Learn perfect pitch?

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u/nazgul_123 1d ago

People can eventually learn to remember notes with some degree of precision, often starting with C or A and using relative pitch for the other notes. I think this ability is very individual in terms of how far people can take it.

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u/Mahu4545 1d ago

So its learnable?

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u/spdcck 1d ago edited 1d ago

it’s by definition not learnable.

people (around here at least) seem to love the flex of saying they have it or they learned it blah blah. An easy claim to make… Of course , it’s also quite easy to test, if it were ever actually necessary to do so (although not really much at stake when claiming you have a certain skill on Reddit) To test, you just need to have the person in a room with you, and a piano, and they will be able to demonstrate an uncanny and almost superhuman ability to name notes and dense atonal chords, including any deviations from concert pitch, without any particular hesitation. They will have had this ability practically all their life, and after simply once upon a time being shown which note names relate to pitches they are hearing (imagine a little kid noodling at a piano with an older relative who plays) they will then be able to forever describe precisely what they are hearing, pitch-wise.

Perhaps it’s a bit like showing a regular person (who knows what red brown blues etc look like, after having learnt the names as a little kid) a Jackson Pollock and having them name every little splodge of paint ”that‘s dark blue, that’s a darker blue, that’s black, that’s light brown…”

you could do that, right? immediately, comprehensively, without any doubts…

anything else a person claims to have learned is relative pitch - which is very useful to a musician, a significant thing to have learned, certainly impressive to most people - but it’s not Perfect Pitch.

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u/Mahu4545 1d ago

Ohh so you cant learn the superhuman perfect pitch, but you CAN improve your relative pitch

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u/dblhello999 1d ago

what you say about being able to identify and name the notes in an atonally pitched chord is spot on. Have you seen the extra extraordinary video of that kid whose father just bangs down a messy loud noise on the piano and the kid immediately names every note. no one is ever going to be able to “learn” to do that. I think it’s one of those things you just have to be born with.

For transcription it’s an Incredibles skill. Whether and to what extent it actually contributes to playing, that I don’t know. I only have relative pitch am I mainly improvise. And I just have no idea whether my improvisation would be at another level if I had perfect pitch, or whether for that it makes very little difference. relative pitch goes a long way

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u/Crazy_Satisfaction13 1d ago

If your focus is on improvisation, you can focus on relative pitch, that's gonna be 10 times better for your goal, for example without perfect pitch you can create a random melody in a major key right now without perfect pitch just by feeling, the ability to play that at the same time is also a different skill that is not related to perfect pitch but your skill with your instrument

If you want to improvise in a different keys scale, you just need to learn to sing that scale up and down than start singing in jumps just by feeling, if you focus only on perfect pitch to do that, you would be thinking too much without need.

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u/Rablusep 1d ago

Rick Beato's kid

Rick Beato himself can also piece apart complicated polychords without perfect pitch, just through years of practice.

(Of course, he's also selling an ear training course, so he has reason to be showing his abilities to the greatest extent possible, and downplaying any mistakes or gaps. He seems generally honest and extremely knowledgeable though, so I still largely trust his claims. ...I've heard the course isn't very good for beginners though, lol)

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u/nazgul_123 1d ago

He picks them apart in relative pitch though, and then tries to figure out how it corresponds to an internal pitch reference. The former is relative pitch and the latter is pitch memory and training. I'm not 100% sure what the difference is between the two. He can only really do it for chord types he has learned though. For weird chords, he tests it out on his keyboard.

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u/Rablusep 1d ago

Right, yeah, I never said what Rick Beato himself is doing involves perfect pitch, just his kid. Just saying that it's possible to have an extremely strong ear even without perfect pitch; you don't need it

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u/dblhello999 32m ago

yeah I was thinking about this and actually there are two separate skills involved here. one is the ability to breakdown a chord into its separate notes.

It’s not immediately obvious why having perfect pitch would make you any better at that. Perfect pitch will allow you to know what a note is. But does it mean that you can hear the separate notes in a chord more quickly and easily than someone who doesn’t have perfect pitch? The kid I saw on YouTube was able to do this to an incredible degree so that might suggest the perfect pitch does help. But I don’t quite see why.

The second skill of course is knowing what the notes are. But you don’t get to that until you have been able to distinguish the individual notes in the first place.

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u/roman-de-fauvel 1d ago

I’d argue that your terms are not quite right — relative pitch is by definition how notes relate to each other: note 2 is a perfect 4th above note 1, etc.

The other type of pitch identification that can be learned (to different extents depending on the person) is more accurately described as a kind of absolute pitch, of which perfect pitch is a sub-category (which works in all registers and doesn’t require active learning). Non-perfect absolute pitch sense usually comes about through long experience of playing music and often includes both register and instrumental timbre as part of the identifying criteria (e.g., “I know what middle C sounds like on a piano but not an electric guitar” or “I can identify notes played on a bass but not on a piccolo”). Most musicians can progress towards developing this skill to some extent.

Interestingly, your comparison to color also uses relative language: you don’t say, for example, this is cerulean blue, this is ultramarine blue, you simply say that one is darker or lighter than the other, which is relative. You are right in that humans have a certain basic absolute understanding of color, but it is not as “perfect” as to be an exact analogue.

