Learning perfect pitch?

[recnepspencer]

How should I go about learning perfect pitch? (Or at least relative pitch) I have absolutely no idea, but I'm an advanced pianist who would like to compose so it could be quite useful.

[brogers70]

Relative pitch just means that you can recognize intervals, and sing them on demand. Then once you are given a single note and told what it is, you can find any other note. Here is a site that has a good set of ear training exercises.

https://www.teoria.com/

Once you are a bit comfortable with that, the best way to learn relative pitch, I think, is to join a choir that does a lot of sight singing. I learned when I was young by singing in a church that had no organist, so the choir sight read the hymns in four part harmony. That sort of thing helps a lot.

I'm not sure about learning perfect pitch. I was not born with it. I've been doing a singing exercise that requires me to start on a low Bb and drop an octave into the "subharmonic register" (that's a long story in itself; it's a technique used by Russian basso profundos). And by virtue of singing that Bb over and over day after day, I've got it well enough engrained that I can find it, at least to within a half-step, without reference to a piano. And once I have that, I can use relative pitch to find any note. But the thing about just automatically recognizing a pitch as quickly and unconsciously as we recognize colors, that I think you have to be born with.

[dcstudio]

I thought they changed the name to "absolute" pitch.  lol.  They say you can't learn it--and they are probably right.   Relative pitch is very possible and after a while something akin to "perfect" pitch emerges especially for pianists.  When I wake up, I don't know where middle C is in my ears--except sometimes I can remember from the day before.   After my morning hours at the piano... my relative pitch works for the rest of the day. At university we had four semesters of that stuff--I remember going to class and thinking--

what the heck are you guys hearing?  I don't hear jack!

sight-singing and ear training, harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic, dictation... solfege --that's a big one--all lead to solid relative pitch.  Start there... it's tried and true.

[xdjuicebox]

In all honesty, relative pitch is wayyyy more useful. However, perfect pitch can be fun and cool and can make up for some parts of relative pitch that you suck at

It's really fun being like "hey that siren is an Eb" or something, or you don't have to spend time finding the key when you jump in when someone else is doing something but relative pitch is WAY more useful

But just listen to a lot of well-tuned music, and try to hear "qualities" in the notes. That's probably more due to temperament than anything else, and it takes a ton of practice

The way I do it is I compare it to pitches that I "remember," usually because it's the first note of a piece I have memorized or something, and always remember music in the correct pitch

[dcstudio]

 tonalities.. major or minor  happy or sad

that was the wisdom of the 2nd largest music school in the USA... believe it or not it was 3rd semester before I could even identify that much..   oh man that sight-singing ear-training stuff is frustrating as hell.   You always have some prodigy in class that just gets it, too... used to just piss me off to no end...lol

developing relative pitch was almost as frustrating as learning the piano--I thought being able to play by ear meant I already had "relative pitch"   LOL  did I ever get a rude awakening. 

[xdjuicebox]

tonalities.. major or minor  happy or sad

that was the wisdom of the 2nd largest music school in the USA... believe it or not it was 3rd semester before I could even identify that much..   oh man that sight-singing ear-training stuff is frustrating as hell.   You always have some prodigy in class that just gets it, too... used to just piss me off to no end...lol

developing relative pitch was almost as frustrating as learning the piano--I thought being able to play by ear meant I already had "relative pitch"   LOL  did I ever get a rude awakening. 

I find composing helped a lot with that, since I studied a lot of music to help with that. I'd be like "how did they achieve this effect?" And I'd learn what scale degree "felt" like what, and what chords "felt" like what, and after a while I could identify all of hte 7th chords, and most extensions

[indianajo]

I've been trying for perfect pitch for 58 years, haven't made it yet.  I have great relative pitch, and once the band started up I was a reference - I was a double reed player after all. 
The best thing i found for interval ear training was "Teach Yourself to Play guitar" which was a great lab exercise in listening to (yourself play) chords.  I had all the chord theory as a child piano student, but we never listened to them, just marked them up in books.  Playing guitar makes you listen to them.  I'll never play brass string guitar, my fingers won't grow calluses (native Am skin), and nylon string guitar is fairly useless unless you are playing for 8 year olds, which I did for a couple of years.  So back to piano (and organ). 
The closest I can get to perfect pitch is to sing my lowest note which is an F.  (I'm a baritone). I can sing the rest of the scale from there.   Taking that pitch as reference will get me within a quarter tone of perfect pitch.  Fortunately I own a Hammond tonewheel organ, which gives me a perfect pitch right there in the living room anytime I turn it on.  I tune my pianos to that, for best results. 

[dcstudio]

I had all the chord theory as a child piano student, but we never listened to them, just marked them up in books. 

that is one of the biggest problems that pianists have...so often it is taught on paper only.  The ears are kind of left to their own devices... it can be detrimental to their development.

(if you are worried about this... just spend a few minutes a day playing by ear... pick out tunes from the radio---work those listening brain cells.)

my life would have been so much different at university had I spent some time learning to label what I could hear before signing up to be a music major.
 

[recnepspencer]

Here's an update of what I've done since I posted the thread: I downloa this war training app and I have relative pitch quite well. I can identify intervals quite easily. As for perfect pitch, I think I might have it, in a sense. I can play back songs I hear in my head and they stay in the right key, so I just need to know the starting note. I applied this knowledge to my ear training, and now I can automatically identify some notes by impulse.

[CC]

Nobody is born with absolute pitch because that is an absolute biological impossibility since the pitch scale is a human convention and is not based on anything absolute.  Everybody (almost) is born with absolute color vision because vision is based on fixed quantum chemical reactions. Everybody who "has" Absolute Pitch (AP) learned it.  Youngsters below the age of three can learn it so quickly and learn so well, that it is almost miraculous which has led to the widely held (in the past) misconception that some are born with it.  In fact, it may be possible for the baby to learn AP while still in the mommy's tummy, and in this sense, are born with it, but I don't know of any research on this. If you are expecting a baby, make sure you teach them AP (make sure the piano is in tune!!) before the age of three -- they will thank you the rest of their lives.  Learning AP is treated in section 17 of my free book, see my web page link below.