[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) I want it that way.
It's actually A major, so it's (SINGING) you are my fire,
or I want it that way.
[MUSIC - BACKSTREET BOYS, "I WANT IT THAT WAY"]
I want it that way.
I played this game with my friend Anna
where I sang random pop songs in whatever key
I feel comfortable with.
And then, since she knows the songs,
she was able to tell me the real key off the top of her head,
because Anna has perfect pitch.
I've got this.
OK. (SINGING) Just a small town girl--
It's not.
(SINGING) --living in a lonely world.
OK.
So it's actually (SINGING) just a small town
girl, living in a lonely world.
[MUSIC - JOURNEY, "DON'T STOP BELIEVIN'"]
Living in a lonely world.
[TONE]
That's a C sharp.
[TONE]
F.
[TONE]
B flat.
Oh my god.
You're so fast.
Amazing.
Yeah.
You just know.
You just know?
I've been playing piano on and off since I was a kid.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The musical ability that's always fascinated me
is perfect pitch.
I want to dig into whether it can be learned.
Hi.
I'm Dianna.
You're watching "Physics Girl."
And I'm here at UCSD with three musicians,
with Miren, Jeff, and Cat.
Miren has perfect pitch.
[TONE]
A.
DIANNA COWERN: And Jeff has perfect pitch.
[PIANO CHORD]
It's a tritone, so it's F-sharp and C maybe?
Yeah.
So how do you describe perfect or absolute pitch?
I would say it is the ability to sort of identify
a pitch in the absence of any other relative pitch.
For non-musicians I like to explain it as sort of everyone
else sees colors, but they don't have names for them.
They're like, oh, that one's different from that one.
But I can tell you that's blue, that's red, that's yellow.
So for instance, if like a microwave beeps,
I would be able to tell you what pitch that was.
[BEEP]
That's a B.
We had some fun demonstrating perfect pitch.
[BEEP]
That's a b.
[DOORBELL RINGING]
G, E flat.
[TONE]
E flat.
[TONE]
That's a C-sharp.
[TAPPING]
That's a really high C.
[TONE]
F.
ANNA: That's an F-sharp.
[BEEP]
That's an A.
[INAUDIBLE]
As we kept doing demonstrations
of perfect pitch, I noticed something.
There are certain factors that influence
how fast these musicians can identify pitches.
Check out Miren, who's a violinist, guessing notes
for violin, and then for piano.
[TONE]
A flat.
[TONE]
B flat.
[TONE]
Um, is that F-sharp?
Mm-hmm.
[TONE]
Um, A-flat?
Mm-hmm.
She's more confident on violin.
But before I dig into that, I want
to make a quick distinction between perfect pitch
and relative pitch.
Relative pitch is this.
No matter your music background, you
can probably tell that these are two different notes.
[TONE]
But you might not be able to identify them.
With relative pitch, given a reference note,
like C, you can identify other notes.
Eric, give me some notes between A and G.
ERIC: E.
(SINGING) Ah.
[TONE]
ERIC: D.
(SINGING) Ah.
[TONE]
ERIC: B.
(SINGING) Ah.
[TONE]
ERIC: F.
(SINGING) Ah.
[TONE]
ERIC:
C. (SINGING) Ah.
[TONE]
ERIC: E.
Ah!
I messed up.
And that's my mediocre skill.
Cat has very strong relative pitch.
Because I play the violin and I've heard the notes,
it's E, A, D, and G. And I've listened to those notes
so many times, like since I was young.
And so I can sing those notes I guess without help.
Bowl
Both relative pitch and perfect pitch
are affected by something called timbre.
And this is where I get to bring in the physics.
Play the same note on two different instruments
[TONE]
And they don't sound the same.
What is a note, though?
No, really.
What is a musical note?
It's commonly called a pitch or a frequency.
And the explanation goes like this.
Sound is a wave.
