Learn Perfect Pitch in 15 years

Originally posted 2024-11-25

Obligatory disclaimer: all opinions are mine and not of my employer

I learned perfect pitch as an adult.

It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch “is”.

Addendum: This post spawned a lot of discussion on Hacker News and quite a few people resonated (hah) with my description of “childhood perfect pitch, but weirdly, only for one instrument”. If this sounds like you, perhaps you too, can learn perfect pitch in 15 years :)

Popular perception of perfect pitch

Just so we’re on the same page: popular pitch is described as one or more of the following abilities:

ability to name the pitch of ambient amusical tones (alarms, honking, pure sine waves etc.)
ability to name the pitch of musical tones
ability to name individual notes within a chord
ability to hum or sing a named note
ability to identify if a song is not in its original key.

The last variant has the lowest bar, but it is most accommodating to those without formal music training.

My formal musical history (age 5-18)

I started taking piano lessons at 5, and while I enjoyed it, I don’t remember it being an unbalanced part of my childhood. Our family moved two hours away when I was 9, and after a month of schlepping two hours each way to see my old piano teacher on weekends (God bless my mother!) she gave up and we switched to another more local piano teacher. I didn’t get along with this teacher, and ended up quitting piano a year or so later. Instead, I played clarinet through middle and high school, and the piano lessons resumed when I was 15, when my mother learned of another piano teacher from a friend of hers.

Sometime when I was ~12 years old, I remember surprising my clarinet teacher by correctly repeating some random notes that he played. He told me I had perfect pitch, but I didn’t think so, because I couldn’t name notes for any instrument other than the clarinet.

The clarinet’s physical layout is the result of many, many tradeoffs in the location of its boreholes and keys. As a result, each note is characteristically flat or sharp by up to 10 cents, and has a characteristic timbre, due to variations in the overtone series generated. I still cringe when I think about the stuffy nose sound quality of the B♭4’s default fingering. I used the A4 + trill modifier fingering almost exclusively as a result. I’m fairly certain that my clarinet “perfect pitch” was just my ability to recognize these microvariations in timbre.

My piano lessons, on the other hand, never hinted at perfect pitch. To be fair, I also never really liked piano the same way I did when I was younger. That all changed in my senior year of high school. We’d just finished recording a CD, to send in with my college application materials. (It was, in retrospect, an absolute waste of everyone’s time both to record and to listen to). My teacher then told me, “You’re done! You can quit lessons now if you want, or if you want to continue we can play other fun stuff.” I still remember that moment with shock - I couldn’t believe that somebody who taught music for a living could be that crass about why anyone should want to learn music.

“I… want to keep playing”, I managed to say, and to their credit, my teacher did a pretty good job over the next 6 months of letting me learn music for music’s sake, reviving my love for the piano. Then, I went to college, and that was it for my formal piano lessons.

Learning perfect pitch (18-30s)

At MIT, I found myself tremendously bored my freshman year due to the combination of my advisor not letting me sign up for interesting classes, plus the freshman credit limit. Instead, I found myself figuring out how to access the suite of music practice rooms, and I spent well over 20-30 hours a week finding new classical music, listening to recordings, and sightreading the scores. The clarinet got the short end of the stick - I tried playing in the wind ensemble for a semester, but found that I just didn’t love clarinet the same way I loved the piano.

By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch… for piano only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying microtuning differences; the piano, under the cover, is a sequence of cables of continuously varying weight, length, and tension, very unlike a clarinet’s body with its idiosyncratically drilled holes. But I still could not hear other instruments or textures; when listening to piano concertos, I would latch onto the piano’s sounds, follow along with my relative pitch, but inevitably lose track of the notes whenever the orchestra took over.

After that first freshman year, my workload was nowhere near as easy, so I could only play piano ~10 hours a week. But my musical tastes and breadth kept evolving; I took music theory classes, got a music minor, started singing in the concert choir, and learned to appreciate operatic, orchestral, and chamber music. I practiced identifying notes in these new contexts, but ironically enough, my clarinet perfect pitch came back to haunt me with vengeance, as if to mock me for abandoning the instrument. The clarinet is a Bb instrument, meaning that the “C” as I knew it on the clarinet was actually a Bb. My mental train of thought would immediately slip sideways by a whole step as soon as I heard any mildly prominent clarinet sounds. That was quite frustrating!

