A first attempt at describing attunement

I don’t have perfect pitch in the strict sense. I do have what’s called relative pitch, however: given a starting note, I can identify any other note relative to it thereafter. Given that formal definition, though, relative pitch would seem to be a particular skill that can called up when tested. But actually, it’s not really the kind of ability that I would describe as a skill. I grew up playing music fairly rigorously, so there is undoubtedly some aspect of training or practice that accounts for it, but I started at such an early age that it’s hard to know whether I owe my relative attunement to nature or nurture, or both.

In any case, relative pitch is more like the tint of my audial-sensory experience; it’s not just something I store away until I’m at a piano, testing my ear against a random note. It’s more of an integrated influence than a discretely applied skill. And really, how often do we isolate a single note, anyway? Sure, given a pitch, I can identify others. But in the long term, I can pretty much always, almost without fail, sing a song in the exact right key—even if I haven’t heard it in ages. It’s a little like color memory: you might picture, for example, your first ‘red’ tricycle right now. (Perhaps a perfect-pitch version of this analogy would be like always recalling the ideal red, or the most primary red, no matter what chromatic context or actually existing object it may or may not belong to.)

I get a private thrill out of testing this ability by recalling a song I haven’t heard in forever and then looking it up on the YooToob to make sure I’ve still got it. It goes to show, too, that relative pitch isn’t so immediate and transient as the single-note-to-note test that accounts for its formal definition. It’s a perceptual phenomenon that can function on a very long-term scale: tonality imprints itself. In that way, my audial experience is pretty much all relational. Maybe for everyone it is, to some degree: for people with relative pitch, exaggeratedly or more explicitly so, and for people with perfectly pitch, absolutely so.