Is having absolute pitch an advantage for A level music?

tom_giles1997

For as long as I have known, I have had the somewhat abnormal ability to recognise and record sound frequency and tone inside my head and play it back with great ease. My first music teacher discovered this when I was around 5 and found that I could play complicated piano music from ear after listening to him play it once and also recognising the key and pitch of the piece. This continued to baffle and amaze other music teachers as I went on to develop this ability.
As I am taking As music now, I have slightly got bored of this ability even though it still amazes my fellow students but does annoy them when I am able to tune an instrument without appliances or notice a tiny mistake in a piece. I used this ability as sort of a fast track for my GCSE music ( I got an A overall) but was wondering how useful or relevant this ability still is when studying AS music. So far anyway the course is going very well. I would very much like to hear from anybody else who has this ''amazing'' ability who is taking either GCSE or A level music who could share experiences about how relevant or useful it is. I understand this ability is very rare but there must be somebody else out there who has it! I don't want to go freaky X men;(. Cheers :smile:

Reply 1

CatnipGlows

I can't imagine it'd massively help you with the theory, only if you're performing :smile:

it's still a useful skill to have though!

Reply 2

tom_giles1997

Original post by abbiemac

I can't imagine it'd massively help you with the theory, only if you're performing :smile:

it's still a useful skill to have though!

That's pretty much what I was concerned about, but yea I guess it's useful. Thanks! :biggrin:

Reply 3

emagicon

I have perfect pitch, and I don't know if your course has a listening paper, but if it does then perfect/absolute pitch helps massively for some areas of the paper

Reply 4

Senseireynolds

what is absolute pitch ?
don't you just mean you are musical lol

Reply 5

math42

Original post by Senseireynolds

what is absolute pitch ?
don't you just mean you are musical lol

Absolute pitch is what it sounds like. People with absolute pitch can recognise notes out of context (a lot of musical people can recognise intervals, but they can't tell you whether some random note is a C or a G# or even something in between conventional frequencies)