This episode was written and produced by Olivia Rosenman.

People with perfect or "absolute" pitch hear every single sound as precise musical notes. Is this extraordinary talent a blessing or a curse? In this episode, we dive into the neuroscience, pluses and pitfalls of absolute pitch. Featuring neuroscientist Daniel Levitin and Grammy-winning musician Jacob Collier.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Hide and Seek by Jacob Collier
Light It Up On Me by Jacob Collier
Down the Line by Jacob Collier
To Sleep by Jacob Collier
All I Need by Jacob Collier
Bakumbe by Jacob Collier
Hideaway by Jacob Collier
Colrain by Marble Run
Sky Above by Jacob Collier
Moon River by Jacob Collier
A Noite by Jacob Collier
Connect by Steven Gutheinz
Count the People by Jacob Collier

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by D allas Taylor.

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Order Daniel Levitin’s book, This Is Your Brain On Music.

View Transcript ▶︎

[music in: Jacob Collier - Hide and Seek]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

What you’re hearing right now is one person’s voice, layered in perfect harmony with itself using an instrument called a vocal harmonizer. This is a live performance; it has not been edited or altered in any way. The voice itself isn’t being digitally tuned, meaning one wrong note and the harmonic structure will fall apart. The singer is Jacob Collier.

Jacob: So what happens when I play the harmonizer is, I sing a note, and I play a few notes on the keyboard. What you hear coming out the instrument is all of the notes I'm playing on the keyboard sung by my voice. So, it's almost like I can be this spontaneous choir.

Singers have used vocal harmonizers for a long time, but this one is special; it was invented by Jacob, and he’s one of the only people in the world who can make it sound like this.

[music continues: Jacob Collier - Hide and Seek]

Jacob: What I realized about this instrument, when I started to get my friends to try and play it is that, it's really, really difficult to play unless you know what note you're singing. Because if you know what note you're singing, say for example, I sing in E, or if I think, "Oh, I want to play a chord of E major," and I go [SFX: sings] and I play the chord, I don't have to think about trying to find an E, because I know an E. Actually, I really didn't think about that. It was just a thing that, I knew it, so I did it.

The way Jacob can just pull a perfect E out of nowhere is called absolute pitch. It’s the ability to identify a musical note without any external reference.

Jacob: I toured for a while, with this one man show, where I was onstage all on my own, surrounded by about 10 different musical instruments, and walking around them, and playing them, and looping them, and designing these grooves, and all this stuff. Sometimes I would have, say, half a beat to move from the double bass to the harmonizer, or from the guitar to the harmonizer. If I had to check my notes, I'd be lost. I'd be absolutely lost.

[music out]

Absolute pitch is a rare gift that neuroscientists are still trying to understand.

That’s producer Olivia Rosenman.

So, Olivia, I feel like whenever I’ve heard about this, it’s been called perfect pitch. So is there a difference between perfect pitch and absolute pitch?

No. Both absolute pitch and perfect pitch refer to the same thing. But, most neuroscientists and musicians use the term absolute pitch.

[music in: Jacob Collier - Light It Up On Me]

The way our brains engage with music is an entire branch of neuroscience in itself.

Daniel: I’ve done most of my work on absolute pitch, but also done some studies of how musical structure is represented in the brain and musical emotion and why people like the music they like.

That’s Dr. Daniel Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist who researches the musical brain. In fact, Daniel wrote what is probably one of the most important books on it. It’s called This Is Your Brain on Music. When I spoke to Daniel, he came prepared.

Daniel: I brought a microphone that goes up to 20,000 hertz in honor of this conversation.

Daniel doesn’t have absolute pitch himself, but he does have a background that helps him bridge the gap between music and science.

Daniel: I had dropped out of college after my sophomore year to play in band. I played in a succession of bands, jazz, and country, and rock bands and eventually found my way into recording studios working as a producer and an engineer.

Over the years, Daniel worked with artists like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and the Grateful Dead. He says that in his experience, absolute pitch isn't always a desirable thing for a musician to have.

