I wanted that way it's actually a major so it's a you are my Fagin or I wanna that way I played this game with my friend Anna where I sang random pop songs in whatever key I felt 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 game just a small-town girl in a lonely world okay so it's actually a nurse small town girl living in a lonely world that's a C sharp F B flat oh my god you're so fast okay you know you just know I've been playing piano on an off since I was a kid the musical ability that's always fascinated me is perfect pitch I want to dig into whether it can be learned hi I'm Diana you're watching physics girl and here at UCSD with three musicians with sneer and Jeff and cat near just perfect it and Jeff has perfect pitch try it on - f - C 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 be like oh that one's different from that one but I can tell you that that's blue that's red that's yellow so for instance if like a microwave beep I would be able to tell you what pitch that was that's a B we had some fun demonstrating perfect bitch that's a B G e-flat that's a c-sharp that's a really high C that's an F sharp that's an A I could do it all day 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 Mirren who the violinist guessing notes for violin and then for piano a flat 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 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 Angie that's my mediocre skill Kat have very strong relative pitch because I put 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 don't my like since I was young and so I can I can sing those notes and without I guess without help both relative pitch and perfect pitch are affected by something called Tambor and this is where I get to bring in the physics play the same note on two different instruments and they don't sound the same what is a note though they're 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 your ear all good we can grasp 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 grasp 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 were 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 Tambor 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 Tambor's 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 Tambor I would say that the Tambor 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 there have been notoriously difficult one for a lot of people I like to think of recognizing different Tambor is like recognizing accents of a language I serve your bread secured your parts under scholar questions what uh Mattson check my cover I had a very hard time understanding a 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 seven 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 nine and she still developed it but it's just the vast majority there seems to be this sort of critical period that over overlapped with language acquisition well and 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 really that's coming out of their parents now he is what do you think it would be like to perceive meaning from the random noises coming out of my mouth hmm what do you see 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 physically yes that's actually [Music] 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 describes getting totally confused when he tries to play a song on a keyboard that's transposed so that the note that you play it's different than the note that comes out oh it makes a note that is not that yeah that's been expressing the C key and this complete excuse me yeah I can't play it anymore really it's gone is the view easy you try to do that just like pick a song I know really well so let me switch it back to normal so I know I can show you what the song in the head song yeah very simple teas [Music] all right so let's impeach our minor little song from C degrees actually for all you out there fine so I just Jana transpose button a bunch of times I don't know how and tried it again what I have to rely on purely muscle memory