Off topic, I know, but how do those gifted with perfect pitch cope with all this?
Michael
You ready for some polemic?
"Perfect pitch" is a sham. It's a fraud perpetuated by people who think that some of us are simply born musical geniuses, with an innate ability to sense the inner nature of music directly, and from whom creative and musical expressiveness naturally and effortlessly flows. I've sat in on seminars for composition, ear-training, musicology, music history, you name it; if one of the composers said he had perfect pitch, everybody's eyes lit up, and his scores are immediately taken more seriously.
What it really means is this: you have internalized the 12-note equal tempered scale -- usually through extensive piano lessons from an early age -- to such a point that your auditory memory is deeply enough ingrained that you can associate heard pitches with their usual note names. That's it. I've also sat in on ear-training seminars where the played music was to be written down transposed: the kids with perfect pitch floundered, because they couldn't actually hear the intervals, and (for them) the note names were all wrong. Likewise, play them examples in other tuning systems -- just intonation, but also meantone, pythagorean, or similar -- and likewise, they couldn't actually identify any of the notes. To them, it was all just "out of tune."
I *despise* the idea of perfect pitch, because to me it's a sort of musical parlor trick that a distressingly high number of musicians have conflated with some sort of in-born propensity for musical talent, and creative music-making suffers greatly for it.
But my opinions on the matter are, as the kids are saying these days, "salty."