[music out]

Daniel: Absolute pitch is mistakenly regarded as a pinnacle of musicianship. There are plenty of composers who didn't have it, and there are composers who did. There are great musicians who didn't have it and great musicians who do.

Paul Macartney doesn’t have it [SFX: The Beatles - Let It Be]. Neither does Beyonce [SFX: Beyonce - Sorry]. Tchaikovsky didn’t have it [SFX: Tchaikosky - Swan Lake] and neither did Brahms [SFX: Brahms - Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor, Op.25].

Daniel: The lack of absolute pitch is not an impediment. The more musicians I talk to about it, and the more I meet with and without it, the more it becomes clear to me that it's actually not such a great thing to have it.

Most musicians rely on something called relative pitch.

Daniel: It’s the ability to identify by name a musical interval. So, if I go, “Bampam,” that's a perfect fourth. If you're a musician, you know that...

If you’re not a musician, a perfect fourth is a series of two notes, four steps apart on the 12 note scale.

Daniel: Almost all musicians that I know of have relative pitch. Now, if I go, "Bampam," if you have relative pitch, you'd say that's a perfect fourth. If you have absolute pitch, you'd name those two notes. I don't have it, so I don't know what they are. I don't know what notes I sang, but it's a perfect fourth.

I don’t have it either, so I need a piano to check what notes Daniel is singing. For the record, it’s a B and an E [SFX: bum bum].

Branford Marsalis is a saxophone player who’s played on heaps of famous records. Like most musicians, Branford has relative pitch, not absolute pitch. In the studio version of the 1985 Sting song “Shadows in the Rain” you can actually hear Branford panicking right at the beginning because he doesn’t know what key the song is in.   [music in - Shadows in the Rain by Sting]

He doesn’t get an answer, but somehow he manages to come in, perfectly in tune.

[music up]

So how did he pull it off? Well lucky for us, Daniel and Branford move in similar circles.

[music out]

Daniel: So, I asked him just a couple of weeks ago, "Do you have absolute pitch? Is that how you figured out the key?”He said, "No, no, no. I waited till Sting started singing, and then I quietly played the saxophone to find what note he was singing, and then I knew what key we were in."

While you can teach yourself relative pitch as an adult, Absolute Pitch is a gift that some people have, and some people don’t. So why is that?

[music in: Jacob Collier - “Down the Line”]

Daniel: Well, as near as we can tell, there's a difference in the way kids are raised. A two-year-old who's learning words, that two-year-old's mother is likely to say, "Oh, look. That's a fire engine. See the fire engine? It's red. See this ball? It's blue." The child is rewarded for making these name associations with a visual perception...

When you see a tomato you instantly know it’s red. You don’t have to go and hold it up against a picture of the rainbow so that you can give it the right color label.

Daniel: Color naming, for most of us, unless you're colorblind, it's automatic. It's an internal template.

And for most of us, musical note labels aren’t something we’re drilled on as kids.

[music out]

Daniel: It's rarely the parent who says, "Did you hear that alarm bell? [SFX: alarm tuned to E flat, turns into piano plunks] That was an E flat, E flat. You hear my voice right now when I hold my voice at a steady pitch? That's a D." A musical family with absolute pitch might do that, but no one else is.

[music in: Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata]

But even a musical family needs to keep their piano tuned.

Daniel: Sometimes people are raised in a household with a piano that's half a step off or a full step off [SFX: Detune Moonlight Sonata, continue detuning until music end]. That happens with old pianos.

[music out]

Daniel: So, you've got somebody who learned that the note that we call C [C on piano] sounds like this [B flat], but to everybody else, they would say, "Well, that's not a C. That's a B flat."...

So even though they’re out of tune, they still have absolute pitch.

Daniel: So, when you test people like this, they're perfectly consistent. They name it with great precision and, as I say, replicability, consistency. They're just off by two semitones.

