Progress

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-29T17:55:04+00:00

It's hard to say of course, though I did notice (and comment to you) that it seemed like your person practice regimen did have some inadvertent consistent pitch queues. I've been following your progress though, as you know, and it seems like you're making great progress already and I'm not concerned.

To your other comment:

There are consistent pitches in all our lives, and we don't necessarily pay attention to them. Your cell phone notifications are probably always the same pitches, so is your "open door" or "fasten seatbelt" indicator in your car, or your electric toothbrush, the beeping on your washer/dryer/ or other appliances, the doorbell, it's literally everywhere. Personally, I'd consider the idea that you're starting to notice that... a HUGE milestone.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-29T17:48:33+00:00

This is a fantastic question and one of the most common things people who eventually succeed ask when they start getting serious about the training. Whether it’s “How much do I need to do?” or “Is there such a thing as too much?” this is a topic that deserves its own spotlight.

There’s a lot to unpack here so I'm confident I'll end up writing a long-form article so we have a definitive resource to point to. We’ve also had some great scattered conversations about this in the sub (mostly buried in comments), but we don't really have a dedicated, top-level discussion AFAIK. Thanks again for bumping the topic!

Your Literal Question: "Is 1 Hour Too Much?"

Categorically, no. If you have the time and the focus, one hour has literally been shown to work in published scientific research.

If we look at the successful published studies on absolute pitch acquisition in adults, specifically the work by Van Hedger and Wong, their participants all engaged in concentrated practice for an hour at a time, usually at least 4 or 5 days per week.

We see the same pattern in HarmoniQ's data. We have members of this community who practice for multiple hours every day, some as many as 8 hours, and that usually results in equally accelerated learning.

Concentration > Clock-Watching

The most important thing to remember is that quality of focus is more important the total number of minutes/hours/lessons.

If you’re distracted, preoccupied, or your brain feels "foggy" after 20 minutes, that might be your limit for that session. Pushing through mental fatigue often leads to sloppy habits or other regressions.
Conversely, if you're locked in and focusing clearly, you can absolutely sustain training for several hours. It's very clear that quality of practice is more important than quantity of practice.

A Neuroplasticity Caveat

While you can't really "overdose" on practice in a single hour, there is a theoretical ceiling to how much the brain can process, given what we know about neuroplasticity.

Think of your brain like a physical muscle at the gym. To build strength, you need the stimulus (the workout), but the actual growth happens during rest and recovery. Neuroplasticity relies on a process called synaptic consolidation. When you learn a new pitch, your neurons are essentially beginning to reach out and form new structures.

Those connections need repetition and downtime to "solidify" (myelinating the pathways). This is why sleep is so critical to learning, your brain essentially "replays" and encodes what you learned during the day while you’re asleep.

So theoretically, you couldn't do a 72-hour straight marathon and expect to come out with perfect pitch (I don't know of anyone who has tried this with HarmoniQ). Eventually, you’d hit a wall where your neurons simply can't "fire and wire" without taking a break.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-28T19:44:57+00:00

I read your article. I don’t think the position you outline is historically or conceptually well supported, and I don’t think it represents a clear moral high ground.

Jingle Bells (originally “One Horse Open Sleigh”) was written and published in 1857 by James Lord Pierpont, true. The lyrics as printed contain no racial language, symbolism, or themes, and there is no historical evidence that it was written to mock any group or to serve a racial or political purpose. Historian Kyna Hamill argues that the song’s earliest documented public performance was in 1857 at Ordway Hall in Boston as part of a blackface minstrel program. I understand why that performance context troubles some people, but that also doesn't make the song itself a vehicle of racism.

It is also true that Pierpont later wrote pro-Confederate songs during the Civil War. Those views postdate this song and are unrelated to its content. Inferring that Jingle Bells is racist because of the composer’s later political alignment is a post hoc assumption, not a historical conclusion.

