Perfect pitch, or absolute pitch (AP), the ability to identify a musical note without a reference tone, often seems like an innate gift. But is it something that can actually be learned? Recent research and dedicated training methods suggest it might be more achievable than previously thought.

Insights from Research

A study titled “Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood” (published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review) explored how adults learn this skill. While accessing the full study details was limited, search results indicate it involved significant training – potentially around 25 hours over 8 weeks. Participants showed substantial improvement, learning to name numerous pitches with high accuracy after the training period. This suggests that dedicated effort can indeed lead to developing absolute pitch judgment, even later in life. Research indicates pitch naming involves distinct cognitive processes, which training likely helps to develop.

A Practical Path: Training Your Pitch Perception

Websites like Perfect Pitch Training offer structured approaches and tools to help develop this ability. Here are some key ideas from their methodology:

1. Start with the Basics: Begin with pitch-matching exercises – hearing a note and singing it back accurately. This builds fundamental tonal memory. Find your vocal range and start matching single notes within it.
2. Understand Note “Flavors”: The training emphasizes recognizing the unique “color” or “flavor” of each of the 12 chromatic notes. For instance, lower notes might feel “darker” and higher notes “lighter.” Focusing on sensing these subtle differences is key. Starting with notes like F♯ and D♯ might be easier for beginners.
3. Structured Exercises: Gradually increase difficulty. Move from single notes to identifying multiple notes played melodically (one after another) or harmonically (together). Expand the number of notes you practice identifying and the pitch range you cover.
4. Utilize Tools: Use ear-training software, pitch tests, and tuners. These tools provide immediate feedback and allow for customized practice (e.g., adjusting acceptable pitch accuracy). Practicing with a musical instrument alongside the software can also be beneficial.
5. Optimize Your Practice:
   • Environment: Find a quiet, comfortable space.
   • Consistency: Practice regularly, even short sessions (15-20 minutes daily) are effective.
   • Equipment: Use the same musical instrument and good quality headphones.
   • Mindset: Be relaxed and positive. Celebrate your progress!

The Takeaway

While perfect pitch might have a reputation as an elusive, inborn talent, evidence suggests it’s a skill that can be developed through structured, dedicated practice. By understanding the unique quality of each note, starting with foundational exercises like pitch matching, and utilizing available training tools consistently, you can train your ear and significantly improve your pitch perception abilities.

We added several keyboard shortcuts that allow you to quickly access some pages of the website.

The full list of the shortcuts is available in our FAQ.

We hope this addition will make your pitch training experience more enjoyable.

And as a reminder, our perfect pitch test already supports the keyboard input to some extent.

Today, I want to write about something that may surprise you.

Training any new skill, including perfect pitch, is an example of neuroplasticity. The term became very popular recently because of the extensive research in neuroscience in the last decades.

One of the latest books on the subject is called “Better in Every Sense” by Norman Farb and Zindel Segal. Although the book is not directly related to music or even learning new skills, I think it’s still very relavant to most of us.

The authors make several claims, and one of their main claims is the following:

If you want to change, you need to pay more attention to your senses: what you see, what you hear, what you feel, what you smell or taste in the present moment.

The authors back up their claims with the decades of the research on people with depression, anxiety and other issues. As to the ways to how to pay more attention to senses they suggest walking, dancing, painting, gardening, cooking, and… drum roll (pun intended)… music!

And this is totally related to our perfect pitch test. Think about it – when you practice with our pitch trainer you engage three of the most important senses:

• you see what is happening on the screen, which may include the built-in tuner.
• you hear the sound played by the computer and possibly your own voice or the sound of your musical instrument.
• you also feel what is happening in your speech apparatus if you sing or in your fingers or lips if you play your instrument while practicing.

Basically, you don’t have any other option, but to be fully present in “now” with your senses engaged. And that, according to the book, helps us a lot psychologically.

I hope, for some people the above information may become an additional motivational factor. Now you know that when you use PerfectPitch.training you don’t only practice your musical ear, but also make yourself more resilient to problems that you face in your life. 🙂

For users who prefer to practice at night, we added a dark mode on our website.

To activate it, please go to “My account” -> “Customize my experience” -> “Enable dark mode”.

We are happy to announce the release of profiles in our perfect pitch test.

