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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

How does one "practice" perfect pitch? (genuinely asking so I can try it, not trying to make some dumb rhetorical point about it not being possible)

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There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others out there.

That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, without hearing the 1st note to reference from.

I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked long-term.

I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that strategy makes sense

That's simple pitch memory. I started playing guitar at 12 and at that time used a tuning fork - and I noticed that after a while I could hear the "right" note of the A string in my head and I didn't really need the fork anymore. That ability is just pitch memory (which can be thrown off) combined with learning the timbre of the instrument you play (in my case a guitar string).

And yes, that's not the same as perfect pitch, which typically includes much more than the above. I certainly don't have it, even if I can pick any string first time in the morning and hear if it's "off". Because that's all I can do. But then again I don't get annoyed by "out of tune" sounds in the world around me, unlike what people with perfect pitch sometimes tell about.

There is some good evidence that children whose first language is tonal (e.g. chinese) develop perfect pitch at much higher rates than those whose is not (e.g. english). This strongly suggests that at least if you catch it at the right developmental stage, it is learnable.

I haven't seen anything equivalent for learning later in life though, although ear-training exercises clearly make your estimation better if you are disciplined about it, but that is relative, not absolute.

I began by listening to a C. After a week I could find it reliably every time. Then I did it for all the other notes.

On bassoon I recognize all notes by their timbre. When I did this it started being something else. After a while I didnt recognize the notes. I just knew. I sometimes still have this. My harp colleague plays a note and I just know what it was.

I told this to a friend of mine who teaches solfege at college level (royal Danish conservatory) and she said that in her line of work perfect pitch isn't a gift it is a work-related injury.

There are a handful of Android apps. Some use samples. Others have addl ear training exercises that are even more useful than PP.

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