But learning absolute pitch as a small child doesn’t completely explain the phenomenon, because there are people out there who have absolute pitch, who haven’t had any musical training in their lives. This is something Daniel was able to prove in a study with tuning forks which he labelled with names rather than musical notes.

Daniel: I just said, "This one is Fred. This one is Ethel. This one is Lucy. This one is Ricky, and just play this to yourself for a week, and come back to me in a week, and I'm going to take it away from you, and then I'm going to ask you to sing that pitch."

That’s how he found people with absolute pitch who didn’t have any musical knowledge at all.

Daniel: People were able to do that. They could sing a Fred or an Ethel, and if you can do that, that's the same to me as singing an A flat or a G.

So it’s not about the labels.

Daniel: If you speak a different language, you're not going to talk about A, B, and C, and some people call it do, re, mi using so-called solfège.

[SFX: DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI, DO]

And even creatures that don’t have any word labels at all can demonstrate Absolute Pitch. Some animals use it to keep track of their pack.

[music in: Jacob Collier - “To Sleep”]

Daniel: Wolves in a pack find a pitch range that is theirs alone, and it's how they identify one another in the pack. So, their howls are not random. They're confined to a particular pitch range, and each wolf has a range that indicates who they are. So, they may not have labels like A flat, but one wolf will say to the other, "Well, that's Harold," [SFX: Howl] or at least know in his or her mind that that's Harold howling, and that's Sophie howling over there [SFX: Howl].

[music out]

And while a human who has Absolute Pitch will also have relative pitch, in the animal kingdom, that’s not necessarily true.

[SFX: Songbird]

Daniel: For most species of birds, songbirds, if you take their song and you transpose it into another key, which is the essence of relative pitch, it's what makes Beethoven fifth work. You hear the pattern “ba, ba, ba, bum, ba, ba, ba, bum” [SFX: Beethoven’s fifth] transposed, you recognize it as the second four notes as related to the first by transposition. You may not know it's called transposition, but you recognize there's something about them that's the same. You do that to a songbird, [SFX] they don't recognize… their own song, which suggests that they've got absolute pitch but not relative.

[music in: Jacob Collier - All I Need]

People with absolute pitch hear every single sound as precise notes on the chromatic scale. For a songwriter, knowing the exact pitches of all the sounds around you has a huge impact on the way you write music. For Jacob, that talent allows him to pull off some pretty unreal harmonic feats. That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Absolute pitch is an extraordinary talent that very few people have. Scientists still haven’t figured out exactly why some people develop it, and why some people don’t. If you have absolute pitch, you instinctively know the exact musical note of every sound you hear.

[music out]

So what’s it like when the whir of a coffee grinder [SFX], clanking silverware [SFX] and creaky doors [SFX] all sound like musical notes?

Jacob: It's fun and can be rather distracting.

[music in: Jacob Collier “Bakumbe”]

Jacob: I think I've realized that it's a lens through which I can view things, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not useful. I don't have to always listen to that voice. I've almost taught myself to walk around the world and listen to sounds as though it's a blanket of sound, rather than these precise things.

Jacob: But were I to want to, I can tune into all sorts of weird and bizarre household objects, and roadside conglomerate sounds, and stuff like that.

[music out]

It might not be very helpful to know that your microwave beeps in B flat [SFX]. But even if absolute pitch isn’t useful all the time, it does come in handy when you’re composing music with heaps of instruments.

Jacob: I play a few different instruments. I'm a singer. I play the piano, and the drums, and the bass, and the guitar, and various percussion instruments, and other instruments that I've invented, and a few other things.

[music in: Jacob Collier - "Hideaway"]

If you watch any of Jacob’s music videos on YouTube, you’ll see that he often plays every single instrument in the song.

[music up]

In this track, “Hideaway,” Jacob plays two ukuleles, two acoustic guitars, a bass guitar, an autoharp, a khalimba, a ghatam, a mandoline, an Udu, and an Azerbaijani tar.