What is a “profile”? A profile is simply a combination of current settings in the perfect pitch test.

Let’s say, you want to do two types of exercises:

• pitch recognition exercise, when you need to recognize the notes by ear and click them on the virtual keyboard
• pitch matching exercise, when you sing into the microphone to answer the questions

Up until now, each time you switched exercises, you needed to adjust the settings.

Now, you can simply save each unique combination of settings as a profile. The profiles are stored securely in your account, and you can load them any time later.

Do you want to try it out?

Log in here and continue your perfect pitch practice

Our next update will allow you to save the results of each practice session:

• practice time
• maximum score

This way you will be able to track your progress over time. Stay tuned!

Right now, we are preparing a new update of our perfect pitch test that would allow you to save settings as profiles and load them later. Hopefully, it will be released in the next week or two.

Today, however, I would like to talk about how to better prepare your body for the perfect pitch training. In our tips for perfect pitch development, I mention that your physiological state is crucial for ear training practice.

In our modern society, unfortunately, we often have a lot of bad, unhealthy habits that may prevent us from going into the right state easily. Sedementary lifestyle, junk food, too much screen time, shallow breathing, not enough sleep. It all may seem unrelated to the perfect pitch training, but believe me – if you feel like crap, you won’t be motivated to do any ear training.

Over the last ten years, I read a lot of books on healthy lifestyle. Recently, I published a list of 20 healthy habits that you may want to check. It is available on my other website Eyesight.training. I also give some information on how to use artificial lights so they won’t affect your health. If you work a lot on the computer, I suggest you check this too.

If you visited the page with the pitch matching exercises, you probably remember that I suggest you engage your whole body in the ear training. You also probably noticed the link to Andrew Byrne’s website – The Singing Athlete.

Well, the last weekend I had the priviledge and pleasure to attend the first level of online certification program led by Andrew.

This first level included topics on:

• breathing
• abdominal and neck muscles
• muscles around the larynx
• tongue
• jaw

We did a lot of exercises, including drills with a partner. We also had a chance to see Andrew coach two singers face-to-face with some amazing results.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience which I recommend to everyone.

At the time of this writing Andrew may still have some spots left for the upcoming training in August.

Recently, I received an email that goes something like this:

“Timur, all my life I was told I don’t have a musical ear. I am an absolute beginner in music. What can I do with your perfect pitch trainer?”

For a very long time, the instruction on how to use our Perfect Pitch Test and Ear Training Software was somewhat short. But this changes today!

We are happy to announce that we created a step-by-step ear training program that would help you develop perfect pitch no matter your current level.

The ear training exercises are divided into 2 large groups:

• pitch matching (intonation) exercises
• exercises to develop perfect pitch

The first page contains a detailed instruction on how to use the built-in tuner. It is an essential tool that will help with your ear training.

Up until recently the selector for allowed notes in our Perfect Pitch Test was only available for single note exercises. This selector allows you to choose which notes you want to practice.

We added another option to our exercise selector.

Now you can select which notes you want to practice even in multiple note exercises (2, 3, or 4 notes). Just as with other multiple note exercises you can select how notes will be played: harmonically (simultaneously) or melodically (one after another).

This can be used if you want to practice all notes from a given scale for example. Or even if you want to improve your relative pitch or practice chord recognition. For example, you can select C, E, G and A and choose 3-note exercise. Some combinations will give you a C major chord, some – C minor chord and some will be a completely different thing.

We updated the scoreboard which displays your score when you practice with our Perfect Pitch Trainer with the activity “Test”.

First, me made it bigger.

Next, now the highest score during the current session is stored in the memory. It can be displayed if you go to your account, click on “Customize my experience” and then select “Show the highest score during the current session”.

Now, for example, if you recognize 30 notes in a row correctly but then make a mistake, there will be a window that says “Today’s highest score: 30”. Note that if you change the settings in the perfect pitch trainer this value is reset to 0, since you will be doing another ear training exercise.

And another update. In the past each time you reached 20 correct answers in a row, there was a congratulations window. Now you can either turn it off or adjust the number of correct answers in a row that will trigger it: 10, 20, or 30. Again, to adjust this setting, go to “My Account”, “Customize my experience”.