Thread: Pieces of Music to remember pitch - suggestions please

First off, hello im new on these forums

second off Ive been searching for some suggestions to pieces of music that are memorable and can help me achieve my goal to get perfect pitch. sadly I havnt found any yet. So i thought it might be a good idea if people threw in some suggestions to pieces of music that are memorable, but most importantly, have a dominant pitch or note attached to them, so I can always just cycle through references to name the note.


so far my list is like so:
lowest c - Nas - One Mic (the opening from the song, really obvious when you hear it)

c - dave 202 - torrent (i dont like using this as a reference since its very digital and alot of chorus on it, but its all ive got right now that sticks)

c# - franz liszt - hungarian rhapsody 2 (the beginning makes it so easy to memorize this note)



g - franz schubert - der erlkonig (althought im having alot of problems identifying g for some reason, might be to do with the pitch that the piece was written in (A4??) so it always sounds either sharp or flat when i compare it to a g on my keyboard.



my list is pretty empty right now but if someone has any good pieces of music that all have their memorable note to them I would appreciate it (and im sure others would as well)


cheers

Save your energy... it can't be done. You either have it or you don't. Enjoy the music, with or without perfect pitch.

id rather not, i know it can be done because i can partially reference it now. So obviously im gonna continue to train myself to master it.

....

perfect pitch is something innate, you can "learn" pitches after time, but it will never be PERFECT like perfect pitch is, being able to identify harmonic/melodic intervals, name a quality of scale/chord type etc. etc. is one thing that is easy to grasp but being able to know the exact notes, or being able to sing a particular note without hearing it is something much harder. and although you may get to a point where it's pretty good, it will never be perfect.

What works for me is the simplest one - just singing do / re / mi / fa / so / la / ti / do. I don't have perfect pitch but I can always find a note by comparing it to that. Whether it's through repetition or some other agency, I can start that at C every time. Also, E also seems very easy to pick out on its own. It has a ring to it that "rhymes" with the letter E, if that makes sense.

Originally Posted by Igneous01

id rather not, i know it can be done because i can partially reference it now. So obviously im gonna continue to train myself to master it.

Not to be unkind... but if you can "partially" reference it now, you probably don't have perfect pitch. People have spent a lot of money on ear training courses that supposedly will let you develop perfect pitch. None do. This is not to say that ear training is not worthwhile - it is. You can develop of very good sense of relative pitch which is even more important to a musician. Perfect pitch is the ability to remember the pitch of a tone without any external help. Many violinists can accurately tune their A string without a pitch source, but unless they have perfect pitch, they are reacting to external aids like the tone quality of that particular note on their instrument.

The reason you can't seem to find a memorable piece to help you memorize pitch is simply because there isn't one. What can be more memorable than the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th symphony? How does that work for you?

Originally Posted by Ernie

Not to be unkind... but if you can "partially" reference it now, you probably don't have perfect pitch. People have spent a lot of money on ear training courses that supposedly will let you develop perfect pitch. None do. This is not to say that ear training is not worthwhile - it is. You can develop of very good sense of relative pitch which is even more important to a musician. Perfect pitch is the ability to remember the pitch of a tone without any external help. Many violinists can accurately tune their A string without a pitch source, but unless they have perfect pitch, they are reacting to external aids like the tone quality of that particular note on their instrument.

The reason you can't seem to find a memorable piece to help you memorize pitch is simply because there isn't one. What can be more memorable than the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th symphony? How does that work for you?

it works extremely well for me, i can memorize any piece of music that I like and can play it back in its original key i heard it from, I can also transpose it in my head to some degree.

why it works is because when i hear the note c sharp/d flat, a piece of music automatically fires off in my head - the opening to hungarian rhapsody - so I know what it is.

i dont know how it works for other people but I find as long as I can get a piece to fire off when a particular note is played, i can identify it. I can also break down chords in my head to single notes as well, only thing holding me back is my ability to not remember all of them individually (hence i need to break them again)

plus it seems im getting the hang of it, played random notes on my piano blindfolded and was able to name 7/10 notes most of the time.

so theres my reason, i hope you guys understand what i mean

From whats been explained to me perfect pitch hasn't been really correlated with compositional genius or genius in musicianship. It just seems to be a certain trait innate to some individuals which can help in ways but pose problems in other ways - for example listening to music, if one instrument is even slightly off pitch it can really bother an individual with perfect pitch, where others may not even notice.

