Do things sometimes sound out of tune to you?

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I'm a musician, and I don't have perfect pitch (in the sense that if you play a note with no reference, I can't name what it is) but I do have relative pitch, which is where if I'm given a frame of reference, for example, you play me a C and say "This is C" and then play another note, I can tell you what the other note is.

My musical senses are very attuned, even though I don't have perfect pitch. I can hear when things are even slightly out of tune. The pianos at school drive me crazy because they are usually out of tune. It's easy for me to identify intervals, and detect minute changes in them. I just can't name what note it is without a reference.

This sometimes happens to me though: I listen to songs repetitively, and sometimes my hearing goes wonky and sounds like the music is out of tune. This is music that I listen to over and over, and it doesn't always sound out of tune.

What is causing this? Sensory overload? My ears are getting sick of listening to the same song? Can my auditory acuity fluctuate? Usually I have very keen hearing, I can hear conversations and sounds farther away than others can.

Does this happen to anyone else?

I don't study music at all, but sometimes certain songs do sound out of tune to me. More commonly, though, is that some songs will sound as though they are being played at a faster or slower rate than they actually are. It usually depends on the song I listened to before it - if I go from listening to a fast song to a medium/slow song, then the medium/slow song will sound impossibly slow. If I go from listening to a slow song to a fast one, then the fast one will sound way too fast and it will overwhelm me.

That's very interesting, Jason. Thanks, I'll look it up.

i'm not a talented musician but i do have perfect pitch which, unfortunately, has become less perfect as the decades have rolled by me. for example, what was a solidly discernable C in my youth, now sounds like a weak Eb. granted, i still "know" that the note i hear is a C, but it no longer SOUNDS like a C, if that makes any sense. i read this is a common comorbid with aging, caused by shrinkage/atrophy of the cochlear tissues.

I've experienced instances where a song's tempo seems faster or slower than I know it actually is. Really weird...

I don't experience that with instruments, but sometimes, I will go clicking on multiple videos of the same song on Youtube because the tempo seems off or the pitch just doesn't sound right. No one in the comments section seems to notice though, when it seems pretty obvious for me.

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i sometimes have this, but in my experience, it concides with a change in external sounds (fridge activating, cars passing by...), making the music sound out of tune with my environment.

there are many things that are constantly out of tune though, which drives my crazy, many lamps and tvs are painfully dissonant in their standby noise, let alone if they are combined...

Music doesn't usually sound out of tune to me, unless it is. But it often sounds "collapsed." It's a hard concept to explain if you've never experienced it. Normally, good music seems (to me) to have a "compelling" quality, often something to do with the "beat" or "drive," that somehow gets my internal clocks ticking to its rhythm and makes the music feel like a unified thing that is more than the sum of its parts. But sometimes, especially when I've been listening carefully for a long time (I do a lot of music mixing), the whole illusion collapses and all I can hear is a robotic drum beat with no soul, and a few instruments doing something equally futile. It feels as if there's something technically wrong with the music, but as the same recording can sound fine the next day, it must be me.....I guess my internal clocks just lose synch occasionally and don't relate me to the music like they usually do.

That seems to be more of a rhythm issue than a melody or pitch issue. I can hear small pitch errors in a mix pretty acutely, but I think ti's mostly because I've spent so long listening for them. I don't bother so much these days since I turned my back on pitch-perfectionism when I realised that the charm of a lot of music is in the deviation from perfect pitching rather than adherence to it. For both pitch and rhythm, a perfect rendering will generally produce stiff, lacklustre music that somehow lacks that wild edge that talks to the heart so well.

I knew a piano tuner who couldn't stand to listen to fretted or otherwise fixed-pitch instruments any more. To allow fixed-pitch instruments to play in more than one key, the tuning has to be compromised so that it will never sound perfect in any key but won't sound too far out in any key either. The piano tuner could hear the compromise and to him it sounded ugly. So he'd listen to choirs and string quartets, where the players are free to adjust their pitching to give perfect intervals. I keep wondering why nobody seems to have created a keyboard that adjusts the pitches of the notes to make every chord sound perfect. But in my case, the only way I can tell any difference is if I try to tune a keyboard myself........it starts off fine, but when I tune one interval properly, it puts other intervals out. To do it properly, one has to deliberately make some of the notes slightly sharp or flat so that there's a bit of dissonance in the intervals.

5 divided by 4 (a perfect interval) = 1.25
2 to the power 4/12 (an equally-tempered interval) = 1.25992

That's the maths behind the problem. The equally-tempered inrterval is about 6 cents sharp, which most people would never notice.