Can You Learn Perfect Pitch? Should You? (Inside The Book)

Have you ever wished you had perfect pitch to hear a note and just name it instantly? It can seem like the “holy grail” of musicality – but is it really? And if you weren’t born with it, is it even possible to learn it yourself?

We’ll be diving into these questions and more in in this episode.

Welcome back to another “Inside The Book” episode of Musicality Now. My name is Christopher Sutton, and I am so excited to share another sneak peek inside the forthcoming Musicality book with you.

Before that, a big thank you to everyone who’s been voting for book covers. We’d narrowed it down to just four options like we talked about in an episode last week, and we’ve had almost 100 people vote and comment on all the designs. It’s been amazing to have that feedback. Thank you so much.

There is one forerunner, one that’s rated highest so far, and we are going to be making that decision later today, so I can’t wait to share that book cover with you.

And thank you again to everyone who took a few minutes to look at the designs and let us know what you thought so that we can pick the very best cover for this exciting new book.

We are going to be opening up for pre-orders soon at musicalitybook.com. If you go there before we open for pre-orders, you’ll be able to register your early interest, and that makes sure you’ll be the first to hear details of that pre-order opportunity, which includes something huge that I am super excited about.

It’s something we’re going to be doing in September to celebrate the book launch and help you to make the most of everything you’ll be learning inside the book. I really wish I could share full details with you right now!

I’m kind of bursting to let you know all about it, but stay tuned for the announcement. And for now, just go to musicalitybook.com and you’ll be the first to know.

So, on to today’s peek inside the book.

I have been finishing up some bits of the Part II chapters recently, and as I read this particular section in the Relative Pitch chapter, I really it really struck me as one of those topics we almost can’t talk too much about at Musical U because it leads so many musicians astray. It did for me back in the day. And it’s a topic that you’ll find a lot of conflicting info about out there.

And as I re-read this section of the Relative Pitch chapter, it made me want to share it more widely and just kind of address the elephant in the room that can otherwise be there.

So let’s dive in. I’m gonna pull up the book.

So just for context, the book is split into three parts. If you’ve watched one of these “Inside The Book” episodes before, you’ll know.

Part I is all about the foundational skills that make everything you do easier or faster or more joyful in music, and musicality training in particular. And we dived previously into the Singing chapter, and maybe only that one so far. We’ll have to circle back and do another Part I chapter soon!

Then in part II, we look at the kind of nitty-gritty skills you need to unlock all of the seemingly magical abilities of natural musicality. In particular, we talk about ear training and three types of building blocks that let you develop your sense of relative pitch, and then two chapters on the rhythm side of things.

Which all sets you up for Part III, where we get into the more practical, applied skills like improvisation, playing by ear, writing, playing with expression, and performance.

So that’s the structure of the book, and today we’re going to be diving into this Part II chapter on Relative Pitch and one particular section of it.

So I’m going to skip in a little bit, and just to set the context:

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In this chapter, we introduce relative pitch and the three types of building blocks you can take advantage of to develop your own sense of relative pitch. We’ll introduce a process for identifying the key of a piece of music by ear, which will allow you to translate from relative pitch into the corresponding letter names. Finally, we’ll talk briefly about some applications and benefits of relative pitch, which are covered more fully in Part III of the book.

As with many other topics in musicality, if we are to truly understand what does work, we must first get clear on our definitions and address any common-but-faulty approaches which might otherwise lead us in the wrong direction.

When it comes to pitch, the first and most important thing to discuss is our choice of relative pitch as the approach to take. In particular, distinguishing relative pitch from “absolute” or “perfect” pitch.

Absolute (or “Perfect”) Pitch

Often when a musician sets out to try learning to recognise notes by ear, they start from the sheet music world of note names and key signatures, and so they assume they would need perfect pitch: the ability to hear a note and automatically know the corresponding letter name. Or to give it a more accurate name, absolute pitch. That’s “absolute” in the sense of being independent from anything else.

As a result, they might do a web search for something like “learn perfect pitch”. What they’ll find is a confusing quagmire of myths and misleading information, along with some sensible-sounding but unhelpful methods for learning the skill.

Absolute pitch, colloquially known as perfect pitch, is the ability to name a note you hear without reference to a known note.

So, for example, if you haven’t heard any other music and someone plays a single note on a piano, and you can name that note just by hearing it, for example “that was an e flat”, that is using a sense of absolute or perfect pitch. The name “perfect pitch” is confusing, since it also suggests an infallible ability to name notes with ultimate precision. For example, knowing that a pitch isn’t just an A, but is A432, so 432 Hertz rather than A400, 440 Hertz.

If that term Hertz is unfamiliar to you, don’t worry, we cover it in the active listening chapter when talking about audio frequencies. But the point here is just that the term perfect pitch only makes naming notes by ear seem like even more of a magical and mysterious gift.

