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Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

Originally posted 2024-11-25 Obligatory disclaimer: all opinions are mine and not of my employer I learned perfect pitch as an adult. It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label.

Your ears contain millions of tiny fine hairs of varying lengths which each vibrate in response to some set of frequencies, making them essentially analog Fourier Transform devices. In my understanding, “perfect pitch” is what you get when your brain has finally annealed its mental representation of music into twelve neurons, one per tone class (assuming western 12-tone scales). Stretch your harmonic recognition by listening to music on the border between tonal and atonal - in the classical world, Ravel, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Shostakovich are pretty good in this regard.

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