I know I will shock and appall some by this message.  Others will be
crushed and have their self esteem shaken.  However, there is no such
thing as perfect pitch in the modern musical world.

The use of the term perfect pitch in speaking tone languages may be
valid, however.  Tone languages are found only in Asia (Mandarin,
Vietnamese) and those peoples only recently became aware of Western
musical instruments and our Western idea of perfect pitch.

What we Westerners call perfect pitch is merely A-440 pitch memory.
Most people can develop relative pitch and determine the name of the
pitch (in A-440 tuning standard) from knowing the name of some other
pitch and figuring out another pitch.  You can also fake perfect pitch.
You first are aware of the top or bottom note that you can sing and
from knowledge of that pitch can determine what pitch you are wanting
to know the name of.

In Bach's day the tuning standard was 1/2 step lower than A-440.  Many
European pipe organs are tuned to many different standards.  Often the
church did not have the money to purchase enough metal to make the
lowest organ pipes (low 16' CCC pipe would be about 16 feet long) so
they would make the lowest C on the pedal board to sound at D or E or G
making for shorter pipes using less metal.  The person who thinks he
has perfect pitch would go nuts trying to play such an organ.  Sometimes
the same occurs when listening to a Bach work being played at original
pitch.

An original Stradivarius violin cannot be tuned to modern pitch without
substantial internal structure changes.  If one could find an original
untouched Strad and you tuned it to A-440 without sending it out for a
rebuild first it would most likely explode from the pressure.  Of
course this drastic tuning change affects tone quality as well.  It is
well known that if one tunes an old fiddle to a lower pitch the tone is
warmer and different from a modern fiddle at A-440.

One of the most damaging ideas in modern music is that we should all go
to A-453 pitch as many orchestras are experimenting with that pitch.
This would damage pianos not scaled for this pitch.  There is also a
movement that wants to move us back to Bach's pitch.  The reasoning is
that opera singers must push their voices more than 1/2 step higher on
everything they sing which also results in a more strained tone
quality.  This idea has some merit as most operas were written when the
old pitches were the standard of the day.

I would be all for going back to old pitch except for the fact that we
would have to rescale and restring all pianos made since 1900 to keep
their good tone.  Lowering pitch without rescaling would make wound
bass strings sound plain ugly.

So you folks with "perfect pitch" should from henceforth refer to it as
"A-440 pitch memory"

D. L. Bullock    Piano World    St. Louis