I have thoroughly imperfect pitch, and it doesn't worry me much. There are some things I can do quite well, and others where I am quite astoundingly incompetent. I have a pretty good sense of where A is - probably because for thirtyfive-odd years of concert-going I've tried to hear that note in my head before the oboist plays it. It's hard-wired into my brain by now. I can reckon simple intervals from that with fair accuracy, but it's by a laborious step-by-step mental process - definitely not instantaneous recognition. I can sing in tune provided I don't think about it. The moment I let myself become conscious of "am I on the right note?", I lose it. Catastrophically, usually. I attribute this to a traumatic experience with a very bad music teacher when I was about seven or eight. I've described her on this list before, and also the very good one I met later who made me accept that it was possible to have musical sensitivities without being a good or accurate singer. Some time ago, Chris Bonds wrote: >The issue is also complicated because musical tone almost never exists >in a pure state. It's a complex of a fundamental pitch and its overtones >in various amplitudes. I think this is an important and much-overlooked point. I know that my pitch sense is very easily confused by different tone-colours (i.e. different overtones and intensities of them on top of the same fundamental). Somewhere along the line, I never properly learned the trick of isolating the fundamental pitch from all the rest. As with singing (vocalising might be a more accurate term in my case), the more self-aware I become, the worse I get. >This fact may explain why some people's sense of absolute pitch is >stronger when listening to an instrument they play (in my case the violin). >Artificially produced sine tones are very difficult for some people to >associate with a pitch, particularly very low tones. Very interesting points. They would suggest that practical pitch-recognition is actually not to do with the fundamental as much as the associated overtones. Otherwise, pure sine-wave tones would be the easiest to identify (at any audible frequency). Ian Crisp [log in to unmask]