I understand what you mean. I know many notes that "fire off in my head," to quote you. I hear a note, and I immediately go back to a song in my memory. C, B, A, A-flat and E-flat have that kind of effect on me.

Personally, I use obscure pieces of music that you've probably never heard of to recognize notes, so no use mentioning them. And A is just stuck in my head from tuning my instrument to it so much.

But for A-flat, think of Clair de Lune (Debussy), the first note of the melody.

Originally Posted by Huilunsoittaja

I understand what you mean. I know many notes that "fire off in my head," to quote you. I hear a note, and I immediately go back to a song in my memory. C, B, A, A-flat and E-flat have that kind of effect on me.

Personally, I use obscure pieces of music that you've probably never heard of to recognize notes, so no use mentioning them. And A is just stuck in my head from tuning my instrument to it so much.

But for A-flat, think of Clair de Lune (Debussy), the first note of the melody.

thank you, theres a piece ive never thought of. Looks ill be listening to that for quite a while ^^

@Ernie: Perfect pitch is not a musical ability per se, it is an extremely good memory of pitch. Note names are human concept anyways, so perfect pitch has nothing to do with notes.

@OP: You can save yourself a lot of time by remembering 1 or 2 pitches, and just referencing other ones by relative pitch.

Rasa, I always understood that perfect pitch was somewhat analogous to color vision. That is, for most people you can hold up a swatch of cloth and they can id it as red, blue, green, whatever. Color blind people can have difficulty with some or all colors. My understanding was that perfect pitch worked the same way, except that most people are the equivalent of color blind. Of course, it's not a perfect analogy because relative pitch doesn't really work in this analogy.

Pitch, and the associated note names are an entirely human concept (as is colour). If you have absolute pitch, you just have a very firm sense of pitch and a very firm memory of where that pitch is in relation to the human "standard" pitches.

So if you're not so firm with pitch, you can train yourself to remember one or two pitches through using a reference note you hear often (in conservatory solfege, we'd listen to A), or a piece that is distinct in your mind.

Originally Posted by Rasa

Pitch, and the associated note names are an entirely human concept (as is colour). If you have absolute pitch, you just have a very firm sense of pitch and a very firm memory of where that pitch is in relation to the human "standard" pitches.

So if you're not so firm with pitch, you can train yourself to remember one or two pitches through using a reference note you hear often (in conservatory solfege, we'd listen to A), or a piece that is distinct in your mind.

Rasa

I hope you're right, but I doubt it. As a piano tech, I've listened to thousands of "A's" over a span of over 40 years. I still can't reliably sing an A, and when I hear an A I don't recognize it as such. People with perfect pitch don't seem to have to think about it - they hear a pitch and identify it. In the same manner, I can't listen to a piece of tonal music without the solfeg syllables popping into my head - no thought required. I realize that this happens because of training, but you would think that with my background as a tuner, and having taught music theory for 34 years, I would have been able to train myself to recognize pitch by now.

Originally Posted by Ernie

Rasa

I hope you're right, but I doubt it. As a piano tech, I've listened to thousands of "A's" over a span of over 40 years. I still can't reliably sing an A, and when I hear an A I don't recognize it as such. People with perfect pitch don't seem to have to think about it - they hear a pitch and identify it. In the same manner, I can't listen to a piece of tonal music without the solfeg syllables popping into my head - no thought required. I realize that this happens because of training, but you would think that with my background as a tuner, and having taught music theory for 34 years, I would have been able to train myself to recognize pitch by now.

Well that's the thing. Not everyone has the hability to memorize sound frequences. People who can memorize pitches, may develop perfect pitch. But you're not exactly born with perfect pitch... no person is able to sing a G or a D if they are asked to, without having any sort of music knowledge.
The original poster seems to be able to memorize pitches, so yes I believe that he/she with alot of practise can get to perfect pitch (memorizing the pitch of all musical notes).