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 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 may 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.
Let’s clear it all up.
Absolute Pitch, colloquially known as “Perfect Pitch”, is the ability to name a note you hear without any 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 implies an infallible ability to name notes with ultimate precision. For example, knowing that a pitch isn’t just “an A” but is “A432” (i.e. 432 Hertz) rather than “A440” (i.e. 440 Hertz). If the term “Hertz” is unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. We cover it in Chapter 5: Active Listening 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 Chapter 4: Singing then you’ll know that being able to judge pitches precisely with your ears is an important part of hitting notes accurately, but there’s also the Vocal Control side of things. In any case, that sensitivity to precise pitch differences is a distinct skill from the Absolute Pitch (being able to name notes by ear) which we’re discussing 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 Chapter 2: Mindset, 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 ten thousand (0.01%) 2. D. J. Levitin and S. E. Rogers, “Absolute Pitch: Perception, Coding, and Controversies,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 1 (2005) . That’s comparable to the proportion 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 recognise 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 those things from an early age, without needing Ear Training, it’s impressive—and it can be particularly hard for the average musician to see it as inspiring rather than intimidating!
Can you learn Absolute Pitch?
It’s natural to start wondering, then: 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 I highly recommend the fascinating book The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search Of What Makes Us Musical by Prof. Henkjan Honing (MIT Press) which explores the biological roots of musicality across various species of animal, including a discussion of Absolute Pitch. . 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. Anecdotal evidence suggests 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 are 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 Chapter 5: Active Listening we talked about it being normal for audio engineers to do Ear Training to let them recognise different frequency bands. For example, so they can adjust the EQ on a recording or live sound equipment, and fix problems, or 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 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 “Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence from the production of learned melodies”, Daniel J. Levitin, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, July 1994 . 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 memorise a single “reference pitch”.
Some musicians choose the A440 note that orchestras tune to, guitarists sometimes choose the low E string, pianists often middle C. The idea is just to pick one pitch and regularly practice trying to remember it and sing it, 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.
Should you try to learn Absolute Pitch?
So clearly there is evidence that our adult brains are capable of learning Absolute Pitch, but here’s the catch: 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. Perhaps so difficult as to be, for all intents and purposes, impossible.
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 that level of Absolute Pitch 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 most 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 12 and making it reliable across octaves and timbres.
- A second is to really listen deeply and try to hear the “pitch colour” characteristic of each note. This was popularised 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! :) 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/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 12 different reference melodies, each one starting from a different note. Then you rely on your musical brain’s desire to “autocomplete”, to let you recognise a note you hear based on which melody it sounds like it’s starting.
I could go into depth about 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
A brief case in point: recently a new blog post started appearing at the top of Google search results for “learn perfect pitch”, with a title along the lines of “I Learned Perfect Pitch in 30 Days”. While there was a lot to commend about the author’s learning process and how they documented and shared it, on examination it turned out that:
A. They were actually using the “reference pitch plus relative pitch” process mentioned in this chapter, rather than true (meaning direct) Absolute Pitch.
B. They succeeded in passing a note identification quiz, which was their original objective, but there was no evidence it actually allowed them to do anything practical. They acknowledged that things fell apart if they didn’t have a second or two to process each note in turn.
To their credit, they fully acknowledged the shortcomings, and that what they’d developed was only a lightweight step towards “genuine” Absolute Pitch. In fact, in spite of the clickbait-y title, it was actually a very good exploration of the opportunities and limitations of trying to learn this skill as an adult, as well as a great example of how much time one can easily spend chasing this “magic bullet” without having much in the way of useful results to show for it, even when you apparently “succeed”.
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Do you need to learn Absolute Pitch?
“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 those who do not have it. In fact, the vast majority of professional musicians in the West do not have perfect pitch.”
Henkjan Honing, The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical
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 the skills which Absolute Pitch enables, such as:
- Playing melodies by ear
- Recognising chord progressions
- Composing music
- Transcribing music
- Improvising
- 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 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 we’re about to cover.
It’s also worth knowing that (as any musician with Absolute Pitch will tell you) it also comes 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! On top of that, many musicians with Absolute Pitch find that it somehow fades as they get older, which can be truly frustrating and challenging after a lifetime relying on it.
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’s easy to maintain, throughout your life. 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 introduced in the previous chapter), you can start freely and confidently playing by ear, improvising, and more, right from the outset. And it can absolutely (pun intended) 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.