical. Indeed, most of your musical heroes likely don’t have perfect pitch; rather, they have great relative pitch skills.

Can relative pitch skills be developed at any age?

Yes! Relative pitch can be developed at any age through practice. It simply requires learning the relationships between notes, and the sensations they evoke in major, minor, and other scales.

Difference Between Relative and Perfect Pitch

The key difference between relative and perfect pitch is that relative pitch requires hearing a note before a note can be created or recognized, while perfect pitch does not. It’s important to notice that this does not mean that relative pitch skills are less effective or slower than perfect pitch skills. Another major difference is that relative pitch can be learned at any age, while perfect pitch is only developed in early childhood.

Relative and Perfect Pitch - Which Is Better?

There is no “better” or “worse” when it comes to talking about perfect vs. relative pitch. Both are skills that can aid a musician in recognizing and producing tones in a fast and reliable way. A better question to ask is “which is more useful?” The answer to that is “relative pitch.”

Plucking notes out of the air at random isn’t something you’re going to have to do a lot in your musical career. It just isn’t how music works.

It is far more important to be aware of the key of a song, the structure of the chords, and the way the melody fits into those chords. This is called the “harmonic context.”

Key Disadvantages of Perfect Pitch

Perfect pitch can create problems for people that have it. When a song is transposed up or down from its original key, musicians who have perfect pitch may experience distress when hearing the piece. They feel it’s “in the wrong key”.

Perfect pitch is the result of early childhood exposure and repetition, so if a musician gained perfect pitch by hearing tones that were slightly flat or sharp, their whole musical tonality might be slightly shifted, causing them to play or sing out of tune.

Finally, musicians who accomplish tasks like transposition through the use of perfect pitch often find it more difficult than those who use relative pitch to accomplish the same tasks.

Different Methods for Developing Relative Pitch

At this point, you’re probably wondering “how can I develop relative pitch?” There are several ways to practice relative pitch and improve your skills, however, not all methods are equally effective.

Trial and Error

The “trial and error approach” refers to the musician playing random notes or chords on an instrument, until they stumble upon the notes and chords that match the song they are trying to play.

While this can be a fun exercise, it’s not an effective way of training your ear. When you use your instrument to help you find the notes, you are not really using your ear and mind to recognize the notes and scale degrees.

You might recognize that the chord or note you’re playing sounds the same as the chord or note in the song or on the radio, but you do not understand how that chord functions within the harmonic context of the music. By training in this way, you won’t develop the ability to recognize chords and notes by ear, and your musicality and inner sense of pitch will remain stagnant.

Interval-Based Ear Training

Interval-based ear training is the process of memorizing the sound of intervals (perfect fifth, minor third, major sixth, etc.) in isolation (without including them in a musical context or a tonality). It usually means playing a note, then learning how to sing a note at some interval above or below that note. An alternative exercise is hearing two notes and having to identify the interval between them. It’s very important to understand that these are non-musical exercises, and successfully performing these exercises doesn’t transfer over to real musical skills, like recognizing melodies and chord progressions on the fly, singing in tune, improvising great melodies, etc.

Indeed, there are several neglected issues related to interval-based ear training. In a few words, the interval method doesn’t take into account how our perception of musical pitch naturally works and develops, so it’s seriously flawed and ineffective (especially for beginners). Check out this video to see all the rigorous scientific findings that back this up.

Without bothering you with all the scientific details here, the underlying problem at the core of the interval method is that the same interval (for example, a major third) can sound or feel totally different depending on where it lies in the scale. This means you may not recognize a major third if it falls in a different place in the scale than the one you’re used to hearing (i.e. when practicing the interval in isolation - as explained at the beginning of this section).

For example, C to E and G to B are both major thirds and are part of major chords in the scale of C major. However, the jump from C to E sounds very different than the jump from G to B when played as part of a chord progression.

This is because the C to E major third is part of the resolution (the I chord) while the G to B is part of the V. The I chord is the tonic chord of the scale, so it sounds very stable and harmonious, while the V chord sounds unstable. They have different functions within the scale, and therefore, different sounds and feelings.

In a few words, practicing intervals in isolation (how it’s done with interval-based exercises) is a very bad idea and it is not going to help you develop your ear training skills at all.

A Better Way

A more effective way to train your ear is to learn how the notes function within the key of the song, and to be able to hear the “implied harmony” of the scale degrees. This process does not rely on understanding the intervals, rather it places notes and melodies into a musical context.

Our mind perceives implied harmony as a feeling, based on the note’s position in the scale. For example, the seventh note in the scale strongly demands resolution to the tonic. When a melody reaches the seventh degree (also called “Ti”), your ear naturally wants to hear that tone resolve to the tonic (or “Do”).

Courses that teach you how to recognize implied harmony and let you internalize how the notes feel inside the context of the scale/key, are the most effective at teaching you relative pitch.

Conclusion

It’s good to have an understanding of what the term “perfect pitch” means, but you don’t need perfect pitch to be a good musician. A deep internalization of the tonal structure and strong relative pitch skills, such as you will learn from Use Your Ear courses, will serve you a lot better.

We hope that this article has answered the questions “what is perfect pitch?” and “what is relative pitch?” Do you have good relative pitch? Do you think you might have perfect pitch? Get in touch and let us know!