Has The World Changed Tune... Literally?!

I have a challenge that I really need your help with! The outcome could be very straightforward in that I have simply lost a musical gift from my childhood, which is highly likely and what I have assumed for some time, but there is a slither of a chance that this is not the case, so I need to share this story. Because the alternative is profound... The World could have changed tune over the last 35 years!

I'll explain to you...

When I was just three, I vividly remember running to our piano, eager to start learning to play. My musically inclined parents supported my interest, and by the time I was around four or five, my piano teacher suggested I might have Perfect Pitch. That meant I could identify musical notes, like Middle C, just by hearing them, or I could accurately hum the correct note if asked. Perfect Pitch is reasonably uncommon but not rare, evidenced by the fact that in my secondary school class, another student had the same gift.

Music featured significantly for me in school. I played the oboe and the church organ, sang in the choir, and played in the school orchestra. I even reached grade 8 in the oboe. But after school, I pretty much stopped playing music and gave it up completely after university.

Years later, I wanted to reconnect with music, so my then-husband gifted me a guitar. I had to relearn reading musical manuscripts and discovered I couldn't pitch notes accurately anymore. This was a big change from my younger years when my Perfect Pitch was so reliable that the physics department at my University wanted to study it. But after 35 years away from music, it wasn't surprising I'd lost this ability.

Learning guitar was tough, especially without my Perfect Pitch. I struggled with playing correctly, which was frustrating, mostly because I couldn’t get over the fact that the note I expected to hear, say a Middle C was not the same as what I was hearing. I ended up being too challenged by the guitar, and feeling despondent and something of a failure, I put it down and gave up music for a couple more years. 

Fast forward to the last few months, and despite the challenges with the guitar, I was determined to give it another go to grow myself musically again. I had promised to teach myself one day to play the flute after I sold my old Oboe. So, l sourced a flute and started lessons, only to face the same difficulties about not hearing the notes at the same pitch I expected them to be at. 

However, I persevered, I loved the flute, and I knew that I had to overcome this challenge and “re-learn” how to hear pitch. I determinedly worked through the online flute lessons one by one, making myself push through the frustration. 

Then one day, the world stopped spinning for a few moments. An example lesson was being demonstrated on this online “learn to play the flute” app I was following. A score of music was on the screen, a trumpet was playing, and a Middle C was a Middle C as I knew it from 35 years ago. Everything sounded right again, and I experienced waves of unbelievable relief flowing through my body. 

Then my mind went into overdrive…!

If this was an old recording of a piece of music played years ago, had the world changed pitch and not my ears?! I wanted to prove this one way or another, and at Christmas, I asked my dad if we still had the old tuning forks he had to tune our piano with from 35 years ago. A couple of weeks ago, he found the time to take a good look for them, and he searched the house from top to bottom, but he has failed to find them. 

So, now I am reaching out to you, the reader. Does anyone have a tuning fork from the 1980s tucked away in a drawer gathering dust? I am longing to know if the world has changed tune. Is a Middle C from the 1980s the same as a Middle C today? Or is there another way you can think of to verify this conundrum? If I am right and my ears have not been deceiving me, then surely the potential implications for science are profound, are they not? 

Or perhaps more simply, and more likely, I have lost my Perfect Pitch, and this piece of music I heard at what appeared to be the “right pitch" for my ears that soothed my soul was an error in recording or uploading and I either need to resign myself to the percussion section of the world of instruments or give up trying to reengage with playing music altogether. 

Please help me if you can!!!