WhichPitch: Gain Perfect Pitch

People used to believe that perfect pitch (more correctly known as "absolute pitch") is a skill you either were born with (or maybe acquired as a young child) or not--that it couldn't be developed later on. But this has been proven incorrect! Studies show that even adults can learn absolute pitch. Ask AI for an up-to-date summary of the evidence on this.

The problem is, we don't yet know the best way to learn it. But we do know that the key is learning to ignore a note's pitch and instead focus on identifying it by its "colour" (or, chroma). Each of the 12 notes has a distinctive chroma, which is always present in the sound of the note regardless of which octave it's in.

This chroma is not hidden; you always hear it. To demonstrate this, play a bunch of different octaves of the same note on any selection of instruments. Their pitches are all different, and each instrument sounds different, but the notes all sound the same, don't they? That sameness is the chroma. For some reason, most people's brains choose to simply focus on the pitch rather than the chroma when they're processing notes. Therefore, to learn absolute pitch, you need to train your brain to focus on the chroma rather than the pitch when processing notes.

There are a couple challenges to doing this.

The first is that, sometimes, when people are trying to focus on the chroma, they get distracted with the timbre of the sound they're hearing and think that some aspect of that timbre is the chroma. This is why WhichPitch randomly chooses your practice notes from different instruments.

The second challenge is something called "relative pitch," which is the skill of calculating which note you are hearing based on your auditory memory of the other notes you heard recently. If your brain is relying on relative pitch to identify notes, then, again, it's focusing on the note's pitch rather than its chroma. This is why absolute pitch trainers that rely on dedicated training sessions are generally ineffective--after their very first note, you have a pitch anchor in your mind, so all subsequent notes are probably being processed using relative pitch.

To overcome this, WhichPitch uses one-note training sessions by spacing out the notes enough that your brain has forgotten the last note by the time you hear the next note. That's why WhichPitch is designed to work in the background and unobtrusively play notes during the times of day you've chosen; it allows you to do hundreds of one-note training sessions each day without relative pitch getting in the way.

Gradually--with consistent practice over weeks or months--your brain will shift to processing notes based on their chroma rather than their pitch. After that, acquiring full absolute pitch is a simple matter of memorizing which chroma goes with which note.

You may initially feel like you are making no progress, but be patient--a lot of the learning is happening subconsciously. Then, one day, you'll realize that each note is starting to sound completely distinct and unique. That's when you'll know you have succeeded at starting to shift your brain to processing notes using chromas rather than pitch.

Specific recommendations on how to use WhichPitch most effectively are in the app itself.

Technical notes (pun intended):

- The notes in this app use the A440 pitch standard with twelve-tone equal temperament

- The instruments' sounds are physically modeled rather than sampled--which means they are computer-generated sounds, not recorded real instruments--to avoid any imperfections that could give non-chroma-related hints about which note you are hearing