WhichPitch: Gain Perfect Pitch

About WhichPitch: Gain Perfect Pitch

People used to believe that perfect pitch (more correctly known as "absolute pitch") is a skill you either were born with (or maybe acquired as a young child) or not--that it couldn't be developed later on. But this has been proven incorrect! Studies show that even adults can learn absolute pitch. (Google for references: PMID 31686378, PMID 32513059, and PMID 31550277.)

The problem is, we don't yet know the best way to learn it. A study on Japanese children found that all of them who completed an absolute pitch training program (24 out of 26 children) succeeded at learning it, and the key for them was figuring out how to ignore the tone height (pitch) and instead start to hear the tone chroma ("colour") (see
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948).

Based on this, we suspect that the tone's pitch and also timbre are distractions obscuring the tone's colour from you. If you can get past those distractions, you will start to hear those colours, which is what will unlock your absolute pitch. This is why WhichPitch allows you to train with multiple instruments (various timbres) and why it randomly chooses between multiple octaves of the notes you've selected (various pitches).

A big problem with other absolute pitch trainers is that they tend to rely on training sessions where you're spending several minutes in a row doing dedicated training. This is less effective because after the very first note, you have a pitch anchor in your mind, so all subsequent note testing is relying more on relative pitch rather than absolute pitch. Plus, after a few weeks of using these, people tend to lose motivation and stop doing the training sessions. WhichPitch is designed to work in the background and unobtrusively play randomly chosen notes during the times of day you've chosen. Each time it plays a note, it will push an answer notification a couple seconds later. (Don't look at the answer until you've decided which note you think it is!) This allows you to do hundreds of tiny absolute pitch training sessions each day without relative pitch getting in the way. And, if you're busy and didn't hear the note or aren't able to check the answer notification, the answer notification will disappear on its own instead of clogging up your notification center.

At some point, you will start to hear past the note's timbre and pitch and hear the colour instead. Start with just 2 or 3 notes that are close to each other in pitch and then add in more after you can reliably distinguish between those ones. We suspect that it will take a while to start hearing the colours of the first 2 or 3 notes, but, once that clicks, learning to recognize the unique colour of the rest of the 12 notes should be fairly quick.

You may initially feel like it is impossible, but keep at it! Learning absolute pitch will take consistent effort over time, probably months rather than weeks. The effort will be worth it to develop this superpower! And be forewarned that when you first acquire it, it will be fragile, so you might lose it and regain it a few times before it sticks.

We'd love to gather some data on how long people of different ages take to acquire it, and also what your experience was like, so please share those details when you rate the app!

Technical notes (pun intended):
- The notes in this app use the A440 pitch standard with twelve-tone equal temperament
- The instruments' sounds are physically modeled rather than sampled (meaning they are computer-generated sounds, not recorded real instruments) to avoid any imperfections that could give non-frequency-related hints about which note you are hearing
- Painstaking efforts were made to design the different instruments' sounds to be as pleasing as possible, but, alas, not every instrument can sound as soothing as a harp
- The lower pitches may sound quieter due to limitations inherent in your phone's tiny speaker drivers, but this will not interfere with the objective of the app