"For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem to do better."
It is common for musicians with relative pitch skills to be better at it with their own instrument(s) than others. For example, I hear guitar parts better than most other instruments, and I've played guitar for three decades. I can do pitch recognition with other sounds, but the further from the range and timbre of guitar it gets the trickier it becomes.
I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. We've all mostly agreed on A=440Hz, and it's become more common with time and electronic instruments and tuners and such for recordings and live performances to be A=440Hz. But, I still find myself retuning sometimes when learning new pieces by ear, because the recording is a little sharp or flat. And, it's arbitrary that we have 12 notes to an octave; we could have 17 or whatever (based on closely matching the ratios, so it's not completely arbitrary).
So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. The wild thing about it is that it is a learned skill that is mostly only obtainable when very young. This is similar to some language nuances and why someone may speak a second language with an accent even after decades of speaking it fluently, if they learned it as an adult. There aren't a lot of skills like that, however...I can't think of any others, and it seems to be because pitch/music/language are all closely related in the brain.
I wonder if in your case, you could retune your absolute pitch with practice? Perhaps you don't play or listen to as much music as you did in your youth when it was "in tune".
> I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary.
> So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill.
Being able to name a note as an A or a B or whatever must be learned, because those labels are arbitrary -- but isn't that just a matter of translation? It seems that the fundamental ability (perceiving and identifying absolute frequencies) could still be innate.
That may be so. But, it seems to be more common among the children of musicians and children who have heavy exposure to music early in life. But, then again, that could also be indicative of genetics...maybe people who love music enough to expose their kids to a lot of it at a young age have more of whatever this ability is, just not enough to be absolute pitch.
I guess it could be that there are people who have the fundamental ability, without ever learning the labels to apply to them. Like the fact that humans took a while to name a bunch of the colors, and even now there are cultures where blue and green are not distinct colors. Maybe there are people with absolute pitch who just never learned the names of the notes they're hearing. Heck, maybe those folks are some of the ones who are "learning" absolute pitch as adults in these trials.
It is common for musicians with relative pitch skills to be better at it with their own instrument(s) than others. For example, I hear guitar parts better than most other instruments, and I've played guitar for three decades. I can do pitch recognition with other sounds, but the further from the range and timbre of guitar it gets the trickier it becomes.
I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. We've all mostly agreed on A=440Hz, and it's become more common with time and electronic instruments and tuners and such for recordings and live performances to be A=440Hz. But, I still find myself retuning sometimes when learning new pieces by ear, because the recording is a little sharp or flat. And, it's arbitrary that we have 12 notes to an octave; we could have 17 or whatever (based on closely matching the ratios, so it's not completely arbitrary).
So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. The wild thing about it is that it is a learned skill that is mostly only obtainable when very young. This is similar to some language nuances and why someone may speak a second language with an accent even after decades of speaking it fluently, if they learned it as an adult. There aren't a lot of skills like that, however...I can't think of any others, and it seems to be because pitch/music/language are all closely related in the brain.
I wonder if in your case, you could retune your absolute pitch with practice? Perhaps you don't play or listen to as much music as you did in your youth when it was "in tune".