Is this perfect pitch?

Question

Recently I've noticed that I'm hearing notes almost pronounce their name, such as a C note saying C. I talked to my vocal teacher about it and he told me to sing a C (which is why I gave the example I did) and he checked it on the piano. It was correct. I've been listening to more and more music and in my mind I'm just like "G#, G... A, C, E..." I later check a lot of those pitches to find that I'm correct. I've also heard random noises coming from outside my house to find that I can identify most of those pitches. I identified one noise (not sure what it was coming from, to be honest) as a Bb. But the thing is, if I do have perfect pitch, why would it wait until I'm 15 years old to finally start popping up? Doesn't that seem kinda strange? Why wouldn't I have noticed it before? Is it just because I didn't start singing until a year ago so what was a Bb concert pitch was a C on my Bb clarinet or...? I'm just really curious about this seventh sense (my sixth sense is the ability to sense when something chaotic is about to happen) that I seem to have.

Tim · Answer

It's not something that has just suddenly appeared, but something you've gotten better and better at until you were good enough at it to realize it.  What you describe isn't really perfect pitch but a much more useful thing called tonal memory.  With time and practice (such as taking vocal lessons) we can learn to remember the sound of specific pitches.  Giving them their names helps reinforce it.  The more you work at it the better you will get.

BTW, that would be your eighth sense.  We all have a natural sixth sense that we don't think about.  It's related to touch and is the ability to sense the orientation of our bodies.  When we extend our arms for instance, we can sense gravity pulling back and we know the position of our arms even if we can't see them.  That's why the police make people close their eyes and touch their nose if they think they are drunk.

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Is this perfect pitch?

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