Today, I start a new month and a new challenge: With only one month of practice, can I develop perfect pitch?

Defining success

According to Wikipedia, perfect pitch is a “rare auditory phenomenon characterized by the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone”.

In other words, if someone went to a piano and played a randomly selected note, someone else with perfect pitch, whose back is turned to the piano, could instantly and correctly identify the note being played (using the 12-note musical alphabet: A, Bb, B, C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, Gb, G, Ab).

My goal this month is to acquire this ability. In particular, I’m challenging myself to correctly identify 20 consecutive, randomly-generated musical notes without a reference tone.

I will likely test my perfect pitch abilities in two ways: 1. Using a computer to generate the notes, and 2. Using another human and a piano to generate the notes.

I think it will be easier to demonstrate the authenticity of my abilities via the computer, but I think it’s more dramatic with another human, so I’ll do both.

Importantly, my goal is to be able to instantly (or almost instantly) identify the note being played. I want to minimize any sort of mental computing as much as possible.

Interestingly, according to this NIH research paper on perfect pitch (which, in the literature, is called Absolute Pitch or AP), perfect pitch doesn’t actually need to be perfect:

Individuals who possess AP are able to identify the pitch class, i.e., one of the 12 notes of the Western musical system, e.g., C, D, G#, of a sound with great accuracy (varying between 70–99%, depending on the task, as compared to 10–40% for non-AP individuals, Takeuchi and Hulse, 1993).

Nevertheless, I’m aiming for 100% accuracy for this month’s challenge.

My starting point

The main tool I’ll be using for training is tonedear.com (which I originally read as “Tone Dear”, later realizing that it’s most likely “Toned Ear”).

Using Toned Ear, I set this month’s baseline by attempting to identify 20 consecutive computer-generated notes. I successfully identified 7 out of the 20, or 35% (which falls on the upper side of the 10–40% non-AP range mentioned above). In other words, I most definitely do not have perfect pitch.

You’ll notice, in the video, I sometimes have a general sense of which area the note is in, sometimes I’m completely lost, and sometimes I miraculously pick the right note (mostly aided by its close relationship to the previous note).

Not the best audio, especially for an audio-centric challenge. I need to figure out a better recording setup.

While 35% is certainly far from perfect pitch standards, it’s not a horrible starting place. I suspect I have an advantage due to my musical training and general knowledge of music theory (versus someone without any musical background).

My chance of failure

During the past seven challenges, even though they weren’t easy, I was reasonably convinced that I would succeed. This challenge I’m way less confident, which stems from the fact that what I’m attempting to do has never officially been documented before.

Here’s what the NIH paper explains…

T raining that begins after the age of 9 very rarely leads to AP [perfect pitch], and there are no known cases of an adult successfully acquiring it (Brady, 1970; Ward and Burns, 1999; Levitin and Rogers, 2005).

1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch, and none of those people have developed it in adulthood (at least, on record). So, this is going to be a bit of an uphill battle.

Nevertheless, I’m still excited for the challenge. I have the same type of self-centric optimism that every lottery player has (“It just feels like I’m going to be the one who does it”).

So, this should be interesting…