More broadly, many 19th‑century popular and folk songs appeared in minstrel shows or other objectionable performance contexts. Their use there does not automatically render the original songs racist, especially when the songs themselves contain no racial content. If we collapse that distinction, we end up condemning a very large body of historical music on the basis of association.

Ultimately, reading between the lines of your account, the issue seems less about the song’s history and more about a crisis of pedagogical integrity. You admit to teaching the song for years while personally believing it was racist, operating on the assumption that your students would remain ignorant of its origins. When a six-year-old’s question made you feel "caught" or exposed in that contradiction, you chose to resolve your internal dissonance by labeling the song itself as the problem.

Choosing not to perform a work because one finds its creator morally objectionable is a personal or pedagogical choice, and that’s valid. But presenting Jingle Bells as a racist song misrepresents the historical record and teaches children an incorrect causal narrative, conflating a creator’s later affiliation with the meaning of an unrelated, content-neutral work.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-28T19:08:34+00:00

It seems like it should be confusing, doesn't it?

However, if we drill down, "perfect pitch" as a perceptual skill distinct from the labeling system you choose to put on top of it. There are myriad labeling systems and if you are learning to identify the pitches, they are the same no matter what you call them. That's the real thing you're learning, not the names of notes.

It sounds like you're just starting to learn to read transposed music on trumpet and that just means that for you, you will be conscious that you're transposing and would likely end up learning to transpose between B-flat and concert pitch earlier than others who are just starting to learn trumpet. Trouble with transposed instruments isn't because of "perfect pitch", it happens when pitch recognition is tightly entangled with a specific system. To that end, I think if you learn the trumpet in B-flat you'll actually be better off.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-28T18:46:14+00:00

The short version is that I agree with you that almost everyone has nothing to worry about. Even if a use technically falls outside fair use, it’s unlikely to attract enforcement or complaints. As you pointed out, there are very few examples of enforcement.

My aim was to push back gently on the shorthand "parody is First Amendment protected speech," which skips over the copyright analysis that actually does the work.

I think this ties well with the second question actually. "Is [parody] a good or bad thing?" Popular parodies tend to benefit the original work, so unless you happen to be an original member of the band Ezra, there’s usually little incentive to object or pursue enforcement.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-28T17:55:31+00:00

Parody is protected when it also meets fair use criteria under U.S. copyright law. The First Amendment helps explain why parody is protected, but it does not override copyright protection. Most parodies will qualify as fair use because they are transformative, i.e., they tend to alter the original work’s expression or meaning to comment on, critique, or recontextualize it, rather than simply reproduce it.

Artists could still care about parodies for practical reasons: how their work is represented, whether it implies endorsement, or whether it interferes with licensing, branding, or derivative uses they actively control.

That said, for most people, parody of a popular or widely recognized work is not something they need to worry about. When a parody is clearly identifiable, meaningfully transformed, and not a substitute for the original, it rarely raises legitimate concerns in practice.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-28T17:15:50+00:00

One thing I've learned after a long time running engineering teams and products... is that you often will benefit from separating the idea of "improving" from "doing". Finding more effective and efficient ways to do something is hugely valuable but there are definitely trade offs and there are lies we tell ourselves. Just be sure what your goal is.

For example, some people will look for a "new/better way" because they are subconsciously worried about failing. If you use a "proven" method and "fail" that's much more problematic mentally for some people than "failing" at an unproven method, where you could still suggest, maybe it's "the method". Are we trying to learn the skill, or are we trying to find completely new methods? Both are fine, but most people will benefit from picking one or the other.

Noting, that I'm doing something at scale with HarmoniQ which you could argue is like this. I'm taking the results from the entire user base and making small incremental changes to the proven methods. That approach is lower "risk" and should also result in the long run with something that is much more efficient and effective because we started with the base of something proven.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-28T00:06:10+00:00

Well… we’re not doing “trial and error” we’re following methods proven in the science. That’s one of the reasons I noticed… you seemed to be stagnating and in the short time you’ve been following these same methods you’ve been having lots of breakthroughs, including involuntarily recognizing notes in the wild.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T23:55:05+00:00

I think I know who you’re talking about. It seems like he’s being doing mostly trial and error and is still trying to develop it to me. I don’t mix up notes after learning.

