Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

I suppose I have perfect pitch, in that I can more often than not:<p><pre><code> * aurally identify key signatures * aurally identify chords * sing a given note on command </code></pre> It wasn&#x27;t until I was into my early twenties that I could do this. For me, the single biggest stepping stone was building the connection between what I could hear in my head from a song that I remember clearly with the underlying music theory.<p>Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked:<p><pre><code> * Pink Floyd&#x27;s &quot;Comfortably Numb&quot; is in B minor * The famous motif in Beethoven&#x27;s 5th is in C minor * Blues Traveller&#x27;s &quot;Hook&quot; is in A * Regina Spektor&#x27;s &quot;Eet&quot; is in D-flat * Nirvana&#x27;s &quot;Smells Like Teen Spirit&quot; is F minor * etc. </code></pre> Then, make connections based upon that. Want to sing a B? Just recall the opening, sustained keyboard chord in &quot;Comfortably Numb&quot;. Huh, The Beatles &quot;Across The Universe&quot; sounds tonally like &quot;Eet&quot; - I guess it is also in D-flat.<p>A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.

Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :)<p>A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%.<p>It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!<p>Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3758&#x2F;s13414-024-02936-0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3758&#x2F;s13414-024-02936-0</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;wK6gbKC90Ps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;wK6gbKC90Ps</a>

I feel like this article is more of a &quot;Here&#x27;s all the things I think about perfect pitch and my journey with music&quot;<p>Maybe I took the title too literally.<p>As someone who wants to gain perfect pitch (and still feels mildly distant from this ability) one thing I can say has been the most helpful:<p>* Get a string instrument<p>* Strum the strings<p>* Try to tune the first string by ear<p>* Once you think you have it, check it against a chromatic tuner.<p>This way will you see how progressively your feeling of &quot;in tune&quot; can be measured in hertz.<p>I can get pretty pretty close (within about 5hz).<p>I used to have competitions with my children on who could get the note closest without a tuner. One of my kids got pretty good where they could almost nail it within 1 hz. It made things fun and a little less &quot;maintenance&quot;.<p>The best way I can describe the process is you have a sensitivity to a threshold of being in tune. I hear the note but there is something inside myself, it almost feels like anxiousness that kinda peaks right before I hit the note and then stops when I &quot;feel&quot; I&#x27;ve hit that note I&#x27;m aiming for. As I&#x27;ve said, I can get within about 5hz which to a musician they can probably notice it is off but for the average ear, it feels muddy but close.<p>Long story short, practice with a tuner and within a year you&#x27;ll surprise yourself.

&gt; By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch… for piano only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying microtuning differences;<p>I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch.<p>&gt; Don’t learn a non-C instrument<p>I would recommend against this because it severely limits your options for instruments to play.

Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages.<p>As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both &quot;hashi&quot; but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn&#x27;t hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn&#x27;t there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn&#x27;t bother me too much.<p>One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn&#x27;t feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It&#x27;s a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.<p>Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I&#x27;m convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.

I could write a similar article &quot;lose perfect pitch in 15 years&quot;.<p>My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440.<p>And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it — tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.

Careful what you wish for.<p>• Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I&#x27;ve read of vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts.<p>• Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I&#x27;ve read of people who had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or 60s because their perfect pitch was now off and everything sounded wrong to them.

I had &quot;temporarily perfect&quot; pitch when I was younger, especially when I was regularly playing the cello. I could pick up my cello and tune it without a reference, and I could recognize a note or key that was being played. I kind of took it for granted.<p>Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn&#x27;t have one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It&#x27;s not something that I&#x27;m concerned about practicing or maintaining. I&#x27;m a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing.<p>I wonder if there&#x27;s a &quot;spectrum&quot; of pitch ability, and also a spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.

It should be noted that a lot of people mistake relative pitch for perfect pitch.<p>Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play <i>one random</i> note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it.<p>Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a tritone versus a perfect fifth for example.<p>You&#x27;ll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they possess perfect pitch when it&#x27;s almost invariably relative pitch.

Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good relative pitch is just about as good in practice, and absolute pitch has the downside that, unlike relative pitch, people tend to lose their absolute pitch as they get older. Which then means they end up having to learn relative pitch skills, anyway. That could be a challenging thing to have to do late in your musical career.

OT: what ever happened to AB repeat?<p>I remember that most of my CD players, and my MP3 players, and I think my iPods had AB repeat. For those who have not used a player with AB repeat, what it did was let you mark two points on a song (&quot;A&quot; and &quot;B&quot;) and then it would loop the section between those two points.<p>It was great if you were trying to transcribe a song or figure out how to play it on your instrument. You could put a couple chords or a section of the melody on AB repeat until you got it and then move on.<p>The major streaming players don&#x27;t seem to have this. Nor does Apple&#x27;s Music player when playing local files.<p>You can download a song (if your streaming service supports it) or record it (if downloads are not supported) and then open it in GarageBand or something similar which should have a way to repeat a section.<p>That works but is a bit of a hassle, and sometimes you might want to try to figure out a song when you aren&#x27;t at your computer.

