A friend of mine, a professor of music composition at Brigham Young University, has the gift of perfect pitch. I asked him if he ever found uses for his talent outside the world of music.
“See that old clunker I drive?” he said, nodding toward his car. “The speedometer is broken, so I gauge my speed by a humming sound in the rear of the car. If the hum is E-flat, I’m going about 25 miles an hour. If it goes up to G, I’m doing 40. And I know I’ll never get a ticket if I don’t go over a B-flat.”
Lawrence, Gary C. “Campus Comedy.” Reader’s Digest, Dec. 1983, pp. 139–40.