This is interesting. (In one of those videos above, Rick Beato mentioned that exposing very young kids to complex music could help them develop perfect pitch.)
Lately I’ve been listening to microtonal music to try to improve my ability to distinguish pitches: Tone-Deafness Test and Microtonal Music
It would help with differentiating phonemes I guess.
Hi all,
My first language was Greek and I can sing in Greek and speak the language as well.
English was my second language actually.
I have extremely good relative pitch and can hold a tune very well and have a very good sense of rhythm also.
I find that rhymes facilitate amplifying a particular note in one’s memory.
Stefos
Worth adding this new content to an old thread:
This video is interesting, especially quasi absolute pitch. It makes me glad that I don’t have perfect pitch.
Just brainstorming out loud, but I wonder if perfect pitch could be improved by regularly playing each of the 12 pitches with a different timbre. The brain might become used to associating a pitch with something that the brain can latch onto more easily (timbre). 
Example: I don’t know off the top of my head what a G♯ sounds like, but I know what a clarinet sounds like. The clarinet’s tone quality would be the “mnemonic image”.
I don’t know if it would work, but I’m thinking of something similar to how relative intervals can be trained by relating them to parts of songs — example: major 7th is the interval between the 1st and 3rd notes of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. If you want to find the M7 interval without an instrument, you can sing just those two notes of the song. Timbre would be a little different, but it might be worth trying.
Here’s a related article I saw this morning:
They found that in both groups, the FFR—which provides a snapshot of the integrity of a person’s ability to process sounds—predicted people’s performance on pitch identification better than any metric previously used in studies of perfect pitch, including musical training.
Participants also tended to be better at naming notes played on a piano as compared to the computer-generated sine tones: Those with perfect pitch averaged 98% accuracy on piano and 77% for sine tones, while those without averaged 29% accuracy on piano and 25% for sine tones.
According to UChicago doctoral student John Veillette, who was also a co-author on the paper, this suggests that timbres—which are conferred by upper harmonics in sound frequencies and give instruments their unique, familiar rings—play an important role in pitch recognition.
Reis said that implies that experience is probably involved in pitch recognition, since even people with self-reported perfect pitch weren’t “perfect” when the notes were produced in an unfamiliar way.
Here’s an amazing demonstration of perfect pitch (Jacob Collier).
Artigo interessante.
Particularmente, não possuo ouvido absoluto, mas consigo imaginar notas e acordes que são familiares no violão. Talvez seria possível (De alguma forma (eu não consegui desenvolver ainda) Relacionar o som de cada nota e suas oitavas (Acima e abaixo) Com alguma coisa muito especifica e quando fosse necessário trazer de volta a memória, assim como faço quando tento imaginar uma nota?
It seems like anything that is very difficult to do like learning perfect pitch as an adult will have naysayers saying it’s impossible, even when there are people that have already proved it possible. Is there already a “law” for this phenomenon?
I am developing a methodology for developing perfect pitch. The core features will be facilitating practice throughout as much of the day as possible, and making the jumps in difficulty between training exercises extremely tiny.
If you can learn to discriminate between two different notes, then you can learn to discriminate between three. You can learn to discriminate between three notes played on two different instruments. You can learn to discriminate between three notes played at two different octaves, etc…
Keep going until you can recognize every note on a wide variety of instruments.
From my own experience, even without achieving perfect pitch the practice itself improves all-around audio perception and memory.
I really hate when people say “It’s impossible for adults to learn X” or “But if you’re not naturally talented it’s useless”.
Because it discourages people to try and learn new things. (Or it’s used as an excuse).
For most activities, you can progress a lot and have a lot of fun, even if you’re not naturally talented for it, even if you didn’t start early, and even if you are never going to be the best at it.
As somebody with really bad ear, I find perfect pitch fascinating, but not the most worthwhile thing to work on (more like a party trick). If your goal is to play music for fun, with others, then it’s much more useful to develop relative pitch.
Besides, do you really want to hear all the wrong notes people play/sing? No, no you don’t 
(painful memories of music lessons in primary school with 30 kids playing the recorder “in unisson”).
As somebody with really bad ear, I find perfect pitch fascinating, but not the most worthwhile thing to work on (more like a party trick). If your goal is to play music for fun, with others, then it’s much more useful to develop relative pitch .
People with perfect pitch have better relative pitch and better dictation ability: https://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JAS004097.pdf
https://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2010_128_890-893.pdf
That it gives an advantage is undeniable. It doesn’t mean it’s necessary and it doesn’t mean that working at acquiring it in priority makes the most sense, especially given the amount of effort it requires.
That it gives an advantage is undeniable. It doesn’t mean it’s necessary and it doesn’t mean that working at acquiring it in priority makes the most sense, especially given the amount of effort it requires.
I don’t think anyone would say that it’s necessary. Just saying that it might be possible is controversial for some reason. As far as what is a priority, well that’s for each person to decide based on what their goals and values are.
Some people may just want the challenge or are curious. Some people may want a deeper, working knowledge of something that is at the core of music and audio perception. It may be worthwhile for them to invest the effort in addition to relative pitch training.
My point was that relative pitch is more useful and easier to acquire. So it’s probably a better goal for most people.
