Didn't read all the posts here, but thought I might be able to contribute.
As my username implies I'm very musical, in fact music technology is one of those special interests I can happily spend half a day indulging.
At an early age my piano teachers and eventually family found out I had perfect pitch, which means I can hear a note and know instantly what it is, without any sort of reference. There are different degrees of this, from what I'm told. Some people are better at recognizing pitches from certain instruments, but have difficulty recognizing pitches from other instruments. Some people have trouble with chords (multiple notes at once), but can do single notes just fine. For me, there is little distinction. Chords are definitely harder, but provided the chords are familiar and easy to hear, I can normally work out exactly what the notes are and what instrument is playing which notes. I'm not sure if it was the training growing up, or if it is indeed part of my talent. I attribute it to both. It's a cool party trick especially when I was in college with a bunch of music majors who tried to trick me by playing very difficult chords.
I also use this talent a lot when transcribing things, or when doing sound design. Because I can listen with keen attention to detail, I can make out pretty quickly how something might be made, or at least hypothesize about it and go from there. I can't say I'm the best of everyone I know, but I think I'm pretty good. And I definitely have my niche areas of keenest exploration.
My tactile memory is pretty good, which is a good thing because my regular memory sucks. Simply put, if you tell me chord names, or tell me notes, I will never remember them unless I can either hear them audibly, or can play them on the keyboard. It's sort of a feedback loop with my synesthesia, which has this weird way of linking tactile and audible cues. If I can feel the chord out, so to speak, I can remember it well. When I learn new material, I have to play it as I learn it, trying to memorize it without playing is no good.
There are other texture sensitivities which I have that aren't completely musical. That's not really a talent, it's more just a sensitivity which I can sometimes use to help me draw on certain emotions or the like.
Whether I have useless superpowers or not, I don't really know. I've certainly done some gigs and made a fair bit of money, so as a musician my aural talents help me a lot. I've thought about being a piano tuner. I've thought about being a mixing engineer either for sound recording or music production. I've thought about trying to work at a synthesizer manufacturing company like Roland, Yamaha, etc. working on sound design. None of it has really happened or started to happen.
For one thing I've decided that recording engineer wouldn't be my primary choice, as I am not as adept with the technicalities of recording and the subtleties one has to be attuned to with the fine art of mixing and the like. Ironic I know, given how I just said my hearing is well attuned and all that, but subtle changes when a lot of variables are involved are really hard for me to get accustomed to, partly because of concentration issues and partly because I've grown to like things that a lot of other professionals seem to scoff at. I could probably get in the field, but I feel like my abilities may lie elsewhere.
Piano tuning I think I could fair better with since my pitch sensitivity is pretty sharp, and I've always liked the thought of taking an instrument that sounded bad and making it substantially better. I've watched videos on Youtube about piano tuning, and about the theory of why things are done the way they are, and surprisingly I do get a lot of it. So, I think if I were to actually do some training with a mentor, I would catch on really quickly. I'd just want to be sure I was working with someone who didn't just copy his teacher's methods. Because it's sort of a special interest, generic procedure isn't enough; I'd want, at least to an extent, to learn about the theory of it, the rhyme and reason behind it. Similarly to perhaps how someone with a special interest in languages would want to know the roots of the new words they learn, and not simply their everyday definition and spelling in English.
So yeah, I really don't know. Just thought I'd throw my talents out here.