One day, maybe when I was 25 or so, I realized that I could identify pitches from a variety of orchestral and string instrument textures. I had also continued to sing with the MIT choir as an alumnus, and I could feel perfect pitch approaching for voices as well; let’s say I picked up perfect pitch for vocal textures around 28. Later on, maybe around 32, I realized that I could identify atonal textures (alarms, train horns, etc.), and along with this milestone came the ability to quantify how out of tune something was.

There are days when my sense of pitch feels weaker. Sometimes I’m listening to an ambient noise soundtrack during work, or don’t get a chance to listen to tonal music for some time. When I haven’t actively listened to tonal music in over 2 weeks, the time it takes me to recognize a note goes from sub-second to a few seconds, although it comes back quickly. It feels like putting on your skis or ice skates for the first time each winter and remembering how to ski/skate.

Analysis

Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days.

Most studies I’ve seen on the internet study perfect pitch as a snapshot in time; a set of subjects drawn from populations of varying musical training, is tested on a single day, or perhaps over a month. These studies have no statistical power to talk about perfect pitch in gradations; they can only say that some fraction of people “have it” or “don’t have it”. I imagine that I would have failed some of their tests and passed others at differing points in time.

The caveat with anecdata is, of course, the highly individual circumstances that come with each data point. Does it matter that I spent my first few years of life living in, essentially, a Korean enclave in NYC? Is it relevant that I am highly sensitive to fine details in all five of my senses, not just in sound? Does it matter that I have a generally strong memory for details? Am I somebody who should have developed perfect pitch normally if not for my patchy formal music schooling? Or was it my choice of non-C musical instrument that delayed the onset of perfect pitch? Or maybe the blame lies with my home piano, which was never tuned and drifted from flat to flatter by about 30 cents over a decade.

To me, the most surprising thing about perfect pitch is that we don’t all have it. The vast majority of us can tell apart our colors, even if half of us refuse to use words like “chartreuse”. Your ears contain millions of tiny fine hairs of varying lengths which each vibrate in response to some set of frequencies, making them essentially analog Fourier Transform devices. And then, your brain then does something stupidly complicated to this set of clean inputs, so that you can instantly tell whose voice is whose in a multi-speaker environment, and so that you can detect the slightest tremor in somebody’s voice that might clue you in on their mental state as they say those words. We undergo decades of musical training so that we can train our brains to unwind all of this complicated processing and extract pure tones from this jumble of sound.

In my understanding, “perfect pitch” is what you get when your brain has finally annealed its mental representation of music into twelve neurons, one per tone class (assuming western 12-tone scales). In my own mind, these twelve neurons just… exist; I don’t have any synesthetic associations with colors, names, or any visual artifacts like a piano. Just the pure qualia of hearing that pitch. At this logical endpoint, note recognition is instantaneous and universal. You can imagine intermediate stages, where neurons are calibrated to certain timbres of sound, or perhaps you have a neuron for the opening note of a specific song that’s burned into your memory, and can place pitches with reference to that opening note.

How to learn perfect pitch

Now that I have a tiny human of my own creation, here’s what I think are probably optimal conditions for developing perfect pitch.

Learn to play some instrument, in a setting where you have to play in tune. (e.g. if you’re learning guitar, don’t just match your strings to each other; use an actual tuner.)
Don’t learn a non-C instrument
Eliminate sources of out-of-tune sounds in your environment.
Learn how to read sheet music, and listen actively to music while following the sheet music/score.
Learn some music theory; nobody learns the 12 tones in isolation, but rather the ways in which they come together to form melody and harmony.
Listening is a skill and takes the proverbial 10,000 hours to master.
Stretch your harmonic recognition by listening to music on the border between tonal and atonal - in the classical world, Ravel, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Shostakovich are pretty good in this regard.
Enjoy the music! It’s okay if you don’t like a piece or a composer; sometimes it takes the right performer or piece to open your vistas.