Does "Perfect Pitch" really work?

[Bass for Beef]

I've seen it multiple times but this time I decided to read. On the back of my "international musician" magazine is an ad for "perfect pitch". I was wondering if anyone has actually tried and succeded at this program.

Check out the program http://www.perfectpitch.com/26years

If it does work maybe I'll check it out, thanks for you help.

[Speedsolve]

Not really, it's certainly no miracle program as the ad's would have you believe. I think some people have had moderate success after several years using this method.

If you're interested in perfect pitch, I strongly recommend checking out www.aruffo.com/eartraining

Here you find extremely reasonably priced and effective software backed up by several years of research.
This guy isn't in it for profit like all the others, he is genuinly interested in developing PP software.

[lemur821]

-1 to scams and +1 to Chris Aruffo. You can tell he's not out to trick anybody because he's the first to admit that he doesn't have a solution yet. He's also the only person I know of who is honestly working hard on a solution. What he does have are good ideas based on quite a lot of research (which you can read on his web site -- but beware if you do, because many of his early theories haven't played out. Don't just read the beginning and believe you've got a handle on the material.), and experimental training software to test them. He also has forums on which real people using the software discuss their progress. I've been interested in his work for some time now, and even tried out his program. I couldn't get myself to like it enough to do a lot of work (no fault of his; many people do like it) though.

[Bass for Beef]

thanks for the input

[Bass Aficionado]

You'll get more out of relative pitch training. Even if you do "learn" perfect pitch, what are you going to do when the guitarist is out of tune a little bit?

[lowerclef]

I agree with Aficionado. I actually have perfect pitch, and honestly, the one really useful thing you can do with it is spontaneously jam to new music you've never heard without needing someone to tell you what key it's in.

Other than that, relative pitch is the way to go. That will give you an idea of how intervals work together, etc. A good way to start this approach is to take some simple patterns you already know and transpose them. Piece of cake on bass; just start on a different note and wiggle your fingers the same way! ;-) Try playing some examples in a few random keys, and you'll soon hear that the intervals relate the same way even though you're in a different key.

Don't get hung up on perfect pitch. It's not all it's cracked up to be. And not everyone can have it. Relative pitch is USEFUL in real music situations, and is attainable by anyone willing to put the work in.

[Bass for Beef]

yeah have relative pitch and I can hum a couple different notes on command with out a reference pitch. Ehh I think I'll be alright saving my money for a new bass instead

[kenlacam]

^ I agree. I bought one of those courses years ago, and all it did was something i could've done on my own-hold down a middle c and hum it, then move on to the next key and so on. There are some advanced excersizes, but it was a waste of money. relative pitch is more practical.

[lowphatbass]

I feel that true perfect pitch is something you are born with, relative pitch can be maximized and developed to a level that some may call perfect but I don't think it is the same. Ear training(learning to distinguish intervals and chord qualities, developing into recognizing progressions and harmony)is much more useful and can often lead a musician into attaining strong relative pitch if practiced intensely enough.
A person with perfect pitch recognized different notes much like we recognize different colours. Imagine trying to explain to a person who was born without sight what blue looks like as apposed to red and yellow. People can often locate pitch naturally, for example singing the first line of "Roxanne" by the Police. Many vocalists may nail it in the right key without the aid of a musical lead-in but it is debatable whether this is "inner perfect pitch" waiting to be developed, the human ability to mimic or just plain muscle memory. Perhaps it is some combination of all three depending on the individual. The human brain is quite complex and we may never know.
That's my thoughts on the subject.

[geoffkhan]

From what I've heard and read, that curriculum works, but you have to put in a lot of time and work. You have to be very dedicated in order for it to succeed.

I'll tell you though, even though I was born with perfect pitch, I still had to work on it a bit and do a lot of transcribing.

[MistaMarko]

I have perfect pitch. You can play any note on a piano, try to make it hard with intervals, and its 1 2 3 A B C for me.

Yes it really works. It enables you to tell what key a song is in, and, like said above, spontaneously jam to any song even if you've never heard it before. The downside is that it pretty much is always on the front of the mind. Any song you listen to, you'll immediately jump to 'Oh, that's an A...ok that was a D, now an F#'. Even if the washing machine makes some weird whining noise, you'll think 'Oh, that was a C#'. It's that bad for me anyway.

