WhichPitch

People used to believe that perfect pitch (more correctly known as "absolute pitch") is a skill you either were born with (or maybe acquired as a young child) or not--that it couldn't be developed later on. But this has been proven incorrect! Studies show that even adults can learn absolute pitch. Ask AI for an up-to-date summary of the evidence on this.

The problem is, we don't yet know the best way to learn it. But we do know that the key is learning to ignore a note's pitch and instead focus on identifying it by its "colour" (or, chroma). Each of the 12 notes has a distinctive chroma, which is always present in the sound of the note regardless of which octave it's in.

This chroma is not hidden; you always hear it. To demonstrate this, play a bunch of different octaves of the same note on any selection of instruments. Their pitches are all different, and each instrument sounds different, but the notes all sound the same, don't they? That sameness is the chroma. For some reason, most people's brains choose to simply focus on the pitch rather than the chroma when they're processing notes. Therefore, to learn absolute pitch, you need to train your brain to focus on the chroma rather than the pitch when processing notes.

There are a couple challenges to doing this: (1) getting distracted by the timbre of the sound you're hearing and (2) relative pitch. WhichPitch is the only absolute pitch trainer that effectively helps you overcome these two challenges, and the method used is explained thoroughly in the How This App Works page in the app.

Gradually--through consistent practice with WhichPitch over weeks or months--your brain will shift to processing notes based on their chroma rather than their pitch. After that, acquiring full absolute pitch is a simple matter of memorizing which chroma goes with which note.

You may initially feel like you are making no progress, but be patient--a lot of the learning is happening subconsciously. Then, one day, you'll realize that each note is starting to sound completely distinct and unique. That's when you'll know you have succeeded at starting to shift your brain to processing notes using chromas rather than pitch.

Technical notes (pun intended): The notes in this app use the A440 pitch standard with twelve-tone equal temperament, and the instruments' sounds are physically modeled rather than sampled (meaning they are computer-generated sounds, not recorded real instruments) to avoid any imperfections that could give non-chroma-related hints about which note you are hearing.