The Test for Perfect Pitch

This afternoon I watched an anime movie titled Full Score of Fear, in which the main character investigates the murders of students at a music academy (anyone catch the musical term in the title?) Interestingly enough, the culprit also planted a bomb inside a pipe organ, and the main character was able to find the bomb only because he noticed that one of the notes played by the organ was consistently "flat," or slightly off-pitch. He was able to do this because he had absolute pitch, aka "perfect pitch," the ability to identify or recreate a musical note without an external reference (i.e. a piano). Most of the viewers probably thought, "Huh? That note was flat?" because the alteration in pitch was very slight, but fortunately, I was able to pick it up.

I don't know when I realized that I had perfect pitch, but I think it was sometime in high school. I could always tell when someone was playing out of tune, and what I lacked in dynamics, I made up for with near-flawless intonation. I can identify single notes pretty well, but chords are more of a problem b/c I haven't had the proper training for it (1-2 years of piano). Even still, I had to wonder just how "perfect" my sense of pitch was. So when I surfed the web and found an auditory test to determine whether or not I had perfect pitch, I knew I had to take it.

After filling out a brief questionaire, the computer began producing different tunes in succession. I had 3 seconds to identify each note after I heard it and click the appropriate "key" on the virtual keyboard. There were 80 tunes altogether, 40 piano tones and 40 "pure" tones, and sometimes the notes were so high or so low on the spectrum that I honestly couldn't tell what they were, or else I ran out of time before I could identify a note. When my scores came out, however, I scored a 30.25/40 on pure tones and 31/40 on piano tones. That's well above the Absolute Pitch cutoff point at 24.5, confirming what I already know regarding my sense of pitch.

Now whenever interviewers ask me to tell them something interesting about myself, I can with all honesty say that I have perfect pitch, and with the data to prove it =)