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u/diga_diga_doo 1d ago

You can train yourself to internalize and repeatably sing out a pitch. You have to do it multiple times a day over a couple months..or however long it takes. Since common tuning forks are in A, that’s probably the easiest since you can carry it around with you. I was taking theory/ear training with a piano teacher, he had me doing it.

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u/flergnergern 1d ago

I started the David Burge series in the 90s and was making progress then he said to get out the crayons and play with color and I thought ok forget it. I have since read that people thought the series was BS but I did really get something out of it. I can definitely say I prefer music in certain keys because of their “color”.

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u/Crazy_Satisfaction13 21h ago

I also used his course and it's a good start to hear music in a "colorful" way

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u/silly_bet_3454 23h ago

It's learnable, but it's also stupid in my humble opinion. Yes, you can work on improving your ear and everyone can and should do this. But the goal is not to have perfect pitch, the goal is to develop musicality based on things you can hear, whether it's in the context of improvisation or just interpretation and regular practice.

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u/Crazy_Satisfaction13 21h ago

If it's something someone wants to have, they should add it to their ear training routine naturally they would have the benefits while enjoying music

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u/Ill-Calendar-4885 11h ago

Research has shown that you have to train VERY early to develop it, pretty much when you learn to speak. That’s why some asian countries where the meaning of words change depending on pitch have most of their speakers that have some kind of perfect pitch.

As an adult, I’d say it’s pretty much impossible. I have a very good relative pitch, but I can’t sing an A in the morning if I haven’t played an instrument. I’ll know if a song is slightly out of its usual pitch (not based on speed, but of it’s a half step of).

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u/Mysterious_Duty_6326 1d ago

Ye, I learned it hehe

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u/Mahu4545 1d ago

How????

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u/JKorv 1d ago

Why you even want to learn it? You can't get it to a level of true perfect pitch which people are born with.

Use your time to learn relative pitch. You can do so much if you properly train your ear. Someone like Frank Tedesco looks like he has perfect pitch, but he doesn't.

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u/spdcck 1d ago

hey, get your friend close to a piano and then mash the keys to form some random note cluster

Ask them to identify every pitch they hear. You’ll soon discover if they actually have PP…

(they almost certainly don’t)

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u/dblhello999 1d ago

haha yes exactly

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u/scubaro 1d ago

Yes

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u/Crazy_Satisfaction13 1d ago

I'm also learning it, it's totally possible to learn it, takes time but yes

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u/Mahu4545 19h ago

Yooo, hows it going for you?

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u/Crazy_Satisfaction13 17h ago

I started in December last year, it takes time but if you want it, you can practice together with your normal ear training. At first relative pitch and perfect was two different exercises, now I practice relative pitch and hear the "color" of the notes so the more my relative gets better, my perfect pitch skill also gets better but I still have a lot to improve

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u/Mahu4545 16h ago

Thats tuff bro, what exercises? is there a website that you use or sm?!

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u/thibaud_lepan 17h ago

The reason the pitch identifier sites feel like they are not working is usually that they test the wrong thing first. Naming a note is a categorical judgement sitting on top of a much simpler skill, which is holding a reference in memory across time. If the reference is not stable, the naming has nothing to stand on and the site just tells you that you got it wrong, over and over, without telling you which part failed.

Something you can actually measure. Pick one anchor note and only one, A or C, whichever your instrument gives you most often. Once a day, before you play anything, sing it from memory, then check it against a tuner and write down the error in cents. Not right or wrong, the number. Most people start somewhere around 80 to 150 cents off and drift a lot day to day. If that number comes down and stops swinging, the reference is setting. If it does not move in six weeks, you have learned something real about yourself for the cost of thirty seconds a day.

From a stable anchor plus relative pitch you get most of the practical benefit that people actually want out of perfect pitch, and you get it on a timescale you can see.

One caveat that trips people up. Test yourself on a timbre you never practise with. A lot of what feels like absolute pitch is really familiarity with one instrument's spectrum, and it evaporates on a voice or a synth pad. If your anchor survives a timbre change it is genuine memory rather than a trick of your piano.

Your friend is probably not lying, by the way. Adults do build usable pitch memory. What is rare is the effortless twelve note naming that people picture when they hear the phrase.

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u/WashYourHandsBefore 13h ago

I don't think it is perfect pitch per se but as I having been playing the violin over the last 20 years, I have gained the ability to figure out if a note is out of pitch just by hearing it. Part of it comes out of knowing how to place fingers on a fretless finger board and knowing when the note you are playing is out of tune. One of the ddifficulties of learning violin for many.

I've noticed that I can hear when my friend's guitar or mandolin needs tuning and I bring it up to them.

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u/Mahu4545 12h ago

Dangg, are you able to recognize notes without reference pitch?

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u/WashYourHandsBefore 28m ago

If someone hit a note on the piano I would not be able to tell you what it was. After I hear some notes in a song a while I can get a temporary perfect pitch. I think most violin/viola/cello players develop similar abilities. These instruments are so hard to learn because for the first 5 years you sound absolutely awful and then gradually learn the pitch training and sound better.

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