The term perfect pitch also gets used in the context of singing, to mean that a singer always hits notes dead-on.

If you’ve read the chapter on singing, then you’ll know that being able to judge pitch precisely with your ears is an important part of hitting notes accurately. But there’s also the vocal control side of things. And in any case, that sensitivity to precise pitch differences is a distinct skill from the absolute pitch we’re interested in here.

For those reasons, although the term perfect pitch is more commonly used, we’ll stick with calling it absolute pitch going forwards.

When we talked about the Talent Myth in the chapter on practicing, I mentioned that there are certain physical traits which can give you an advantage and which you do need to be born with. For example, a basketball player’s height.

In music, having absolute pitch is perhaps the one and only such trait. Estimates vary, but roughly speaking, we’re talking about less than 1% of the general population, perhaps as low as one in 10,000. That’s comparable to the proportion of people who have amusia and are truly tone deaf, so it’s a very rare trait.

It certainly can seem magical. I once knew a musician with absolute pitch who used to have fun by announcing the notes of car horns and other random beeping sounds when we were out and about. That was pretty funny, and it is a beautiful demonstration of how music can be such a core part of somebody that even random sounds have a musical meaning.

It’s not just a party trick, though. Absolute pitch is genuinely useful, by enabling you to recognize note pitches by ear, it directly unlocks the various pitch-related skills of musicality mentioned at the start of this chapter.

So when you meet a musician with absolute pitch who has essentially been able to do all of those things from an early age, like improvising and playing by ear and transcribing music by ear without needing to do ear training, it is impressive. And it can be particularly hard for the average musician to see it as inspiring rather than intimidating.

So, can you learn absolute pitch?

It’s natural to start wondering: if absolute pitch is such a cool shortcut and so useful to the musicians who have it, can you learn it yourself?

The answer is yes… but only barely.

The scientific research on the subject shows that in general, you need to be born with absolute pitch, or at least have it from a very young age. It’s not understood what causes it, though there is a higher prevalence in countries where the spoken language is tonal, for example, Mandarin.

It’s also not clear how much it’s nature versus nurture, but anecdotal evidence suggests that both have a role. For example, that musician I mentioned before was born of two parents with absolute pitch, but also, not coincidentally, grew up in a highly musical household, making it hard to piece apart genetics and upbringing.

Based on that, you might think “okay, fine, well, I wasn’t born with it, so never mind”. But unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. And this is where musicians get misled.

It is possible to develop some degree of absolute pitch as an adult.

The way I like to explain it is that actually we’re all biologically capable of absolute pitch. It’s just that our brains didn’t think it mattered, so now we don’t interpret sound in that way. But there are clear examples that you can re-train your brain to care about absolute pitch.

One example is in the world of audio. In the chapter on active listening, we talked about it being normal for audio engineers to do ear training, to let them recognize different frequency bands, for example, so that they can adjust the EQ on a recording or live sound equipment and fix problems and enhance the overall mix. That is using a form of absolute pitch where they need to hone in directly on a certain frequency band by ear. Experienced engineers can spot things down to a band that’s just a third of an octave wide, meaning four semitones, corresponding to just a few notes. So they’re not getting as precise as one specific note name, the way we usually think of absolute pitch as working, but they’re getting pretty close. And that third-octave-band skill level is quite common among professional engineers.

A second example is that if you ask someone to sing a song they know well, often they will actually sing it in the correct key. This is known as the Levitin effect, after the author of the scientific paper first introducing the phenomenon. Their highly-reinforced memory for that piece of music has stored the absolute pitches, and they are exhibiting a kind of absolute pitch when they sing the right notes.

That leads on to a third example, which is the one form of absolute pitch ear training which I do recommend as worthwhile, and that’s to memorize a single reference pitch. Some musicians choose the A440 note that orchestras typically tune to. Guitarists sometimes choose the low E string. Pianists often choose Middle C.

The idea is just to pick one pitch and regularly practice trying to remember it and sing it and then check your answer. This can gradually reinforce your memory of this pitch and give you a simple way to do absolute-pitch-like tasks. More on this later when we discuss finding the key of a piece of music by ear.

So should you try to learn absolute pitch?

Clearly, there is evidence that our adult brains are capable of learning absolute pitch. But here’s the thing: to get to the level of instantly recognising any note, and to do it even when there are multiple notes played at once, like in an actual piece of music, is incredibly hard and slow going.

I’ve been studying and working extensively in the area of ear training for almost 15 years now, and I have yet to meet or hear from a single person who has reached this level as an adult.

What I have heard from is hundreds of musicians who have spent months or even years chasing this goal and getting to only a rudimentary level where they can recognise a handful of notes, reasonably reliably, when played in isolation. They generally still can’t apply that to more than the basic musical tasks.

