How to train absolute pitch

Train a few pitches at a time. Hear each tone on its own, with no reference note, and name it. See the answer straight away. Add a new pitch only when you name the ones you have both correctly and quickly. Mix instruments and octaves so you learn the note and not the sound, and test yourself without answers, on separate days.

This is the method the adult studies used, and the one Solfeto is built on. Each step says why, and what the app does with it.

1. Learn pitch classes, not sounds

A C is a C on any instrument and in any octave. Train it that way from the start, or you will learn what a C on your piano sounds like, which is a narrower thing. Solfeto plays piano, guitar and a soft synth, from C2 to B5, in random order, so no two tones in a row are alike except in the note.

2. Start with two pitches, far apart

Two is enough to begin, and the further apart the better, so that early right answers come from the notes and not from luck. Solfeto starts everyone on C and F♯, 6semitones apart, the most two notes can be. The rest join one at a time, in an order chosen to keep the early ones easy to tell apart:

• C1
• F♯2
• A3
• D♯4
• E5
• G♯6
• G7
• C♯8
• B9
• F10
• D11
• A♯12

3. See the answer after every tone

Feedback is how a category is learned. Name the tone, then see at once whether you were right and what it was. Without it you are only testing yourself, and guessing the same wrong note a hundred times teaches the wrong note.

4. Be right and fast before adding a pitch

A slow right answer is often relative pitch: counting up from a note you remember. So hold both. Solfeto adds the next pitch when, over your last 40 tones, you are right 90 percent of the time, the middle of your answer times is under 2 seconds, and no single pitch is below80 percent. On the way there are 7 smaller steps, so most days show progress.

5. Never give yourself a reference

No note at the start of a session, no tuning note, no chime that sounds the same every time. Anything constant becomes an anchor to count from. Leave at least 800 milliseconds between tones, and if you can, break the memory of the last one. In Solfeto, even the sound after an answer is built on the tone's own note, so it differs every time.

6. Test without answers, on separate days

Training with answers shown tells you how you do with help. Every 7 days, take 36 tones across all 12 pitches with no answers at all, and keep the score. That curve is the honest measure. The final level counts only when it holds on separate days: in Solfeto, 90 percent on 3 of them. How to run a test like this yourself is in the test guide.

7. Little and often

60 tones takes about five minutes. Doing that every day for weeks does more than an hour now and then, and a day missed is not a disaster: pick up where you are. Solfeto checks briefly after a week or more away, and steps back one pitch only if the newest has slipped.

Doing it without an app

You can follow every step with a friend at a piano: they play single notes from your set in random octaves, you name each one, they tell you, and you keep count. What is hard by hand is the bookkeeping: random order, the timing, knowing when a set is held, and testing without answers on the right days. Solfeto does that part, on an iPhone, in 2 notes on the first day and five minutes each day after.