As a musician, you’re probably aware that it’s possible to play a given melody starting from any note.
If you ask a random passer-by on the street to sing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” for you, then (assuming they have a decent grasp on the two core skills of singing covered in Chapter 4: Singing!) they will sing a series of notes which are recognisably that melody.
They didn’t need to run off to a piano keyboard to find the correct starting note. They just picked a starting note Quite possibly “Their Note”! See Chapter 4: Singing. , and went from there.
If you then asked three more people to sing the same tune, they might each choose a different starting note—and yet each rendition would be recognisably the same melody. That’s true even though in a sense, every single note they sung was different from the person before. If you replicated what each person sang on an instrument, or you wrote it down in traditional notation, literally every note would have had a different pitch. If you’re familiar with the idea of a musical “key”, each performance was in a different key, and so the particular notes used were completely different as a result.
And yet… it still sounded like the same melody!
To understand why, we need to shift the way we think about notes in music. Again, for most people, “learning music” means “learning to play an instrument”, and when that’s your starting point, the way you think about notes typically immediately becomes a world of letter names, sharps and flats, and having dots in a particular place in written notation.
When it comes to Ear Training and developing an instinctive ability to recognise notes by ear, we need to focus first and foremost on how the music sounds above all else. And so it makes sense that we need a different way to think about notes, and in particular about note pitches.
The Relative Pitch Solution
There’s one big insight which musicians who go down the Absolute Pitch rabbithole are missing: as much as we humans love to think of music in a scientific, analytical way where everything is written down very specifically… that’s not actually where music comes from.
Music has emerged from the way our brain and ear biologically interpret pitches. And we were doing that long before anybody gave notes letter names or wrote down a key signature, and without needing to be the “one in ten thousand” with Absolute Pitch.
As the hypothetical “Mary Had A Little Lamb” example just demonstrated for us above, our ears really don’t hear in terms of a specific key, letter names, or sharps and flats.
Our body and brain actually understand music based on relative pitch.
Relative Pitch is about interpreting the notes you hear based on their relationship to other notes. Specifically, based on their pitch distance from other notes. When you listen to music, your ear and brain are constantly measuring all these distances and using them to interpret each of the notes, relative to the other notes.
That’s why if someone plays or sings a melody in a random key, or the DJ on the radio pitch-shifts a song, you can still recognise it without a hitch. Your ear is automatically tuning in to the relative pitch distances, regardless of the specific key it’s in.
In other words, if you shift everything up or down together (which is what it means to “change key”), it makes very little difference to the music itself.
Here’s where this can become a superpower for you: if we focus on the relationships between the notes, we can leverage what our ears have already spent a lifetime doing!
Believe it or not, you already have highly-trained musical ears that are, in a sense, identifying all the notes you hear. It’s just not happening at a conscious level, which makes it hard to do anything like naming the notes with it.
At first your conscious mind can only judge “this is a big gap” or “those two notes are quite close together”. But as you practice, you make that “internal pitch ruler” more and more precise, and more and more reliable, to the point where you can easily “measure” all kinds of things you hear, and so identify the notes. That can include how to “translate” it into any key you choose, letting you play it on an instrument or write it down in notation.
So even though Relative Pitch may be a new way of thinking about pitch for you, we don’t need to try to persuade our ears to hear in a completely different way. All we need to do is to refine that “pitch ruler” we have in our mind, and practice putting labels on the different distances we measure with it. That’s what Relative Pitch Ear Training is all about.
In some cases you will consciously be thinking about “distances” and even the “pitch ruler”, while in other cases it will just be at work under the hood as a refined ability to judge relative pitches.
In the following chapters we’ll focus on developing your sense of Relative Pitch, using three types of “building block”. Each is a different way of refining and using that internal “pitch ruler”:
- Intervals are all about measuring the distance from one note to another note.
- Solfa is all about measuring the distance from one note to the “home note” or “tonic” note of a piece.
- Chords and Progressions are about measuring both the distances among a set of notes played simultaneously, and the distance of all those notes from the “home note” or “tonic”.
You’ll be learning much more about each of these as we continue. For now, all you need to do is to let go of the idea that “pitch” must mean keys, letter names, and fingerings on your instrument. Of course those things are a part of the practical skills we’re looking to unlock, and we will be tackling those “translations” back to Absolute Pitch along the way. But you want to be thinking primarily in terms of Relative Pitch.
If you do, you’ll soon discover that there’s an enormous wealth of information you can pick up in the music you hear, long before ever getting to the point of pinning it down to a specific key and note names or buttons on your instrument.