Like you could follow the training plan of a pro athlete to get in shape, or just do sports in moderation. One is more likely than the other to leave you frustrated and give up.
Especially since I don’t really see how perfect pitch is giving you a better understanding of music. Relative pitch and hearing how music is build, yes. But perfect pitch on its own? There must be something that I’m missing to make it that important…
That being said, in the end the best training is the one you enjoy, because then you’ll actually do it. Efficiency isn’t the most important thing.
But nobody is suggesting one should train perfect pitch to the exclusion of relatike pitch. Most people interested in training it will be longtime musicians like myself who already have very good relative pitch sense.
After the training, my relative pitch has also improved, too. That’s one of the reasons I disliked that weird Adam Neely video: learning perfect pitch has just given me an extra skill that doesn’t interfere in any way with relative pitch, which is still what I rely on for almost all playing. It’s just handy when transcribing stuff.
Do you have any insight into learning perfect pitch based on your experience?
Yes - the training used an approach called “melody triggers”, and was part of a very clever English jazz musician’s PhD research in 2020. I don’t know if he published it in the end.
The idea is that you pick 12 tunes, one for each note in the Western scale. Then the training program plays a random note, and you have to guess which of the tunes starts with that note.
It’s based on the observation that even untrained humans can usually sing the starting note of familiar songs within 1-2 semitones absolute error (known as the Levitin effect).
The training ramps this up very intensely. When you pass the first (recognition) stage, the next stage is about imagining the tone (audiation) for a named tune. I found this part difficult and improved very slowly.
At least for me, it was one of those skills where you make a huge improvement at the beginning, but then see diminishing returns. At the beginning it feels like there are 12 confused voters in your head, but after even just a couple of weeks, hearing a tone is like 1 voter raising their hand very clearly while the others sit down.
I kept doing the training for a couple of years, then stopped because I was sick of “hearing” those 12 tunes pop up when I heard a note.
Basically every time I recognised a note (usually automatically, if it was an isolated note, but not so much when complex music is playing), it instantly recalled that specific tune. So I’d hear a car horn on the street sounding a C# and the “Chariots of Fire” theme starts playing in my head. Similarly, if I’m tuning my violin and want to sing an E before testing that string, I’ll think of Fur Elise, which starts on that note. But actually I don’t want that… I want to just think of “E” without bringing the context of another tune into mind.
Since I stopped doing the training, the associations have faded a little, but my absolute pitch sense is still pretty good. But nowhere even remotely close to people like Jacob Collier who can instantly decode a complex chord – I’m only really able to pick out single notes.
And I don’t really tune my violin using absolute pitch because mine isn’t accurate enough (although I was surprised to discover some research that most people with perfect pitch aren’t perfectly accurate either, and can be “tricked” by gradually detuning things). If I hear a D# and think “oh, Voodoo Child, right, D#” and you tell me “wrong, that was a D”, I’ll get confused and not be sure if I was right or wrong. The researcher highlighted a possible distinction between someone with “enhanced tonal memory” and “absolute pitch encoders”. I’m probably more in the former category, while someone like Collier would be in the latter category (exceptionally reliable, stable and accurate even at microtonal levels).
Anyway I’m exploring some other ideas now because I still want to be able to one-shot transcribe complex chords, but I’ve not yet found any methods more effective than that training some years ago.
That tune recognition method sounds like it could be a useful mnemonic for getting started, but yeah eventually to use it in realtime you’ve gotta develop the direct note recognition.
I think what makes it so difficult to develop is that the chroma of a note is a very abstract concept, and in general the more abstract a thing the more difficult it is to encode into memory, and concrete examples are required to anchor it like the tunes you used.
There’s also other aspects to sounds like the relative pitch, timbre, and undertones that seem to throw us off.
The approach I’m taking is to learn each note across many different instruments and octaves. I’m progressing slowly by introducing one note at a time and then adding octaves and instruments before adding in the next note. I’ll go backwards in my note progression, add another instrument, and then work my way back up.
Reviewing throughout the day is helpful and testing many times without prior rehearsal is important to improve long term retention since short term memory can’t be utilized if enough time has passed. I’m also doing a lot of replaying notes in my head, usually just trying to match it as close as possible to what I heard.
I often end up cueing off of some idiosyncrasies with a note on a particular instrument, which is cheating but I don’t worry too much about it and that should get resolved as I learn more instruments. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to memorize the exact sound of a note without extracting the chroma, since that will just give more concrete data to help elucidate the pattern that makes each note unique. Same thing with the method you used, but I would suggest learning several tunes for each note in combination with the more direct approach I am taking.
I’m still very early on in this but I’m really just applying everything I know about learning difficult things and maxxing it out since this is an especially challenging task.
I’ll be interested to hear your progress. For now, I’m trying out the Eguchi method, which trains you to recognise a series of chords incrementally, before introducing note recognition.
There seems to be no published data or even anecdotal success stories in adults with this method, but I suspect it might work by training note recognition as an implicit task rather than consciously thinking about specific notes. Also I think it helps your relative pitch to temporarily get out of the way slightly.
Will report back in a few weeks maybe.