[davefarrell]

when i think of perfect pitch i think that in my experiance with it i was told that you have perfect pitch but what happens if your a bassist and your like "this is in a" and a guitar player says "no it's in c". so does perfect pitch apply to the clef you read from? but on second thought if you are comin in on a jamm you don't have to ask that question. either way for me i would much rather great relative pitch. my instructor can hear a Bb at the start of her day and carry it with her for the rest of the day

[Jim Carr]

Perfect Pitch (called Absolute Pitch by those who study hearing, perception, psychoacoustics, and music cognition) is an inherited trait. It is genetic. If you can "learn" to be taller, you can learn Absolute Pitch. More on that later.

If you want to understand what you hear, forget acquiring perfect pitch from snake oil salesmen. Instead, bite the bullet and get some real skill. Study Ear Training (sometimes called Aural Skills or Musicianship). Most programs of study, either with a private teacher, in music school, high school or college are very notation oriented. Part of what is learned is how to transcribe what you hear into notation (dictation), sing melodic lines from notation, perform and transcribe rhythms, etc.

Why notation? Notation allows one to be given specific graduated challeges, and also allows one to show that one has understood. Yes, high levels of "aural skill" are also possessed by trained musicians from traditions that don't use notation. Let's face it, reading is an important skill to master. Jaco said something like, "No one reads 'just a little.' You read or you don't."

Often, the dictation component is comprised of one voice (a single melodic line), 2 voices, (melody and bass), and four voices (chord progressions). You practice notating what is played.

The singing of melodic lines is usually called sight-singing. It is not usually "at sight." Rather, it is all about preparing short tunes from notation (8-16 bars) and singing them on numbers, solfege syllables (do, re, mi, etc.), or a neutral syllable (La).

Sight-singing is intended to help musicians improve their ability to read music in a variety of clefs, understand what they perform/hear (intervals, rhythms, scales, key changes), and develop the ability to hear in their heads what they see on a page. In effect, it converts notation from a dead bunch of dots and lines into music that you hear when you look at it. There are also rhythmic exercises, sometimes called "rhythmic reading." These use notated rhythms which are performed by clapping, patting, saying "ta", etc. Often there are two or more lines combined. These are pretty essential to good reading and transcription.

Some American, Mexican, and Canadian conservatories, as well as those in France, Spain, and Italy employ "Parlando Solfege," where note names are recited from notation with or without changing rhythmic values. This trains the eye and brain to read and recognize rhythms quicky, and are great for learning new clefs and improving sight-reading.

The dictation/transcription part is the hardest for most people, especialy the 4 voice harmonic progression part. Dictation study can be aided by music software, but IMHO, an experienced instructor with plenty of graduated materials is more effective and can take you way farther. Also, anyone (without absolute pitch) working on 4-voice dictation needs to spend a lot of time at the keyboard playing materials similar to what they are learning to transcribe, so there is also a "keyboard harmony" component to ear training that hooks into harmony, analysis, composition, and performance.

Oh yes, concerning Absolute Pitch, I have found that the "fixed-do" method of sight-singing/solfege/clef reading does help students become much more sensitive to absolute pitch and Key. This is mostly driven by repetition and the keyboard, and is a temporary effect that lasts until one stops focusing on aural skills several hours a day. Then it fades some, but leaves behind in many students a lingering awareness that makes Key much more important in hearing musical form. But that tends to be more on the Classical side of the street.

There is a lot of info on the web about ear training.

[Reuben]

I agree with those who reccomend focusing your efforts of relative pitch and ear training.

My father had near-perfect pitch, but was not born with it. He aquired it from 40+ years playing in symphony orchestras. I believe that his sensitivity to pitch was partly contextual (as is mine). A couple of examples:

If he heard a single chord played by an orchestra he could almost always tell you what the tone center was. But we would play little games sometimes where we'd go into the next room and play a note on the piano and his record there was much worse. He was still right a fair amount of times, but compared to his ability to detect key or pitch played by orchestral groupings was far better. I began to suspect that his recognition of keys was partialy tied to hearing the timbres of instruments, which change depending on where they are playing in their range, etc.

