A common goal for many musicians is to learn to play their favourite songs by ear. To do this, you first need to learn about ear training. And one of the very first concepts you’ll study is that there are two ways for musicians to play by ear: perfect pitch and relative pitch. This week’s post, let’s explore these methods and which is more helpful when learning to play music by ear.
Perfect Pitch
The first of these two methods is probably something you’ve heard of before: perfect pitch. This is an easy concept to understand, thanks to the examples you’ve probably seen in movies or television. A musician with perfect pitch can instantly recognize any note they hear. For example, with perfect pitch, I could play an E on the piano, and you could tell me it was an E without any context. It would be as easy as tell me that on traffic lights, green means go, and red means stop.
Those same TV shows and movies also tend to portray perfect pitch as the ultimate musical gift. However, in reality, it’s really not all that helpful. Having perfect pitch means you can assign the proper name (C, D, E, etc.) to any sound frequency you hear. Still, it can’t help you understand the importance of the relationships between the tones that help weave them together into harmonies and melodies.
Let’s look at it another way: comparing perfect pitch to eyesight. Only, having the ability called perfect pitch would be like looking at a picture and seeing a vibrantly colourful image, but without any focus or detail to understand what you’re seeing.
Relative Pitch
The second method for learning to play music by ear is called relative pitch. With relative pitch, you couldn’t specifically tell me that you heard me play an E without any musical context. But, if I were to play a second note after the E, you could tell me the pitch difference between the two sounds. This difference in pitch is called an interval, and relative pitch allows you to identify the interval between the notes rather than the notes themselves. Once you have a good sense of relative pitch, recognizing the intervals between tones will again be as easy as telling me the meanings of the colours on a traffic light.
The art of understanding how notes fit together, and how to put them together, comes out of relative pitch. So, all serious and successful musicians hone their relative pitch skills. Why? For a ton of reasons: if a song is played in a different key, they can usually transpose everything easily; if the grand finale of a gig ends up as an extended improvisation, everyone in the band can interact with each other’s instruments; to sing or play riffs or phrases back and forth to each other in a pleasing and exciting way; and because understanding the relationship between tones makes songwriting easier. Perfect pitch alone doesn’t allow for any of this.
To continue our eyesight metaphor, relative pitch is like looking at an image and seeing it in finely focused detail, but without the colour that gives it meaning.
The Problem With Perfect Pitch
The biggest issue with focusing on trying to learn perfect pitch is that you’ll almost certainly fail. That doesn’t mean you aren’t determined or focused on your goals. Rather, it means most research suggests it’s virtually impossible to learn perfect pitch as an adult. It’s generally accepted among both musicians and researchers that perfect pitch can only be learned as a child. That’s because it develops along with the developing mind. The idea is that once your brain is finished “cooking,” so to speak, most of your mental pathways have been laid down, and you can no longer learn perfect pitch.
That said, some people claim it can be taught, and many more musicians claim to have it. In most cases, that’s just PR, and the one case of someone claiming to have learned it as an adult that I could find is interesting, but not in the way you would expect. This lone adult claiming to have learned perfect pitch even says it’s not worth the effort.
Why Relative Pitch is More Useful
If you’re serious about learning to play music by ear, there are a few reasons to focus your energy on learning relative rather than perfect pitch.
First and foremost, musicians and researchers agree that, unlike perfect pitch, it can be taught. It’s not quite as simple as perfect pitch. There is a system that you need to learn to first recognize the intervals in music and then the notes from there. This learning process leads to two more wonderful things about relative pitch: it works, and results come quickly.
First, relative pitch works, and it works at any age. It doesn’t matter if you’re 70 years old or 7. If you put in the effort and go through the process, you can learn relative pitch. That, in turn, allows you to play music by ear.
The second benefit to learning relative pitch is that you can see results almost immediately. On day one, you start to get a sense of how the system works. Within a few short weeks, you’ll begin to see the progress you’re making. On the other hand, some methods that try to teach perfect pitch rely on just a few exercises and hope for the best. That is an excellent way to waste time and effort, waiting months or years to see little to no results.
Final Thoughts
Most music schools, programs, and lessons will focus on teaching you relative pitch skills. Having the ability to identify a single note (i.e., perfect pitch) isn’t all that useful for musical interactions or ensemble performances.
Want to improve your own ear? Check out all The Music Studios programs—for both kids and adults—and take your skills to the next level!