There are a few commonly discussed methods for learning absolute pitch:

One is the simple “guess and check on a regular basis” mentioned above when discussing learning a single reference pitch. You gradually try to do this with more and more pitches, working up to all twelve and making it reliable across octaves and different timbres.

A second method is to really listen deeply and try to hear the pitch colour characteristic of each note. This was popularized by a very well-known book-and-CD course about 20 years ago. I don’t want to be sued, so I won’t name names! But with this approach you are essentially trying to develop a light form of synesthesia, where your brain interprets one sense with another, in this case feeling or seeing colours when you hear sounds.

The third method is analogous to the reference songs way of learning interval recognition, which we’ll cover in a subsequent chapter. You try to memorise the sound of certain melodies, choosing twelve different reference melodies, each one starting from a different note. Then you rely on your musical brain’s desire to “auto-complete” to let you recognize the note you hear based on the melody it sounds like it’s about to start.

I could go into depth on each of these. I diligently tried all three myself in my twenties, and I’ve had students try them. I think all that’s worth saying is that they all sound reasonable, and they do all deliver some encouraging early results after a week or two, which might make you think it’s worth persisting. However, as I said before, I have yet to meet a single person who has developed anything close to full absolute pitch who didn’t have it from childhood.

So do you need to learn absolute pitch?

There’s a quote here from Henkjan Honing, a former guest on Musicality Now, the author of The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search Of What Makes Us Musical, which is an utterly fantastic book, I recommend picking up.

“As far as we know, perfect pitch has little to do with musicality. Generally speaking, people who have perfect pitch are no more musical than than those who do not have it. In fact, the vast majority of professional musicians in the west do not have perfect pitch.”

So if you found it discouraging to hear that learning absolute pitch is essentially impossible as an adult, please don’t.

The good news is that of all of the skills which absolute pitch enables, such as playing melodies by ear, recognising chord progressions, composing music, transcribing music, improvising, doing party tricks – there is just one of those where absolute pitch is the only way to do it. Can you guess which?

Yes, it’s the party tricks, like declaring that a car horn or an alarm bell is a B flat And actually, even those are within reach if you use the reference pitch method and the alternative approach to pitch which we’re about to cover.

It’s also worth knowing that, as any musician with absolute pitch will tell you, it does also come with limitations.

For example, if someone relies on their sense of absolute pitch to let them play by ear, it can be quite confusing and challenging if they need to switch into a different key. Or when a band is in tune with each other but not with the “correct” A440 tuning, it can sound unbearably awkward to the musician with absolute pitch, even while the band and the rest of the audience thinks it sounds perfectly fine.

With the alternative approach we recommend, it doesn’t matter what musical abilities you were born with, it doesn’t matter if you’re young, middle aged, or retired. It can be adapted to suit any instrument, and it can be used for any pitch-related tasks in your real musical life.

With an integrated ear training approach, as covered in the previous chapter, you can start freely and confidently playing by ear, improvising and more, right from the outset. And it can absolutely get you to the level where other people see what you can do and assume that you must have been born with perfect pitch.

So what is this alternative to absolute pitch? It’s a well developed sense of relative pitch.

———

Cool. So from there, we move into talking about relative pitch, what it is, how it works, and how you can go about learning it. Leading on to those three chapters on the building blocks that let you learn relative pitch and develop your sense of relative pitch really quickly.

So that’s the section I wanted to share with you today. Just that kind of myth-busting section on perfect pitch or absolute pitch.

Like I said at the beginning, this can be a real hot topic and a real, what’s the right word? Dead end, really! A dark alleyway for a lot of musicians when they go into ear training wanting to recognise notes by ear. Going down that perfect pitch path can waste an awful lot of time and be really demotivating.

So I knew we had to include that section in the chapter on relative pitch, really, just to frame why relative pitch is the be-all-and-end-all for 99.9% of musicians.

I hope it was useful for you. If you already knew all of this, fantastic. If you’ve wondered about perfect pitch or absolute pitch, if you’ve been tempted to try learning it yourself, or even if you’ve spent some time learning it, I hope that hashes it out for you and makes clear what the opportunity is – or isn’t – and what the better alternative might be.

I may share another section of that chapter on relative pitch another time, but do let me know in the comments, whether you’re on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or if you’re listening to the audio podcast, write an email to [email protected] and do let me know what other chapters you’d be keen to peek into on these Inside The Book episodes.

I love sharing these little peeks inside the book with you, and I hope you’re enjoying them too.

That’s it for this one! Coming up this week, we have an interview, a masterclass excerpt, a Coaches Corner episode, and our next Meet The Team interview, as well as one more that I’m excited to share with you later in the week.

Stay tuned for those. Cheers! And go make some music!

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