[music up]

Oh and that’s him singing, too.

[music up]

Jacob laid down each track individually and then looped and edited them together into an extremely impressive one man band.

[music stop]

Jacob comes from a musical family. His mother is a violinist and conductor, so his gift of absolute pitch was identified early on.

[music in: Colrain by Marble Run (Blue Dot)]

Jacob: Well, I was about two years old, I suppose. I would listen to all sorts of strange sounds around the house; be it the microwave beep [SFX], the vacuum cleaner whirring [SFX], or the car alarm going off outside [SFX], whatever.

As Daniel explained, some children develop absolute pitch by being constantly told the notes of the sounds around them. But Jacob's family took a different approach. Instead of naming notes, they focused on how the notes made him feel.

Jacob: It would always be not, what is that note, but what does that note feel like. I supposed I was encouraged to navigate all these different sounds and pitches, by way of feeling them, rather than analyzing them.

[music out]

For example, Jacob says that hearing his mother play the violin influenced the way he feels about certain notes.

Jacob: The interesting thing about that process of learning for me was that I'd be more likely to confuse, for example, an A with a D, than an A with a G sharp. Because the A and the D had this open string feeling.

[SFX: Violin SFX on notes]

An “open string” is when a note is played on a stringed instrument, like a violin or guitar, without putting any fingers on the neck. On a violin, the strings are traditionally tuned to G, A, D and E [SFX]. For Jacob, these open string notes all share a certain feeling.

Jacob: The A, and E, and D [Violin SFX on notes] feeling being quite open, and quite rounded, and quite neutral, and on the brighter side felt much more different to something like G flat, D flat, A flat [Violin SFX on notes], because those, I suppose, feel like they're on the darker side, on the flatter side of the notes.

In this way, Jacob’s parents taught him to trust his feelings when it came to music.

Jacob: I suppose since the age of two or three, I've felt like I could trust that internal compass, and navigate in that way.

And it’s that internal compass that allows Jacob to explore the world of harmony

Jacob: So, I think for me, it was interesting to start recognizing not just frequencies, but relationships between them. That led me on to my absolute fascination and deep crush on harmony in general.

I tested out Jacob’s pitch by hitting the coffee mug on my desk with a pair of scissors.

Olivia: Maybe I'm just going to hit it with these scissors that I have here. Then if you can tell me what it is, that'd be cool.

Jacob: Yeah. [SFX: clink]

Olivia: Do you want me to do it again?

Jacob: Yeah, go on, then. [SFX: clink]

Jacob: [SFX: mug clinking sound] So, it sounds like halfway between a D and a D flat.

Ok, wait… I have to jump in here and check that. Here’s that sound again [SFX: clink]. Now, let’s isolate the resonating frequency [SFX]. To be exact, that’s 2339 Hertz, which is right between a D flat and a D, just like Jacob said. That is unbelievable!

I know! But surprisingly, even though Jacob can identify a note to a fraction of a semitone, that doesn’t mean he always plays or sings in tune.

Jacob: No, no. It doesn't at all.

[music in: Jacob Collier: “Sky Above”]

Jacob: Well, first off all, I'm quite interested in being out of tune. I think that being out of tune is a whole kettle of fish that most people don't dig into. I think it's exciting to do it, in an interesting way. But also, I'm not a brilliant, brilliant singer. I don't think of myself as a particularly spectacular technician on any instrument that I play. I think that singing a note in tune is much more about technical or control than it is about knowledge.

In other words, just because you know exactly what a note should sound like, that doesn’t mean you can always hit it.

Jacob: But what I would say is that when I sing a note out of tune, I can tell you how many hundredths of a semitone the note is out of tune without thinking.

That is, unless he’s sick.

[music out]

Jacob: I have noticed that if I'm very unwell, like for example, I'm suffering from a fever. I specifically have found with fevers that everything goes pear shaped and things can sound up to a semitone sharp, which is extremely bizarre.

