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This is super similar to some other popular questions concerning perfect pitch, but I thought that it was specific enough to avoid closing.

The idea of having perfect pitch has always appealed to me, and, on a whim, and at 10:30 PM, I googled "learn perfect pitch." Instantly, all of these videos with "perfect pitch programing" in the title popped up.

Yeah, it's disturbing:

But I wonder how effective this method for "learning" perfect pitch is. I mean, there's plenty of people who vehemently believe that perfect pitch is genetic. But, well, I don't know... I can sort of see this working, but it is kind of annoying. Like super annoying.

Do these types of time wasting, psychosis inducing brain-cell killing sludge buckets of music and poorly synthesized voices actually have any documented success, or is it just a bunch of you tubers with a MIDI program?

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  • I am going to give it a try this week. It cannot hurt. The problem I have with other trainings/software is that it never gives you the sounds tied to the notes ahead of time. It's always a trial and error thing. I am pretty good at this point, but will try this and see if it improves my scores in other training.
    – blusician
    Oct 22, 2016 at 9:46
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    Genuinely can't see how this sort of thing can be successful. I can sing an accurate C note, and find others from there, and that's good enough for me. Waiting to get feedback from folk who have attained absolute pitch from this sort of idea.But sceptical...
    – Tim
    Oct 22, 2016 at 10:07
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    I could rather see this working if it evoked some sort of synæstesia in a sophisticated way. That video seems to just link all note names to “annoying square synth sound”. But dunno... perhaps the annoying monotonicity is precisely what should cause the brain to learn really detecting pitch alone, without interval connotations. Oct 23, 2016 at 0:52

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Perfect pitch is not something that you can "learn." Having perfect pitch myself, here is my advice. In my opinion, those courses are a bunch of garbage and don't help you at all. To be honest, I don't think I could stand more than a minute of hearing "F....F.....F....F". It would drive me bonkers. I discovered that I had perfect pitch when I was in 4th grade (age 8) and I was in the Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. I think that the first step, if you want to get perfect pitch is to play an instrument or sing a lot. I have played piano since I was in 1st grade, so that definitely helped. The first thing that I noticed, after playing piano for a while was that I could sing a C on command. Now, if you have one note that you know really well, then you can find all other notes based off of that one, which is what I did. If you practice and exercise this, e.g. practicing finding an A off of a C a lot, then gradually, you will start to remember more and more notes until you have perfect pitch. I hope that this was helpful to you.

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Lots of practice MIGHT help you develop perfect pitch. It will certainly help you develop relative pitch - the ability, once given a framework, to recognize notes and intervals.

If you are skilled at this already, probably no need for the course.

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