Perfect pitch can be learned, says researcher. But only if you practice perfectly

The Current11:53Perfect pitch can be learned, new research suggests

When it comes to having perfect pitch, it's believed either you have it or you don't.

Even some of the most talented and seasoned musicians don't have the skill, which is the ability to hear or recreate the pitch of a note without a reference tone. It's a step above relative pitch, which is the ability to identify or produce a note in relation to other notes.

But new research published in the online journal Springer Nature Link in February is debunking the longstanding myth held by musicians and scientists that the skill can't be learned.

"Perfect pitch is not a very precise term. Technically we prefer to call it absolute pitch," psychology lecturer Yetta Kwailing Wong told The Current host Matt Galloway.

Wong works at the University of Surrey and The Learning and Perception Lab in the U.K, which studies the differences between experts and novices and investigates methods for enhancing learning efficiency across a range of fields.

Wong's research suggests that absolute pitch is a learnable skill and that people can train to become as accurate as those who possess the skill naturally.

She spoke to Galloway about her research and absolute pitch. Here's part of that conversation. 

How common is it for somebody to have absolute pitch?

There are different statistics. The estimation could be as rare as one in 10,000 but this is not very well-evidenced and recent research shows it could be anywhere from seven to 50 per cent of students in music conservatories, but in general it's relatively rare.  

So if you have it, you're one of the lucky ones. 

That's what people think, yeah. I agree.

But the belief was that you either have it or you don't. Why did you want to look into whether it's possible to learn absolute pitch?

I regard myself as somewhere in the middle. When I was young, I learned some musical instruments and I played with this kind of exercise and I found myself sort of accurate.

I'm well above chance and way below what's expected from the so-called absolute pitch people. So who am I according to the theory? I just thought there has to be something wrong so I wanted to look at it more and I ended up running these studies.

Tell me more about this experiment. How'd you figure out whether people could actually learn absolute pitch?

We designed an eight-week online training program and we recruited musicians who really wanted to develop this skill. Then, we made them train for 21 hours and they completed 15,000 rounds of pitch naming practices.

So, it requires real hard work. Then we tested their pitch naming performance before and after the training.

These are done online but we make sure that they can't cheat. We had consent to videotape what they were doing during the tests, so we know they're not looking for cues.

They don't have a tuning fork or a phone in their hands that'll show them the answer. We did a careful measurement to find out how well they can perform the task and how much improvement they showed. 

After the training, they could name seven pitches out of 12, which is pretty good. That's a lot to learn. Some of them got to the end and could name all 12 pitches very accurately with a performance level that's comparable to what you'd observe in the real world.

So we're pretty happy and encouraged about this finding. We thought it showed that this skill can be learned among adults as long as you have the right way of learning.

They had to do 15,000 of those tests? That's a lot. 

That's why it took 21 hours on average. It's a very hard process. There's a reason why a lot of people assume that it can't be learned because it's so difficult.

That's why it took really passionate and committed learners to try and get through these difficulties. Of course, there are elements in the design of the training program to encourage them to keep going. We design the tasks in a certain way so they don't waste their learning time doing something that's not productive.

For example, they can't rely on relative pitch, which is something much easier and is a very similar ability. But if you spend time trying to learn relative pitch, you're not going to learn anything about absolute pitch and you'll fail in our final test.

What do you think's going on in our brains that allows us to learn something like absolute pitch?  

It represents the wonderful ability for our brains to pick up perceptual information. Human perceptual systems are highly adaptable. We learn to detect what's in the environment and to tune our system to become sharper, faster and more accurate.

When we see the same stimulus again and again, that something is well known, and this neuroplasticity holds into adulthood. Absolute pitch is kind of an exception because there's only 12 notes to learn, so how come it's so difficult and it can trick a professional musician?

I feel like the reason we got a different result is really the more effective learning experience that we designed into training. It's not magic, it's a better design, combined with passionate, committed learners who're determined to get through the difficulty.

But there's a lesson there beyond absolute pitch. For a lot of people, there're certain things that you can learn, and there's things that are innate, that if you don't know, you're not going to be able to learn. We're capable, even in adulthood, of learning new things?  

Some think that they won't be good musicians if they start music lessons later in life or that they're not going to learn the native accent if they pick up a new language. There's a lot of these ideas.

We have to differentiate between things that are difficult from things that are impossible. When something's difficult, it may just mean that we need to find the right way to learn and to believe that with hard work, we can get through it.