Acoustic Learning,
Inc.
Absolute Pitch research, ear training and more
The Ear Training Companion™ v6.1 will help you learn absolute and relative pitch. This new patent pending method is the result of years of research into absolute pitch, education theory, and perceptual development.
"Your work is awesome. I've had much better result by far than anything else I have tried." - Andy G.
The Ear Training Companion™ v6.1 software from Acoustic Learning Inc. provides a comprehensive curriculum of lessons, disguised as four entertaining games, which lead you through the process of learning absolute pitch, intervals, scale degrees, and chord structures. It's your tutor, trainer, partner, and testing machine, all in one.
Everything is organized for you, and all you have to do is play.
Screenshot from Absolute Pitch Avenue.
How does absolute pitch work? Every tone has its own essential sound-- the "C-ness" or "G-ness" which defines the pitch-- and hearing this essential sound is how absolute listeners identify the tone. This essential sound is called chroma. Learning absolute pitch means learning to hear chroma.
"I have been working on developing perfect pitch for about a year with no results. (I am 19). Anyway, the other day I stumbled into your AP [software]... In just a week or less I have experienced AMAZING results. ...Even with this small amount of time, I have really been able to hear the C pitch in the music that I commonly listen to. Also, I can sing a C at any time of the day (including when I wake up). This is something that a full year of working on other methods could not do. I feel that I am actually progressing with your method, rather than just trying to hear things that are impossible to hear (like that the F-Sharp is "Twangy" and such).
"Also, today (after just waking up) I went into my bathroom to brush my teeth. My toothbrush is one of those sonicare "sonic" toothbrush thingys. When you turn it on, it vibrates. For some reason, when I was brushing my teeth I actually listened to the sound the toothbrush was making. It sounded like a C to me somehow. I became excited and took my toothbrush to my piano to check and see if it was really resonating at a C. Sure enough...it was...leaving me stunned. NEVER before had I been able to just hear a random appliance in my house and determine the pitch."
-Bret M."I used [another absolute-pitch training product] and though I didn't get very far in it, I did not notice anything close to what I've noticed from using your Ear Training Companion. It's like the quality that identifies a pitch doesn't vary based on the octave... I don't really pick with a conscious thought of the octave, it's just I hear C.
I kept listening to sounds that didn't have C, thinking is there a higher or lower C in there? I sort of thought I would have to interpret the pitch as a higher or lower version or something. But then I realized that the ones that I was getting right were different octaves, and the same pitch sound was jumping out at me." - Brian H.
By playing the game, you will automatically learn to hear chroma. You won't have to struggle to hear it, you don't have to wonder what it is, you don't have to figure anything out. You won't even know you're learning to hear chroma-- until you discover yourself listening to it!
The Ear Training Companion works by making your brain do what it does naturally.
Here are three shapes that all have one thing in common.
How long does it take you to see what it is?
You didn't even have to know what you were looking for-- your mind
found it automatically.
It's so easy, you may have thought this was a trick question. But
it's not. This is how your brain works.
And once you see that absolute feature, then you can recognize it no matter where it appears.
This is how the Ear Training Companion teaches you to hear pitch chroma and to have true absolute listening. It's just the way your brain works.
And only the patent pending Ear Training Companion method does it this way.
ETC teaches you to automatically know every pitch, no matter where you hear it.
"I love this game. I can hear the 1st target pitch in all kinds of situations already. When I turn on my computer or swap between users the chord and the theme melody have the target pitch in them. I can hear these even after being away from the computer overnight. I am onto the second level now (the blue ones). Thanks for writing this programme." - Barry B.
"I hear C jump out at me every time. It would make itself apparent immediately, no matter what was being played. Because it was only the one pitch, [ETC] seems like it prepares you for hearing this stuff in the real world. Whereas I do [another method], from the beginning you're thinking about 2 pitches, and then 3 and 5; lol, no way that I learn them, instead I'm stuck guessing. But when I go to do G [in ETC], C's still jump out at me." - Brian H.
Because the Ear Training Companion thoroughly trains you to hear one pitch at a time, you'll find more and more pitches "jumping out" at you, until you've learned all 12 tones of the chromatic scale.
Absolute pitch is not just a party trick of being able to "name notes." With solid ear training in absolute and relative pitch, you can easily pick apart any piece of music and know exactly what you've got.
"I've found [ETC] extremely helpful and have had many musicians I've played with commenting on what a marvelous natural gift I have in my ear! I have to explain it's not natural I worked my a** off at it!!! I am now at the stage where I can hear almost any melody (within reason) and play it back immediately on the guitar or piano. This gives me wonderful freedom in playing, and it is in great part due to your software that I have achieved this level of skill, so thank you! I hope others can benefit from it in the same way." - Kyle K.
The Ear Training Companion automatically re-trains your ear to hear what you never knew was there. The Ear Training Companion is your key to a whole new dimension of music.
"I just purchased your ETC... I've read most of your research
on your excellent site as well. You have cleared up much of the
mystery surrounding absolute pitch, something *** does not do.
I've worked through most of *** course but stopped after about
2/3 through. My biggest obstacle was the timbre of the piano. To
practice hearing pitch with different instruments is what makes
ETC a great tool; I'm excited about working with your program
for this very reason."
- Paul Minotto, conductor,
Prime
Time Sublime Community Orchestra
"I would like to say that after having viewed many dozens of
websites on absolute pitch, yours is by far the most
comprehensive and well put-together... It has been a tremendous
help and relief to be able to read its contents. Keep up the
great work."
- Matthew N.
