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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

>They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have: Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum.

Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article.

I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes.

I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative pitch and chord theory.

I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.

There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords.

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You are in much better shape than most mortals in this respect.

> I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.

But you can work your way up and down the keyboard from that initial A440 to check how the other As are and then expand from there until you have them all in tune. So you can't just pick a random note and tune it but you can for instance use your one reference to tune a whole keyboard eventually hitting on that one random note and getting it to within some tolerance.

> I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords

That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else.

The catch is that trying to tune a piano by ear gets really tricky since your ear wants to tune intervals to integer ratios of frequencies. It's really easy to tune a piano so that it sounds good in C and then the further away from that key you get, the worse the tuning gets. (I've encountered twentieth-century pipe organs that aren't equally tempered—I had been hired to play bass and guitar at a church once and things were fine rehearsing with the piano, but in the church, the guitar sounded horrid and I had to switch to playing bass for all the songs that were accompanied on organ.)

True, hence 'stretch' tuning and various other tunings. It all depends on whether you want the piano to play 'period correct', by itself in a solo concerto in together with other instruments.

There are so many different tunings it is quite amazing.

A great piece of open source software for anybody that is even remotely serious about this:

http://piano-tuner.org/

The strings and reeds adapt more readily than more rigid fixed intervals. but I keep everything out of tune. Piano is always a bit flat. But for some middling g. And I double on sax.

> That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else.

Counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Collier

True musical genius and child prodigy but also a skilled performer and composer.

History also tells of impressive feats by composers like Mozart and Rachmaninoff.

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