Something vibrates, like a string,
and moves the air back and forth to create
areas of high and low pressure that get carried as a wave
to you ear.
All good.
We can graph the high and low pressure as something
you've seen many times, a wave like this.
High pressure, low pressure, high pressure, low pressure.
I've got this really cool app that
allows you to graph any sounds.
So right away, you can see that the waves
of different instruments look different.
And they're not the beautiful sine waves
that we're used to seeing.
All of these waves have something
in common, a main or fundamental frequency.
It's this up and down pattern repeating at a specific rate
or frequency.
Higher notes have a higher fundamental frequency.
But then there are all these other little bumps.
And they come from adding in higher frequencies
to your main frequency.
Check out this website where you can
listen to different frequencies and then
add them to see what it looks like on the graph,
and then hear what it sounds like.
I will link to all these programs in the description.
So it's the shape of the wave of these different instruments
that defines timbre.
It's the shape of the wave that makes the instrument sound
brassy or bright or mellow.
Now back to pitch recognition.
It makes total sense to me that different timbres
would be harder to recognize, because they're not
the same note.
Some have more frequencies added in.
And if you learn music on one instrument,
well, then you learn the notes on that specific timbre.
I would say that the timbre affects my ability for sure,
like I'm definitely better on string instruments
than I am on piano than I am on like pure sine wave tones
and like also voices, sort of a notoriously difficult one
for a lot of people.
I like to think of recognizing different timbres
like recognizing accents of a language.
Now save your breath for cooling your porridge.
[INAUDIBLE]
I had a very hard time understanding the New Zealand
accent when I was there earlier this month.
But over time, I was able to get better at it, because I already
know the language.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like perfect pitch
can be learned after a certain period of your life.
You did not get sort of musical training
or intensive musical exposure before the age of 7,
you're kind of very unlikely to develop absolute pitch.
It's obviously not always the case.
Like one of my really good friends, she started music at 9
and she still developed it.
But it's just the vast majority, there
seems to be this sort of critical period
that overlaps sort of with language acquisition, actually.
Well then.
Imagining what it's like to have this perfect memory of a note
that you can recall and recognize
seems impossible to me.
It's like asking a baby to find meaning
in what they perceive as random noises coming out
of their parents' mouths.
Hey, Ida.
What do you think it would be like to perceive
meaning from the random noises coming out of my mouth.
Mmm.
What do you think?
Pretty cute, but unlikely.
But for now, we can take comfort in the fact
that we can recognize the difference between a banjo
and a pipe organ.
Thank you so much for watching, and happy physics-ing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[THEME MUSIC]
(SINGING) Baby, you're a firework.
Yes.
So that's actually a (SINGING) baby, you're a firework.
[MUSIC - KATY PERRY, "FIREWORK"]
Baby, you're a firework.
What's so impressive about that to me
is that it's like Anna's memory of a song
is tied up with what key it's in.
It's like it's impossible for people with perfect pitch
to remember a song in any other key.
In fact, Jeff described getting totally confused
when he tries to play a song on a keyboard that's
transposed so that the note that you play [TONE]
is different than the note that comes out.
Oh, now it's in F?
It makes a note that is not.
Yeah.
So that's F.
DIANNA COWERN: Oh, man.
But I'm pressing the C key.
And this completely screws me up.
DIANNA COWERN: Yeah.
I can't play it anymore.
DIANNA COWERN: Really?
It's done.
It's diseased.
I can't touch it.
Can we see you try to do that?
I'll just like pick a song I know really well,
so I'm going to switch it back to normal so I know--
so I can show you what the song in my head sounds like.
It's very simple.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So that's in C-sharp minor.
It's a song from [INAUDIBLE],, actually, for all of you
out there.
DIANNA COWERN: Fun.
So I just jammed the Transpose button a bunch of times.
I don't know how.
I'll try to do it again.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHTER]
What?
I have to rely on purely muscle memory.