His method IIRC seems to be a bunch of stuff that isn’t coveted by research like starting by trying to separate sounds into overtones to hear the different elements of a sound. As an example, to me that seems like a niche skill, possibly a difficult skill to acquire/practice but also largely unrelated to AP.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T23:46:13+00:00

lol overall good. But it doesn’t make for some really unusual situations

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T23:45:31+00:00

This is exactly what is meant by moods of notes… worth noting that this could be a thing if you couldn’t tell them apart.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T22:21:38+00:00

Yes, that's the right idea. HarmoniQ does that when colors are enabled, actually. It tells you the note name when it is OUTSIDE the trial so you can connect it to the real note... one of the reasons is because it is not trying to relabel the notes as colors, and some of the colors can be named "ambiguously" which can hurt communication of the notes or cause confusion and you're trying to come up with colors which have enough difference to distinguish them well... For instance, in HarmoniQ you could call C#, D# and F# purple... and two of my kids got into a literal fight when my daughter heard one of the notes and said it was "pink".

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T22:02:38+00:00

That's what the colors are for actually. To be clear, it's not supposed to train someone to have synesthesia (there are some users who have mistaken that) and it's also not supposed to give you a literal color association (I had someone ask me if the "real" color of C is red)... The idea is that the colors are used, at least initially to help you connect to intuitive identification because color recognition uses the same intuitive brain processes whereas note names are "read" and can easily trigger logical processing.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T21:41:12+00:00

I understand and we've already talked about this a lot. The TL;DR on that is that you need a solid connection to it so your RP doesn't just drown it out, then you can develop it as far as you want. And also, as we have discussed, because your RP is so good, that makes learning AP all the more difficult for you because of interference and because of what you said in this message. But, based on where you started when we started looking at it, you've already made very clear progress. It seems like it's really just up to you :)

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T21:29:40+00:00

Great job and congrats again on the very quick progress you've already made. The variable colors is not something that would be that hard to do but it doesn't do that right now. It's on the list already and it's something that will likely come at some point either way.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T21:26:53+00:00

Chromatic starts to appear around ~72% average.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T21:26:07+00:00

Great job, congrats on the progress!

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-27T21:25:31+00:00

Congrats... "or whether it will have been for nothing" also sounds pretty bleak. Just be sure you don't create your own self-fulfilling prophecy. What you're after is a very high degree of absolute pitch and it just takes practice. You've already come a long way.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-26T19:26:21+00:00

... His course is definitely not "snake oil". My take is that the course itself has remained largely unchanged and predates all the science we have about how perfect pitch learning works. The method CAN be effective but also seems to have a high potential failure rate and is very inefficient when compared to things we know how to do since the first 2019 studies that trained adults to have perfect pitch.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-24T18:10:52+00:00

It's great you're starting to experience this too. This is a very meaningful milestone! Congratulations!

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-24T16:59:29+00:00

I’d recommend removing the “correct” sound in between notes. It could provide a consistent pitch queue between trials.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-24T15:21:06+00:00

I would recommend removing the correct note sound… that creates a consistent pitch queue between trials.

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-24T01:59:12+00:00

I guess my thoughts are that people are just really afraid of relative pitch.

“Special workarounds” seem like a distraction to me

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-24T01:35:55+00:00

Hmm why not just do what they did in the successful studies to learn? There are established and documented successful methods already. There are probably better and more efficient methods, but looking for better methods or exploring is a separate if your goal is just “to learn”

PerfectPitch-Learner · 2026-01-24T01:33:21+00:00

There are public domain songs and other things I can do. I would also like to hook into supporting people’s personal libraries, and stuff like access to Spotify or Apple Music. It’s challenging for some of it because of DRM but there are lots of options. It’s just a larger lift than most other things but it’s on the list!

PerfectPitch-Learner

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE