What is Relative Pitch And The Importance of Music Intervals?

In music, a melody is made by intervals, the sonic “distance” between notes. While casual listeners can generally tell when a note is different from the one that preceded it, it takes a certain skill to be able to reliably identify the exact intervals between notes.

This skill is called relative pitch. When, for example, note G#5 is followed by D6, a musician with relative pitch knows that he or she has just heard a tritone. When you have relative pitch, you can hear the distinctive character of each interval. The tritone is one of 12 non-compound intervals common in tonal music.

Relative pitch allows musicians to do much more than just play instruments. Singers with relative pitch can sight-sing or repeat a melody they’ve just heard with perfect accuracy, using the intervals as a guide. Having relative pitch also means musicians can transcribe or play music by ear without the trial-and-error that might have slowed them down before. For players of fretless instruments like the violin, viola or cello, relative pitch is necessary in order to be able to match pitch with the rest of the ensemble. It also allows any musician to accurately tune his or her instrument without the use of an electronic device.

Relative pitch is not an “inherited” ability; it’s learned through simple ear training exercises. Basically, these mostly involve listening to intervals, whether they’re played on an instrument at hand or presented through recordings or even memory, until the music intervals are familiar enough to the learner that they’re instantly recognizable regardless of the musical context in which they occur.

The vast majority of professional musicians have relative pitch, and ear training is a required part of almost all college and university music programs. This is because, in short, not having relative pitch severely limits what musicians can do. Even casual, just-for-fun music hobbyists will find ear training – and its immediate benefit of relative pitch – to be more than worthwhile, thanks to the many tasks they enable.