Types of Perfect Pitch Training

Posted on Thursday, February 4, 2010 in Related Music

There are some who believe that perfect pitch training is not worthwhile because they think a person cannot learn the skill, that you must be born with it. It may surprise you, though, that the majority of musical scholars are aware that the ability can be developed as an adult. There is, however, an element of doubt in many minds as to whether you can purposely train yourself to have perfect pitch and how to do it.

There are a few quite common methods used to learn the ability. They usually start with a message of optimism, they will tell you that perfect pitch training is certainly possible and you need to believe this to make progress. It is true that if you keep a positive outlook, you stand a chance of learning. However, if you are excessively skeptical, your pessimism will dominate. Assuming you believe it to be possible to begin with, you can take steps towards learning perfect pitch and the improvement in your ear will encourage you and re-enforce your belief. Nobody will be able to flip a switch in the brain and suddenly achieve the musical ear of Mozart. The ear is trained over time and can be trained as far as you want to go. It should be noted, however, that belief is not enough in itself, you must train. For more info, click: perfect pitch software.

When you begin, you will be learning to hear the differences between the notes, other than their fundamental pitch. Some methods will call these the “pitch colors” or “note timbres”. Some methods offer little or no explanation of these “colors”, though, which is the main stumbling block for most students. An example would be a perfect pitch training manual, which simply suggests that you play a ‘C’ and close your eyes. Try to associate feelings with it or hear it as unique in some way. This is all very vague. It would have to be almost by coincidence that you would hear the right qualities by this method More likely, you will just begin dreaming about something else.

The use of melodies is sometimes used to teach the memorization of a note. Within a melody, it is thought that the note can be remembered as the mind deliberately picks it out from the rest. You may try to remember individual notes this way. The argument against this is that, in the context of a melody, the notes are not absolute entities. If you are trying to remember melodies in their correct key so as to remember note pitches, are you really learning perfect pitch? For more info, click: perfect pitch training.

A favorable option is to develop the acuity of your ear to listen to harmonics (known also as overtones). When listening to individual tones, we tend to concentrate on the fundamental frequency of the sound. However, each note contains many multiple frequency components of the fundamental. The timbre of a tonal sound comes from the harmonic levels. The reported difference in quality, or pitch “color” is most likely to come from a perception of difference in the harmonic spectra of the different notes. The most definitive step forward in perfect pitch training is learning about how to listen to harmonics. You can read more about this at: what is perfect pitch?