Do you believe that lack of perfect pitch should be recognized as a disability? Do you believe that lack of perfect pitch should prevent someone from certain licensed professions? Do you believe that lack of perfect pitch is a safety concern in some circumstances?
Because the answer is "yes" for colorblindness. It's just a wildly overstated comparison. I mean, even tone-deaf people don't experience the kind of difficulties that people with colorblindness experience. You could just say that I could never entirely understand the benefits of having perfect pitch since I don't have it, and maybe that would be true, but I have literally never experienced a professional musical situation where I felt or thought, "Oh man, if only I had perfect pitch - I would have succeeded where I just failed." And this includes directing gigs, accompanying gigs, performance gigs, etc.
I'm occasionally wistful I don't have synesthesia just because that sounds actually expansive, but I don't pine for perfect pitch at all.
Synesthesia is weird and can be pretty specific. I have it - I "hear" flavors, although it's more about tones than pitches (think drums and cymbals rather than pianos). And part of it is about shape. Flavors change over exposure time, just as a musical note changes volume and harmonic content over its duration. It's almost impossible to explain.
The comparison to colorblindness isn't precise: colorblind people don't have relative color perception. In terms of information content, over an entire song the information encoded in the scale is very small compared to the information encoded in the relative pitches of notes (in fact the ratio goes to 0 for long music). A grayscale image contains significantly less information, essentially a 2D chrominance array; the ratio of information is roughly constant and does not diminish for large images, or say a series of images (e.g. a grayscale movie). It would be more like applying unknown hue rotations [1] each time you look at an image.
As a colorblind person with synesthesia (but I don’t play any instruments), I can say it is absolutely expansive. I experience sounds partially as sight; I have ‘seen’ many shades I would never be able to distinguish in the real world. I believe it works the other way as well, allowing me to notice more sounds than others because I can visually distinguish them, and then listen for differences
Because the answer is "yes" for colorblindness. It's just a wildly overstated comparison. I mean, even tone-deaf people don't experience the kind of difficulties that people with colorblindness experience. You could just say that I could never entirely understand the benefits of having perfect pitch since I don't have it, and maybe that would be true, but I have literally never experienced a professional musical situation where I felt or thought, "Oh man, if only I had perfect pitch - I would have succeeded where I just failed." And this includes directing gigs, accompanying gigs, performance gigs, etc.
I'm occasionally wistful I don't have synesthesia just because that sounds actually expansive, but I don't pine for perfect pitch at all.