absolute and relative pitch

TC3 · 2026-01-06T19:17:05+00:00

I was interested in the absolute pitch and relative pitch discussion in the “what makes piano hard” thread but didn’t want to thread drift with a massive pos...

thepianoplayer416

1 thing people talked about before is that people would perfect pitch can tell between similar pitches like B, C & C#. Someone with perfect pitch would have trouble playing on a piano that is even slightly out of tune. When a "C" doesn't sound exactly like a C would throw get him confused. Last year I was in a store playing a song on an out of tune piano. Didn't find playing to be a problem.

MRC

WieWaldi I am not sure, if I got everything right, but it sounds a little bit like the problem has to do with the equal temperament tuning of the piano?

It's not so much the equal temperament as the fact that the piano is limited to one temperament, while the strings can be constantly changing their temperament. We could replace the equal temperament with one where some intervals correspond exactly to certain intervals used by the strings at certain points, which would make the strings happier in these particular cases. But this would mean that certain other intervals at other points would make the strings very unhappy indeed.

An example: some years ago I played the harpsichord in an early 17th century opera. We were using a meantone tuning, which tries to make as many pure thirds as possible. This is only feasible on a keyboard instrument if you restrict yourself to a certain range of tonalities, which can work pretty well for music of this period. But you can still run into problems. On my harpsichord, the string a semitone above G was tuned to produce a G# a perfect third from E, so I could play E major chords (there were a lot of these). If an F minor chord was necessary (rarely, but it happened), I couldn't use this note as an Ab: in this case it sounded horribly out of tune. The only solution was to simply not play the note, playing only F and C and leaving the Ab to the strings.

keystring

I don't know whether I can shed light or confusion on the one topic.

First I'll go to the barbershop quartet, and its quest for the "5th note" which can only be achieved through precise tuning of all four voices to produce the phantom 5th note above. Barbershop quartets sing a capella, with no accompanying instrument, esp. piano, because of the effects they want to produce.

Likewise, a string quartet wants to create effects. You can have a major chord that is brighter or less bright or disturbingly bright, all of it as part of musical expression. So in the original example, the string player with perfect pitch who couldn't adjust would destroy the sought after effect.

You can't compare that to "what if there's a piano" because those won't be the same musical goals. Or there would be a compromise of sorts.

iternabe

I just came across this paragraph by Josef Lhevinne in his book "Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing" (on page 12):

Absolute pitch is by no means absolutely necessary. I have it and have always had it. Safonoff, my own master, did not. Rubinstein did. Sometimes it is a disadvantage. I cannot think of any composition except in the key in which it was written. Sometimes when a piano is a whole tone flat or a half tone sharp, I become fearfully confused, as it does not seem that I am playing the right notes. I instinctively start to transpose the sounds to where they belong and thus get mixed up.

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