As you know, we have an innate sense of musicality and we can sense when certain tones are off key and wrong. Im curious to what degree can we sense it? Is there a limit of deviation from the correct pitch where we can’t recognize that the note is off pitch anymore and it starts sounding normal?
In: 6
If by ‘wrong or off key’ you mean hearing whether a note is out of tune, the typical limit is quite small even to an untrained ear.
Musical tone is a logarithmic scale with each octave being a halving of the sound frequency. In western scales there are 12 tones between octaves with each tone having 100 cents. Normal adults are able to recognize pitch differences of as small as 25 cents very reliably. One trained professional demonstrated the ability to tell the difference in tone quality with a variation of 5-6 cents. Some tone deaf adults could not tell the difference between notes that were a whole tone or more (over 100 cents) apart!
Wikipedia link for [cent (music)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music)#Human_perception)
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