is perfect pitch or excellent pitch memory necessary for good composers?

Loc Le

New member
is perfect pitch or excellent pitch memory necessary for good composers? i read music composition books and they speak about how people make melodies in there head, how is that possiple unless you have good hearing and memory of all 12 pitches across octave, and i can make a melody of course by humming but i wouldnt even know what pitch is what lol , so if i come pose i just rely on seeing the piano roll and imagine the pitch i guess thats good enough?
 
is perfect pitch or excellent pitch memory necessary for good composers? i read music composition books and they speak about how people make melodies in there head, how is that possiple unless you have good hearing and memory of all 12 pitches across octave, and i can make a melody of course by humming but i wouldnt even know what pitch is what lol , so if i come pose i just rely on seeing the piano roll and imagine the pitch i guess thats good enough?
If you can hum, you can make a melody. It is not hard, and you do not need perfect pitch to do it-just hum something random. Playing the melody is just as easy as singing what you hear in your head. Easy. There are 12 notes-your melody is bound to be anyone of them. You just have to practice doing it until it is effortless.
 
Only about 1 in 10,000 people has perfect pitch (also called absolute pitch). It is interesting that a significant portion of famous composers had perfect pitch, but many successful composers didn't have it. And certainly most songwriters don't have it.

The ability to write a good, memorable tune is a very interesting muscle to flex. It does get stronger as you learn to flex it, but it's hard to describe where to begin. I recommend repetition: try creating lots of melodies. I find I do this almost automatically when the creative portion of my mind is bored while doing mechanical things, like driving or showering. I'm not great at it, but I'm learning.


There's nothing magical about keeping the melody you created in exactly the pitch you invented it in your mind. It is entirely normal for bands to transpose their songs up or down, sometimes for instrument range or ease of keys, but almost always for the singer's range.

It does take some understanding and knowing of pitch to be able to play the melody you just invented on an instrument. This is called "playing by ear", which is very different and exponentially easier than developing perfect pitch. All musicians (that play tonal instruments) develop this, but you can speed it up by specifically practicing matching pitches from songs as you hear them on an instrument, or by using the musician's definition of ear training software (which helps you train your hearing of intervals and chords).




P.S.

An exponentially larger share of the population in Asian countries that use tonality in their languages (including Mandarin and Vietnamese) have perfect pitch. It's not a genetic thing: it can be learned, certainly influenced. Though the bulk of the easy training is from ages 4-6. If you combine early learning of tonal languages with early learning of music, a child has a significantly better chance. At the Central School of Music in Bejing, about 60% of children that begin musical instruction by age 4 develop perfect pitch.

If this interests you, listen to podcasts RadioLab, with their episode Behaves So Strangely, and Freakonomics, with their episode How to Become Great at Just About Anything.
 
Having perfect pitch or good memory is nothing for a producer. You have technology that can remember things for you.
Having the ability to correctly string notes together, make memorable catchy melodies, making motifs that flow well with one another. That is everything for a producer.
 
it's necessary if ya want to know the pitches by heart but that's about it
This is true. Perfect pitch is a bit useless and it's really really really hard to learn

However, there's another thing, like perfect pitch, which is way way way easier and anyone who's been doing music for a long time picks up anyway, just through writing lots of chords/melodies.
It's called relative pitch
This means that if someone plays you two notes you can tell the interval (number of semitones) between them.
Having good relative pitch makes translating a melody in your head to notes a lot easier and is very useful if you write melodies often.
 
...However, there's another thing, like perfect pitch, which is way way way easier and anyone who's been doing music for a long time picks up anyway, just through writing lots of chords/melodies.
It's called relative pitch
This means that if someone plays you two notes you can tell the interval (number of semitones) between them.
Having good relative pitch makes translating a melody in your head to notes a lot easier and is very useful if you write melodies often.


Yes. and really, if a singer had perfect pitch with no embellishing or modulation, the sound would be static and uninteresting. As mentioned above, you can commit the notes to memory through practice. Some people will need to work at it more than others (for me personally, it took me awhile). But even seasoned people sometimes will strike a note to get themselves oriented at first.

Singing or humming what you are trying to play or create is also very helpful and really helps facilitate the brains tactile grasp on what it is you are trying to write or play.

It's going to take some work though. Just have fun with it knowing that your pursuing a greater understanding of music and though that, you WILL make better music. I promise you that.
 
Back
Top