Music is who I am. I don't say it's been a "part" of me or that it has always been "with" me because that wouldn't be accurate; it is the very foundation of who I am as a person and it is how I live. My mom tells me I used to hum tunes and "sing" little songs in my bouncing walker before I even said my first word. As a little girl, it was my dream to get famous one day and perform for a living. I started taking voice lessons in second grade and I joined band and began playing trumpet as soon as I could in fifth grade. Upon joining band, I also joined the grade school choir that was separate from our general music class. I've been in music ensembles ever since and I was heavily involved in musical theater and show choir throughout high school. However, there was always something a little different about the way I processed music that I wouldn't discover until my freshman year of college.
Often times, throughout a choir rehearsal in middle or high school, as we were learning music, I would become very frustrated with others in my section. I didn't understand why they had to be given a starting pitch or, in some instances, had to have more difficult melodies and harmonies plunked out on the piano. I never wondered why I seemed to be the only one with this frustration that no one else seemed to understand. I wasn't mean or standoffish about it to anybody, but I always felt a bit bored when we were first learning new songs. My choir director would have me switch from alto to second soprano all the time because I learned fast in songs that required another part on top of the others. For a while, I chalked it up to just being a weirdly good sight reader. Until I came to college, that is.
I joined University Choir at Ashland because it's a required ensemble for vocal music minors. Our choir director introduced us newcomers to a music reading tool called Solfege, which some freshman such as myself weren't too familiar with. I'd heard of it and we talked a little about it in high school choir, but it wasn't a principle tool we used. If you haven't heard of it, it's most basically described as taking the Do, Re, Mi scale and applying it to any key signature in order to teach yourself musical melodies and harmonies. And quite honestly, I thought there was something wrong with me when I started questioning its use.
The whole entire choir would sit there assigning Ti, Fa, Sol, and La to different notes all over their individual parts, and I thought I was going crazy because I just already knew the pitches. I eventually just stopped even trying to do it because it would trip me up, so I just started using a vowel such as "Ah" when singing a new part before moving to the written words.
However, one night, as I sat on my boyfriend's bed, he was doing his music theory homework and it involved writing down a melody with its note names after listening to it a few times. I said the notes casually as I heard them and he just sort of looked at me in disbelief as he scrambled to check my identification of the pitches to see if I had been right--and I was.
He did this multiple times after and once he realized he couldn't trip me up, that was when he looked at me and told me I had perfect pitch. I didn't know what that meant until he described what I couldn't seem to understand for so long. Looking back on it now, I don't know how I didn't discover its name earlier. Perfect pitch is defined as the auditory phenomenon characterized by the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. So, if you've ever heard of a pitch pipe...I'm essentially that. I don't need a piano to give me a note because it's for some reason already in my head.
After all this time, it made sense why learning music came so easy to me. It made sense why I couldn't understand why people would sing songs so far from the original key. It made sense why the songs on the radio always sounded different than on the CD I bought with the same exact song on it (because radio stations will raise the pitch of a song only a hair higher or lower than the original, often times not even a whole half or quarter step to avoid copyright violations). It clicked after all this time as to why I hear "music" everywhere I go because people speak in tones and pitches that I identify. The hum of a refrigerator even has its own pitch.
When others started learning I had it, I would often be treated differently than I had before. I got the sense that people began thinking I was prideful about my ability. People would joke about how they hated me for it. I even got into an argument with a very close friend because they were frustrated with me for making a joke about "not being flat" in tone. Quite honestly, it's a very isolating ability and talent. It is both a blessing and a curse. I don't want to be the jerk in choir who sings out differently as the pitch starts to sag, but I don't want to ignore what I can do. It's all about balance and using it when I can, and appreciating what I can do.
However, I also recognize how cool it is to be able to do what I do. According to some statistics, it's predicted that only 1 in 10,000 people have this ability, and many will never even recognize it. It took me until the age of 19 to figure it out for myself and its helped me to realize many things.
No one is perfect and perfect pitch certainly doesn't make me any better than anyone else musically, or in any way for that matter. It's a common misconception of those who don't understand its implications. I can go flat or sharp when I sing. Sure, I hear it and immediately get frustrated, but it still is a reality for me. I screw up notes sometimes when I sight sing. And I'm now even making a solid effort to ignore my pitch and get better at Solfege.
Regardless, I'm so grateful for the gift that I have. It is a part of my identity that I only consciously acknowledged in the past year. If anything, it's a reminder of what I really need to improve on musically, such as breath support and technique. It sets a higher standard for my musical ability because of the sight reading advantage, and it'll ultimately help me to grow even more in my personal musical growth and development.
Yes, I have perfect pitch, and it makes me that much more average.
