Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Can you identify (by ear only) what key something is in?

I am learning too, so I am wondering about doriangrey's skills.

not an easy task on equal temperament

easier in past times when each key was unequally tempered and had their own quirks in intervals

Doritos Flavoured, are you saying absolute pitch recognition is relative pitch recognition? What are you saying?

My primary instrument is violin. If a song or tunes starts to play, I can quickly ascertain the key and play along. And because a violin has no frets it doesn't matter if the tune is a semitone sharp or flat, I'm there.
I can't do this with a piano. Nor can I just hear a tone and name it. I don't value that as a skill. As you might imagine, what I can do comes in quite handy.

If I understand you right, I can usually identify the note when hearing it to the key, and chords I can narrow down to the octave and the mode.

Thanks. This is what I am working on. Dorian, I am not sure which male singer you were referring to.
Pitch and timing are coordinated..maybe that is why the drummer had a good ear--he is on the beat. I'm going to humm.

I really don't know if I have this ability, cannot say I have ever taken any notice... will have to have a listen to some random tunes and see if I can guess the key they're in without even touching the piano/keyboard

I have the ability to know roughly where on the piano a tune should be based just by listening, but knowing the key with 100 certainty... I honestly cannot say I've ever tried.

For that matter, if I hear a tune in the car, I like and wish to play on the piano, I will likely transpose it into D or G. If I find out the original key, I may or may not move it. I used to think people wrote in weird keys, but most of the time they only mess with the pitch. Moving A to 448, 450, or some such frequency.

I'm saying in past times it was likely easier to know because each scale in unequal temperament had different intervals, thus each scale had it's own "character"

with equal temperament, they're all equal regarding intervals, so unless you do have perfect pitch, you won't notice which is which.

DoritosFlavoured-It probably has been discussed already here but I thought perfect pitch perhaps was learned like running, walking, listening or other skills are learned and perfected by environment so I then exclaimed maybe it is just relative pitch!

I can only tell if something is in D major because my right ear is sensitive to the movement between the C sharp and the D an octave above middle C. It's very annoying especially listening to the many violin concertos written in D major.
I haven't got a clue apart from that.

Maybe I only did a half-hearted search but I couldn't find a just intonation scale, only interval examples, when I went looking for this "character". Thanks for the information. maybe I can use another instrument.
#I am confused..more walk less talk.