Or you could just take depakote[0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3848041&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3848041&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t have perfect pitch, but I basically have a 440Hz sine embedded in my brain which I can use for tuning stuff and figure out the rest through relative pitch. Perfect pitch sounds actually extremely distracting as a listener...

20% to 30% of autistic people seem to have perfect pitch [1, 2].<p>Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic people (35) [3].<p>I&#x27;m one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a kid).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AutisticWithADHD&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1g7fbhp&#x2F;how_many_of_you_have_perfectabsolute_pitch&#x2F;?rdt=62255" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AutisticWithADHD&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1g7fbhp&#x2F;h...</a> - not scientific but given that it normally is 1 in 2000 at best, this is way too high.<p>[2] More sources talk about it, but can&#x27;t seem to find it right now. I&#x27;m pretty sure that [3] has some sources, but don&#x27;t want to do the research.<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3364198&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3364198&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve yet to find a use for perfect pitch other than it&#x27;s a cool parlor trick. I&#x27;m not a 100% perfect as I don&#x27;t really practice the skill, and I have a hard time separating my relative pitch from absolute pitch. Although from time to time when the band looks at you and asks what key was that in it&#x27;s fun to have an answer.<p>Instead, I think interval identification is the most useful skill. Hearing two notes after each other and being able to name the interval is relevant to every genre of music and live performance, so it can be played back on whatever instrument is in front of you.<p>The next most useful skill (in my opinion) is chord decomposition: hearing a chord and being able to identify the component notes, relative to the tonic. Diads are useful enough for guitar players&#x2F;bassists, but triads are super useful for piano players, vocalists, or other polyphonic instruments.

The thing that really accelerated my pitch learning was choral singing (in particular, with a serious classically-oriented choir at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago). If you’re singing the notes, they really get internalized. At the peak of my skills, I was able to compose a fully harmonized melody on a walk and then play it on piano when I got home.

This is more common than people thought. I don&#x27;t remember who said it but most people can get pretty close to the first note of All Star - Smash Mouth for example.<p>Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.

&gt; Your ears contain millions of tiny fine hairs of varying lengths which each vibrate in response to some set of frequencies, making them essentially analog Fourier Transform devices. And then, your brain then does something stupidly complicated to this set of clean inputs, so that you can instantly tell whose voice is whose in a multi-speaker environment, and so that you can detect the slightest tremor in somebody’s voice that might clue you in on their mental state as they say those words. We undergo decades of musical training so that we can train our brains to unwind all of this complicated processing and extract pure tones from this jumble of sound.<p>i always wondered why we dont seem to have developed ML models that can do this yet. its not like the synthetic data is hard to generate, if data limitations are the excuse.

I grew up thinking I had perfect pitch, after a youth choir director identified it and realized I could name all the notes from a random key played on the piano.<p>Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a much lower or higher register.<p>Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first six notes of a melody at a time. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com&#x2F;</a> New songs are still being added daily. Enjoy!

Musical notes are rarely (never?) a single frequency waveform - there are layers of ordered harmonics. Some peoples versions of perfect pitch often seem to have some reliance upon the particular harmonic structures that they&#x27;ve trained their ear to, e.g. a particular instrument.<p>And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner.<p>Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and&#x2F;or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.

You&#x27;ve had musical training since you were 5? And you say<p>&quot;Sometime when I was ~12 years old, I remember surprising my clarinet teacher by correctly repeating some random notes that he played. He told me I had perfect pitch, but I didn’t think so, because I couldn’t name notes for any instrument other than the clarinet.&quot;<p>Okay, so then this doesn&#x27;t seem like an article written for the average musician (person).

The perfect pitch skill I admire the most is being able to count cycles&#x2F;recognize&#x2F;sing pitches by frequency and&#x2F;or sing various types of temperament.<p>Recently I&#x27;ve become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant sound. It&#x27;s also interesting to hear (and play) baroque instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.

I&#x27;ve been doing directed ear training online for several years now - if you think you have perfect pitch, you can actually test it at tonedear.com (I don&#x27;t). I&#x27;ve been working instead on the first lesson, interval training. It plays two tones next to each other and you&#x27;re supposed to identify if they&#x27;re a major third, perfect fifth, octave, etc. I&#x27;ve been doing it for over two years and I&#x27;ve definitely gotten better, although I&#x27;m still not even at 100% at interval recognition.

