Training Perfect Pitch and Rhythm

Hi Friends!

Hope you're doing well. As you know music and neuroscience are two of my favorite subjects. In my most viewed blog (over 1,200 views) Music x Yoga, I began exploring this intersection. Today we're going to dive a bit deeper into two musical aspects I have, which are super rare, how they work in the brain, and how you can train your brain to develop them: Perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. My goal in this blog, as someone with both, is to explain what they are, how they work for me, how they work in the brain, and how you might be able to train your brain to develop them.

Perfect pitch to me is knowing exactly what pitch a sound I hear is, without any point of reference. If I hear a microwave or an elevator ding or a person singing, I can immediately say the pitch it's at (A, B, C#, etc.). Another element of this, at least for me, is a mental database where I can store this information and quickly connect it to other things, like what are all the songs in C Major, or E minor, etc. I only need to hear a song once for this to happen, or even a small fragment of a song. This works not just with songs, but other sounds as well.

Perfect rhythm is not nearly as well studied. Broadly speaking, it's perfect timing. If I hear people talking or a song or anything that has a pulse, as most things do, I can immediately say that's 83 beats per minute, or something like this. I can also instantly recognize accelerandos (speeding up) and ritardandos (slowing down) and the tempos associated with those. Moreover, like with the perfect pitch, my mind can pool and store that information in an easy categorizable and query-able way so if someone asks me to "mashup" two songs, I can match rhythms and pitches immediately in my brain, and even hear the mashup in my brain. This might be a bit too deep for this piece so let's carry on with some basics.

Studies suggest that perfect pitch and perfect rhythm each occur in about 1/10,000 people, so assuming independence, which isn't a sound assumption but ok, we're looking at approximately 1/100,000,000 who possess both, or 83 people in the world, which means nothing given the assumptions, no sound way to verify, etc. How Rare Is Perfect Pitch? The Science Behind It - ScienceInsights is a nice article if you want further frequency discussions. Some #TLDR takeaways are that the frequency for perfect pitch are significantly higher in those with autism and other neurodivergences and significantly higher in environments where kids learn tonal languages, like Chinese. This suggests that these superpowers can be taught and are not entirely innate as many believe. I hope to share some strategies here on how to help develop them, and honestly, these will help improve your music, processing speed, and memory retention, regardless of whether or not anything reaches the level of "perfection".

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Neuroimaging has shown us that the left planum temporale in the brain is significantly larger relatively in those of us with perfect pitch. It's already asymmetrical in people in general and focuses on fast language processing. The big difference with perfect pitch is that our brains route pitches through this part of our brains, making notes the equivalent of vowel sounds, which most are able to get perfect every time with practice and brain training.

The other piece to this is mapping. Those of us with perfect pitch have a pathway between our superior temporal gyrus, where the long-term pitch is stored, and the right prefrontal cortex, where our working memory pitch is, and we can travel this pathway super fast. This can actually be trained. Think of it like this. Most people can recognize the color black without looking at the color white first. Why should it be different between an A and a C? That said, it takes practice.

So where to start in training perfect pitch? The answer is building relative pitch, which many strong musicians have. For that you need a point of reference, say a C. Folks with relative pitch can hear a C and then go up and down half steps or whole steps to hit the other notes. That said, they can't produce that C perfectly, without that point of reference, and when they're done a song or rehearsal, they lose that sense of what the C is until they hear one again. That's why in choral music, usually the pianist will play starting notes for all the parts, or at least a starting note so people can work relatively.

Like when you're building your muscles, repetition is key. New musicians should start by learning scales. Solfege: Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do is super effective for this. The more associations you can make the better. Correlate those to notes on the staff. Correlate those to hand motions. Use online training tools and modern tech to practice relative pitch: Relative Pitch: Test and Train Your Pitch Recognition Skills. Practice. Practice. Practice. Likewise, correlate the pitches with numbers with 1 being Do. The more correlations you make, the more you're training your brain to master pitch. Practice. Makes. Perfect.

As you get better, jump around. Not literally, musically, though if you want to get in some jumping jacks go for it. Start by singing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 or some such. Once you've got that down, try 1, 3, 5, 3, 1. Keep it pattern based initially to build consistent interval training. Then work in inconsistencies as you improve to move away from repeated patterns and establish core understanding in your brain e.g. 1, 5, 3, 2, 1; 1, 2, 4, 5, 3, 1; 1, 6, 4, 2, 5, 1; etc. You'll reach the point where you can pick a random string of numbers and sing it perfectly, with practice. It also helps to correlate this training with a tuned instrument, say a piano or guitar. The more connections you can across different mediums, the better your brain will retain the info.

