Does perfect absolute pitch spoil a listener for imperfect music?
I really think it’s helped me in transposition… if I look at a C and know that it should sound like an Ab, I play/hear an Ab. Transposition is something that my church required of me (simply because it was the reality of the choir and soloists) from when I was 11 years old though, so perhaps I just got used to working with transpositions. Many fellow students told me that the first time they encountered transposition was in college theory, which would make it really difficult to learn so late… Still, perfect pitch and relative pitch are two separate mechanisms, and both are useful. Relative pitch is like a black and white TV, where you get the structure of everything, the lines and shapes, the sizes and distances, but absolute pitch gives you the color. So both are important, but every musician needs to be able to recognize intervals for their distances, not just for the pitches that are sounding. For those with inborn absolute pitch, knowing what a major third sounds like is at le