"I started to work with *** Course months ago and
I began to feel that there's no longer development in my
learning. But reading your critical comments and impressions
motivated me enormously! Your intelligence is astonishing! Now,
knowing that I'm no longer dependent on something mystical,
absolute pitch is again attainable for me."
- Andreas
Iancu, guitarist and pianist, Germany
"I have learned an immense amount from your website, and want
to thank you for the valuable information."
- Citar player
and composer, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
"I have recently purchased your software and I am quite
impressed with all it can do for my absolute pitch
ear-training!! A while ago (about 2 years ago) I ordered ***
absolute pitch course but, I was a little disappointed with the
course for its vague explanation of what "absolute pitch" is and
how to learn it. I was particularly confused about what to
listen for in the tones!! *** kept emphasizing that the
colors would somehow all sink in after a certain amount of time
but my question was, 'How, if I don't know what to listen
for??'"
- Mishka Roth, pianist and piano teacher, France
"Thank you for such an outstanding resource. I'm extremely
impressed with your software program as well as your website.
It's a treasure trove, seriously, for anyone interested in
educating themselves about how we perceive and experience
pitch."
- Mark S.
You will hear recognizable results very quickly, and your perception and performance will continue to improve as your ear learns more and more every day. If you aren't satisfied, for any reason, your purchase is protected by a 100% money-back guarantee.
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Someone in the forum just asked how this Absolute Pitch Blaster thing is supposed to work, anyway. My immediate reaction was surprise-- hadn't he read the website?-- but then it occurred to me that, although the development of APB's principles are scattered all around the website, and although I planned from the start to use Phase 12 to explain the method, I hadn't yet written an article for the specific purpose of describing How It Works. So here it is.
Absolute listeners identify a pitch by its "chroma"; therefore, the key to absolute listening is pitch chroma. Chroma, vaguely described, is what a pitch sounds like. We've known since the 1900s that chroma is the absolute quality of a musical pitch, and every absolute-pitch training method since the 1960s has attempted to train students to hear pitch chroma. But to teach anything, you've got to be able to define it. Otherwise you can only give hints and suggestions, and hope that something clicks-- but then if something does click, there's no way to know what actually clicked!** Chroma is a subjective, psychological quality, and that's the main problem: nobody has ever been able to determine exactly what "chroma" is. Until now.
I have a definition of chroma. I see chroma as the psychological interpretation of a pitch frequency, and this knowledge is the core of the APB training method. Because of this definition, APB can ignore all the psychological touchy-feely sensory-awareness garbage, and solve the problem directly, by teaching you to recognize pitch frequency. (That's why APB is patent pending.) Nobody knows what "chroma" is, psychologically-- but we know exactly what a "spectral frequency" is, so APB can use established principles of perceptual learning to make you hear it. Equally important, we know what a spectral frequency isn't, so it's possible to know what APB should not teach.
So that's what it does. Now how does it work?
Here's what I wrote on the new software page, in case you hadn't seen it yet:
Here are three shapes that all have one thing in common.
How long does it take you to see what it is?
You didn't even have to know what you were looking for-- your mind found it automatically.
It's so easy, you may have thought this was a trick question. But it's not. This is how your brain works.And once you see that absolute feature, then you can recognize it no matter where it appears.
This is the principle of perceptual differentiation, and it's how APB teaches your mind to hear spectral frequency.
Spectral frequency is only one characteristic of a sound. Even a seemingly simple sound like a single tone is composed of multiple characteristics like duration, volume, and intensity, and musical tones are additionally surrounded by timbres and overtones and harmonies, and all of these are bundled together into our mind's normal comprehension of "pitch". APB works by placing a pitch into increasingly complex situations so that, bit by bit, your mind strips away everything that isn't chroma.
Here's a more complete visual analogue to the APB process.
This picture contains the "target."
(Notice that, at this point, you have no idea what the "target" actually is.)
The "target" is in all of these pictures. Can you find it?
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By now you should have a pretty clear idea of what the
target is, so that when you see this image
you can spot the target easily.
Also, when you were trying to figure out what the "target" was, you probably compared the new images to each other, yes? If you didn't just limit yourself to the original image, you would've found the process even easier. This is a natural learning impulse, and it is the purpose of the blue buttons in APB.
I can use the same pictures to illustrate traditional note-naming methods. By "traditional methods" I mean any method which requires you to identify pitches by name.
Here's how it works:
This is a "C". Memorize this image.
Here are more images. Please identify the "C" whenever you see it.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
If you successfully memorized the "C", you could easily recognize and identify #2 and #6. But all these images are "C"!
You'd never learn to identify the other ones as "C", because they obviously don't look like the original image. You might hesitantly select #5 because it's sort of like the memorized image, but the better you memorized "C" the less likely you'd be to pick #5.
This is why someone can learn identify and recall musical tones extremely well, using traditional "perfect pitch" training, but then find that ability to be musically useless. When you memorize tones you are not learning to hear pitch; in fact, from that training you never learn which of a tone's many characteristics is the actual pitch. (I wrote a bit more about this in the forum.) This is why Absolute Pitch Blaster never asks you to identify tones, and never asks you to name pitches. Trying to name pitches only encourages tone memorization, and tone memorization is counterproductive to learning absolute pitch.
Were you wondering why, in this example, I didn't just show the actual target as the "C" to be memorized? That's because a pitch frequency only exists inside of a musical sound. A pitch never appears by itself; it always appears together with other tonal characteristics. You can't separate it; even a sine wave has duration and amplitude (at the very least).
Ear Training Companion™ is a trademark of Acoustic Learning, Inc.