I accidentally trained myself by playing with SimTunes &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SimTunes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SimTunes</a>&gt; a lot as a kid. But I think it trained me to be slightly flat. Electronically perfect notes sound wrong, and I tune things down when that&#x27;s an option. I wish I cared enough to try running SimTunes today and see if A was 440 Hz or not.

Beato has a course for it. He says he used to have it but it has drifted over time. He also claims his young daughter has it now.

I have perfect pitch–your color analogy is exactly how I describe my bewilderment that it isn’t the default state for humans.

I have some perfect pitch due to having piano training for 2 years when I was around 8, started playing tenor saxophone 2 years ago, because of perfect pitch I had to learn the instrument as a concert pitch instrument instead of a Bb one, because thinking about a C but hearing a Bb will drive me crazy.

perfect pitch is rare. it isn’t trainable. most people deep in music know this. u drop a ball on the piano and it hits 6 notes and the person tells u the pitches. you break glass on the ground and they tell you those pitches too. Meanwhile people with trained pitch can do somewhat decently with enough training and certainly someone playing an instrument long enough will just know which notes are being played on that instrument but it isn’t the same thing. absolute pitch is RNG even among music students.

I don&#x27;t have perfect pitch. But I can open a tuner app and whistle an A, based on hearing (in my head) a chamber orchestra playing the opening bar of Bach&#x27;s A minor concerto.

Someone introduce the author to microtunings. there is a whole - much more harmonic - world out there. Equal temperment is a harmonic disaster and it is time to end it. (there are advantages to equal temperment but harmony is lost)

&gt; <i>I learned perfect pitch as an adult.</i><p>Better learn to play an instrument; I don&#x27;t know what a perfect pitch would be good for.

I have...good pitch? If you play notes on a piano I will guess right significantly more often than I could by chance, and my misses will often be one note away. Not perfect pitch, and not useful in any event.

It&#x27;s incorrect to say that Perfect Pitch means you can pick out any of the 12 tones commonly used in western music. It doesn&#x27;t mean that; that can only come with training.<p>The core ability with perfect pitch is to remember a note persistent over many months or years. If you know a song well, and you have perfect pitch, you will almost always sing it in the correct pitch. Not within a semitone; within a percent, enough that if you were singing with the recording, you would not be out of tune.<p>There is overwhelming evidence that this ability is either genetic or acquired at a very early age. It&#x27;s a difference between people like the way you can fold your tongue or move your thumb. It&#x27;s innate.<p>someone with musical training can use this skill to identify the 12 tones of western music, but that&#x27;s frankly just a party trick built on the core capability.<p>Here&#x27;s the concrete example. My son has perfect pitch. I didn&#x27;t know this until we were watching a Beatles movie, I think A Hard Day&#x27;s night, and he asked why the instruments Were Out Of Tune. Later I played the record and compared it with the video, and they were off by less than a quarter tone. The Beatles another musicians in the &#x27;60s often used very speed to subtly change the tone and tempo and many Beatles Tunes are at a pitch that lies between the standard a 440 12 lb scale

As expected, another one of the many that conflates well trained relative pitch with absolute.<p><i>Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days.</i><p>All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author, and that is ofc commendable.<p>However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils down to at the very least being able to <i>immediately</i> [1] recognize the Hz aka note-name of <i>any</i> pitch-producing entity (keyboard&#x2F;string&#x2F;woodwind&#x2F;brass instruments, toothbrush, drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.) with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions like being able to identify every single note of a specific cluster and there&#x27;s variability of maximum number of notes each AP possessor is able to distinguish.<p>Also, short of old age and intoxication&#x2F;sickness, the distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days.<p>All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes even the notorious Valproate study [2].<p>I&#x27;m not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific interest and I get the appeal of it being &#x27;magical&#x27; however one can&#x27;t help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected.<p>But even then, the article unintentionally presents a &#x27;happy-ending&#x27; type of story; the author most likely definitely did not obtain AP ability but what they&#x27;re describing is exactly what everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive for, and I&#x27;d wager there are many studying musicians that haven&#x27;t developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and would greatly benefit from). Let&#x27;s just don&#x27;t perpetuate elitist obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP possessor superiority comes from.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7OefC0i.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7OefC0i.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3848041&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3848041&#x2F;</a>

I am into telesales and I was thinking it has something to take with sales pitch lol

&gt; Don’t learn a non-C instrument<p>I didn’t expect that but in hindsight it makes sense.

Related: Ayako Sakakibara et al.: A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of training with the ‘chord identification method’<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;0305735612463948" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;0305735612463948</a><p>Abstract TL;DR: Results suggest that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through intentional training.

love to see someone I went to high school with on HN&#x27;s front page :)

As someone clinically tone deaf (and no desire to change), this comments section is wild. Y’all experience sound very differently than me.

Not a single Rick Beato mention? Come on guys you’re losing out on a massive circlejerk opportunity!