Greg Keefe

Acquiring Perfect Pitch

2008.02.07

I've been trying to acquire perfect pitch for the last several years. I initially bought an audio course on CD (back around 2002 or 2003), but I didn't get results. So after that I bought two pitch pipes and stuck them in my desk drawer, and once in a while when I get something from the drawer I see the pipe there and give it another try.

A few days ago I came up with this idea: Have the computer randomly play two tones (one of which is an E, the other a D# or F) then try to decide which one is the E. This seems to be a big help, because I now can pick out the E pretty consistently. I'm not sure if this will turn into perfect pitch or not, but I'll post follow up results below.

Here is the tool I use to listen to the random tones (only works in some browsers)