If your life depended on it, could you instantly name the pitch of a car horn, or sing a middle C on cue? Odds are you could not, but there are a few students at Gunn who can.

Senior Jonathan Tsay and junior Christine Kim both have a unique ability called perfect pitch. Perfect pitch, also known as absolute pitch, is the ability to recognize any note and name it, or conversely produce any pitch on demand. Many of the great musicians, such as Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey, have also been blessed with this ability.

Most people have a general sense of pitch that they use everyday to determine what sounds right and wrong. In individuals with perfect pitch, however, this ability is magnified and more finely tuned. Tsay, for example, can distinguish any piano note almost instantly, although “for an obscure instrument it’s more difficult and takes a couple of seconds to get used to,” he said.

Perfect pitch, like any skill, needs to be practiced to become honed and reliable. “When I was little, I could only hear ‘white-key’ notes,” Kim said. “If the note was a flat or sharp, I could not distinguish the different pitches. Even now, it takes me slightly longer to figure out certain chords when there are a lot of flats in the key signature.”

Tsay was introduced to music at a young age. He currently plays the piano, violin and erhu (a Chinese instrument similar to a violin) and finds his sense of pitch very useful. “It makes sight-reading a lot easier because you don’t have to focus on the pitch, only the rhythm,” Tsay said.

Tsay found his sense of perfect pitch at the age six when he started playing the piano, and found that the notes and tones came easily to him. Although anyone can improve their tone recognition with practice, Tsay feels perfect pitch is an innate ability. “You just realize you have it, you can’t learn it,” Tsay said.

Others, however, believe that perfect pitch is an ability that anyone can learn with enough practice and time spent with music. “I became perfect pitch at a really young age because of my piano and violin studies,” sophomore Victor Zhu said. Zhu has played the piano since he was five years old, and he has spent so much time around music that the pitches now come naturally to him. Even though he first learned the notes on the piano, they also transfer over to everything else that he hears. “Pitches are universal,” Zhu said. “If you can name them on a piano, it’s the same with everything else.”

Despite the musical applications of perfect pitch, it can also be an annoyance at times because you cannot ignore imperfect tones or musical blunders, according to Tsay. “If you’re listening to somebody play something off tune, it just sounds like noise,” he said. A bombardment of notes can also confuse people with perfect pitch because of their inability to keep up with the pitch of each note. “When there are too many notes at the same time, and I can’t figure out the note names quickly enough, it drives me nuts,” Kim said.