I have similar abilities. If I hear a guitarist play a open D chord I know immediately that I'm hearing a D chord. If the guitarist plays the same voicing in a higher key by use of a capo I will almost always be able to tell that it's an open D chord capoed up. It's partly musical context and party the sound of the instrument, and also reconizing the voicing that makes me able to hear this. More interesting to me, and I think this partially explains my father's abilities, if you play notes for me on the piano, the times that I guess them correctly an interesting process goes on in my head. I hear the note and then imagine that note being played on a bass, hear it as a root note, and imagine the sound of a familiar lick played off of it. In the cases where I guess correctly, I am very often going through some proccess similar to this. Sometimes it's far less concious than that, but if I am able to pay attention I realize I'm doing something like this. I wasn't born with this by any means. It has come slowly and to atribute it to any one area of study or effort is impossible for me, especially since my ear training study has been fairly minimal and I never went to music school. I believe that it's come to me primarily through experience. Hearing pitch (perfect and relative) is like sight-reading, it's greatly enhanced by recognizing things you've seen/heard before.

So it is easy for me to imagine that if one were to put in years of effort with the "Perfect Pitch" method one might improve one's recognition of pitch, but if we are here to play music, then music is what we ought to study, and skills will come.

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by Jim Carr

Perfect Pitch (called Absolute Pitch by those who study hearing, perception, psychoacoustics, and music cognition) is an inherited trait. It is genetic. If you can "learn" to be taller, you can learn Absolute Pitch. More on that later.

As far as I know, there is no evidence to support this view. Especially since it has been proven trainable in small children (aged 2 - 4).

[seanm]

Originally Posted by Jim Carr

Oh yes, concerning Absolute Pitch, I have found that the "fixed-do" method of sight-singing/solfege/clef reading does help students become much more sensitive to absolute pitch and Key. This is mostly driven by repetition and the keyboard, and is a temporary effect that lasts until one stops focusing on aural skills several hours a day. Then it fades some, but leaves behind in many students a lingering awareness that makes Key much more important in hearing musical form. But that tends to be more on the Classical side of the street.

This makes sense to me. I used to tune using a tuning fork. I would strike the fork then put it in my mouth. This made the sound louder and left my hands free to tune up. After years of this I could sing an A on pitch. In a pinch, I could tune without a reference.

But I bought a tuner and have lost the knack.

Originally Posted by Reuben

I have similar abilities. If I hear a guitarist play a open D chord I know immediately that I'm hearing a D chord. If the guitarist plays the same voicing in a higher key by use of a capo I will almost always be able to tell that it's an open D chord capoed up. It's partly musical context and party the sound of the instrument, and also reconizing the voicing that makes me able to hear this.

I can do this too, but only to a limited degree. For G and D I can nail them first time. I am pretty good with A, C, and E.

But throw in an F and I get lost since we go months between playing in F. We also rarely play in flat keys, so if the singer capos up and I don't notice, I can really struggle finding the key.

But this is really learned behavior from repetition.

[28lorelei]

MistaMarko, can u just hear the notes in a piece like, "That's an A, there's a G and a D" or can u look at the big picture and say, "This piece is in D minor?"

[DWBass]

I also have perfect pitch but there's a huge problem that comes with it...........

Everyone is always out of tune (even slightly)!
Everyone is always playing the wrong chords!!
Really, really bad tuning and wrongs chords actually cause me grief!
My band members don't like it when I tell them they are out of tune or playing the wrong notes!

It's a frikkin' curse!

[PJSShearer]

Originally Posted by lowerclef

.... Piece of cake on bass; just start on a different note and wiggle your fingers the same way! ;-) .....

.. Don't tell everyone - I made a career out of doing that!!.

[PJSShearer]

Originally Posted by DWBass

I also have perfect pitch but there's a huge problem that comes with it...........

Everyone is always out of tune (even slightly)!
Everyone is always playing the wrong chords!!
Really, really bad tuning and wrongs chords actually cause me grief!
My band members don't like it when I tell them they are out of tune or playing the wrong notes!

It's a frikkin' curse!

I remember once being taken to a restauarant with a lounge pianist by someone who thought that as I was a "lounge" musician, I'd enjoy it. After about 5 minutes I could stand it no longer and asked to leave. Why?:

1. That piano is out of tune!!.

2. He's playing the wrong chords!!.