But when he’s in good health, Jacob’s ear is so keen that he hears distinct musical differences where most people just hear the same thing.

Jacob: One of the ways I generally think about things is that for every note, there is a middle, and a slightly low, and a slightly high. There are three versions of every note. So, say you take like, [sings D], and [sings D]and [sings D] right? Those are three different kinds of D. They're all closest to D, out of all the notes; [sings D Flat] is way lower.

Where someone without absolute pitch may not hear the differences in those three shades of a D, Jacob hears them as entirely different notes.

Jacob: So, I think that my mind has recently been blown just realizing how many different kinds of notes there are between notes. I think that's kind of spurred me on, the interest I have in discovering all these secret notes between.

So what most people might think of as a note that’s slightly out of tune, for Jacob is a secret note that can be a source of inspiration.

Jacob: I suppose with such notes, you have a few different options. One is that you can correct the note, using some kind of correction tool where you say, "Okay, I'm going to apply the auto tune [SFX], and it's going to make everything quantized, and all semitones exactly the same size.

Jacob: The second option is that you tune it manually, by which I mean that you speed up [SFX] or slow down [SFX] that region of the audio file by a particular number of cents, which is one hundredth of a semitone. The third option is to embrace that it's out of tune, and get jiggy with it, and adapt the other things around the notes to fit.

[music in: Jacob Collier - “Moon River”]

Let’s take a listen to an example of Jacob’s ability to find creative uses for the secret notes in between. This is an arrangement he did of Moon River, by Henry Mancini.

[music continues: Jacob Collier - “Moon River”]

Jacob: In the final verse I modulate it to the key of D half flat major.

Musically, this is a very complex thing to do.

[music out]

Barnaby Martin is the creator of the YouTube channel “Listening In,” where he posts video essays about musical topics. In one of his videos, Barnaby breaks down Jacob’s cover of Moon River.

Barnaby: Jacob’s arrangement of Moon River seems to be pushing every aspect of his work to its limits. It contains microtonality, alternative tuning, 8 different keys or pitch centres as well as some of the most complex and dense harmonic language he's ever used. All done without a piano. All done with only his inner ear.

This next part is going to get a bit technical. Stay with us. Even if you don’t fully grasp all the details, you’ll definitely understand just how complex this arrangement is.

[music in]

The song opens with a dreamy, hummed rendition of the Moon River melody in the key of B flat major.

Then, to get to the first verse, Jacob moves from B flat major to D flat major in a quick sequence of 11 complex chords.

[music up, then down]

After the first verse in D flat major, Jacob transposes up a semitone into D major for verse two. It’s here that Jacob starts to get jiggy with it, sliding into the spaces in between standard notes.

Barnaby: The top line sings notes a major seventh above the tune but uses microtonal inflections to add color to this descending sequence of chords.

[music continues]

If this all sounds like gibberish to you, don’t worry. The takeaway is that once you start using notes outside of the traditional 12 note scale, things get very tricky, very quickly.

[music out]

So what is it about these off-tune or in between notes that Jacob loves so much?

[music in: Jacob Collier: A Noite]

Jacob: I'm more interested in writing songs in non-linear keys, or keys that don't exist on the piano. Not in the name of being strange or dysfunctional harmonically, but more it's like I've trodden the snow. It's like when you have untrodden snow [SFX: Untrodden snow]. Say you start your life with untrodden snow, and you walk along certain pathways of the snow a lot [SFX: Trodden snow]. Then there are these other areas, which aren't as trodden down. So, it feels so much fresher to step on some untrodden snow [SFX: Untrodden snow]. It's a really wonderful feeling.

Jacob: I think it really feels like I'm in this new frontier. Also, I find it really confounding, in a nice way. Creatively, I'm always fed by things that are subtly unfamiliar, or strange, or that I don't already have a system for understanding. I'm always chasing those things, things that I can't quite put in a box.

[music out]

According to Daniel Levitin, Jacob’s not the only musician who likes to walk on untrodden snow.