Note that building an understanding through numbers and solfege helps because it makes modulation easy. With enough practice it won't matter what key you're singing/playing in since you have such a deep understanding of relative pitch. Ear training is a big part of this too. Whatever sounds you hear, whatever you listen to, train your brain to associate them with pitch. Use an app to verify if you like.

Start with simple things like pop hooks or children's nursery rhymes to build the basics. The world is filled with sound and if you are intentional about listening and associating those sounds to pitch, via solfege, numbers, notes, instruments, etc. over time, perhaps, it will be so deeply ingrained in your brain that you can have that perfect pitch. As for building that mental database, we can talk more on that later, but practice, reps, and early training definitely help. For now, lots of practice and start simple and don't get frustrated! It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Switching gears to perfect rhythm, let's start with the neuroscience. The basal ganglia and cerebellum are the parts of the brain that serve as the clock. The basal ganglia are the steady pulse or metronome on a larger scale but the cerebellum is where the precision comes in, calculating millisecond intervals between notes. Like other parts of the brain, these can be trained. For me, rhythmic patterns are established in my hippocampus, which houses my long-term memory. With more practice with specific music and brain training techniques, a few of which I'll show in a sec, you can also lock in those rhythms in your hippocampus.

For me, having trained since I was a baby, I have a rhythm database I can call on whenever I want and search instantly and connect to new information. As for brain training and starting young, two themes that are getting more and more popular for brain training and musical growth, the key is growing the corpus callosum. This is basically a bunch of nerves that connect the left hemisphere which is the analytics, sequence stuff and the right hemisphere which is more creative.

So how do we train perfect rhythm? Start with your speaking voice. Try to become aware of the cadence of your speech. Try to speak in a consistent pattern and keep a beat. Rap music is a great way to hear this and practice. Sightreading practice can help immensely for trained musicians too. Train your mind in the language of quarter notes: 1, 2, 3, 4; eighth notes: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and; triplets: 1-trip-let, 2-trip-let, 3-trip-let, 4-trip-let; sixteenth notes: 1 e & a, 2 e & a, 3 e & a, 4 e & a; etc.

Once you have your basic beats down, start connecting with what you hear and build correlations with your body and mind. Tap a consistent beat while singing it. Got it? Great! Make the beat more nuanced. Keep going! Get that down then tap one beat and sing a different one. Get that down, keep your left hand and right hand doing different beats and your voice doing another. Add your left foot. Add your right foot. This may sound simple but it's really challenging and requires lots of time and practice to master.

All this training will also improve your processing speed and ability to quickly assess whether anything is off. Most human beings' threshold for detecting a timing inconsistency is between 10 and 30 milliseconds, or between a hundredth and three hundredths of a second. It is not bad, but when it comes to great music, we want to get that down. While most ears can't detect less than 20 millisecond deviations, mine can. Mine is well under 5ms, which is considered the threshold for "perfect rhythm".

This is also related to abilities to rapidly guess songs and mentally associate very few sounds to a broader song. Songless is a great training tool to do this and grow that mental database as well as reduce the ms in your error training. I can consistently identify songs in less than half a second and often under a tenth of a second. Start at 15s. You'd be surprised at how good you are especially if you listen to lots of music. Then reduce from there. About that. Listen to LOTS of music. Genre doesn't matter. Enjoy! Throughout my life, I've listened to an average of 10 hours of music per day, no joke. It is always on and even when it's not, it's always on in my brain, so by that metric it's 24/7/365!

Another way to practice your rhythm sense is with a metronome, which keeps a steady pulse at different beats per minute. Listen to it enough, with enough tactile reinforcement with your hands, feet, and voice, and you just might train that brain to master rhythm. Another piece to mastering rhythm is mastering silence. For example, start by clapping every beat of the metronome. Then, clap only on beats 2 and 4 each measure. Vary this as you improve. Even 5 minutes a day doing this will help your brain train. Remember, repetition is key.

Ooh here's a fun one my choir director Nathaniel does to help us get in sync rhythmically. He'll give us the beat then say clap on 5 and we need to all simultaneously clap in perfect sync on the 5th beat, counting the silence in our brain. Start with small numbers and build it out. When he said 20, not going to lie, even some awesome musicians clapped at 19. It happens to the best of us. That's why we practice. That's why we train. Give yourself some grace. As my guitar teacher Hilary often tells us during group practice: "If you go off the rhythm, stay on the train."

Let's leave this here for today. If you made it this far, congratulations! Hopefully this blog has helped you understand a little bit about perfect pitch and perfect rhythm, how it connects to our brain, and how we can train and practice to help develop some of these habits. It's really important that you don't get mad at yourself when things don't work. Getting better at music is like getting better at a language or sport. It takes a ton of training and repetition and practice. That said, it can be super fun and hopefully you give it a try! Trust me that this will help immensely in other aspect of your lives too!

That's all for today! See y'all next time! Sarang out.