Daniel: Just to cite one of my favorite groups, Led Zeppelin, ... Jimmy Page would have the band intentionally tune in between the cracks off of standard pitches [SFX: Guitar tuning]. I don't know why he did it, but what it means is that when we listen to Led Zeppelin today against that backdrop of hearing tens of thousands of recordings in a canonical precise pitch, it may sound a little more exotic because it's breaking the rules.

Led Zeppelin also made pitch changes to their music in post production.

[Music Clip: Led Zeppelin - No quarter]

This recording of “No Quarter” was slowed down to drop the pitch a quarter of a tone. According to Jimmy Page, this made it sound “bigger, thicker and more intense”.

If we speed it up a bit, we can get a sense of what the song might have originally sounded like.

[SFX: speed up track to bring it up a quarter tone]

Here’s the final, slowed down version again.

[SFX: morph back to recorded version]

[music out]

When it comes to standard pitches, Jacob Collier sees a pretty good reason to break the rules.

[music in: Connect by Steven Gutheinz]

Jacob: I think what I've come to understand recently is, it's a convenient system, the semitones. There are 12 notes in every octave, and those are all the notes that there are in the world and stuff. But the truth of the matter is, it's totally arbitrary.

Even if he considers the 12 note scale arbitrary, the fact remains that Jacob can conjure that scale from memory in a way that most of us can't. This is what fascinates Daniel

Daniel: When we attend to something in the environment by looking at it or hearing it, tasting it, smelling it, touching it, some of those details get encoded into memory and some of them don't.

There’s something special happening with sound, perception and memory in the brains of people with Absolute Pitch.

Daniel: All this interacts with memory and consciousness and perception in interesting ways. I find absolute pitch to really be this fascinating nexus of all these things.

For Jacob, having absolute pitch has helped him realize that there’s really no difference between sound and music.

Jacob: I, for one, wouldn't claim a birdsong [SFX] to be more inherently musical, per se, than something like a dog [SFX]. But I think that because we, as humans, tend to organize things in certain ways in our minds, that we call something music or not music.

Jacob: I almost feel like the more names you give stuff, the smaller the thing gets. It's like saying, "This fits into this box, or this box, or this box. This is a sound, and this is music." In some ways, we’re one to describe a sound as either, all you'd be doing is imprisoning the value of the sound within something which has value already. Which is to say, make it non-infinite.

So if you’re like most people, and you don’t have absolute pitch, why should you care about it?

Jacob: Well, I don't think it's worth caring about absolute pitch, per se. I think it's worth caring about pitch. I think that, if you care about pitch enough, that absolute pitch becomes interesting. You know what I mean? Because I guess you recognize that there are all these different sounds in the world, all around you, on the radio, and in the music that you listen to, if you listen to music [SFX]. Or as I say, in bird songs [SFX], and animal calls[SFX], and peoples' conversations[SFX], car horns, kettles, hoovers[SFX], all sorts of things. The world is kind of cacophonising, in a musical way all the time.

Jacob: I think that once you realize that the world is music, you can't un-hear it as music. That's a really wonderful, joyous thing to realize.

[music out]

[music in: Jacob Collier - “Count the People”]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team that makes commercials, documentaries, and trailers sound incredible. Hear more at defacto sound dot com. This episode was written and produced by Olivia Rosenman, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was story edited by Casey Emmerling. It was edited and sound designed by Soren Begin and Colin DeVarney.

A HUGE thank you to Jacob Collier for not only for speaking with us, but also allowing us to use so much of his music. The track you’re hearing right now is from his latest album, Djesse Volume 3. Listen wherever you get your music.

Thanks also to Daniel Levitin, who wrote the book This is Your Brain on Music. That book was a big inspiration for this episode.

And thanks to Barnaby Martin for allowing us to play clips from his YouTube channel, called “Listening In.” You can find all of the individual tracks we used, as well as additional links, and original artwork, on our website, 20K dot org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]