Functional Ear Trainer vs WhichPitch

Have you (or maybe one of your friends) ever wanted to learn to transcribe or play music by ear? It is so important for a musician to know what you are hearing. A good musical ear helps when you are composing, improvising, transcribing melodies, or playing with others. Most likely you have already tried different programs to learn to recognize intervals or even to acquire perfect pitch. However, although such programs develop your ear, but can you actually play any melody you hear as soon as you listen to it? Imagine you could understand music... It is like when somebody is talking to you, you not only hear pleasant sounds, but you recognize words and their meaning. One day I came across Alain Benbassat's program called "Functional Ear Trainer" and have been using it ever since. It is based on Alain's method to learn to recognize tones. The main difference between the Functional Ear Trainer and other methods is that it teaches you to distinguish between tones in the context of a particular musical key. You begin to recognize the role (or function) of each tone in this key, which is incredibly similar to its role in other keys of the same scale. And it is *guaranteed* anyone can gradually develop this skill. It does not matter: - who you are - an absolute beginner in music or a virtuoso professional musician; - how old you are - a 3 yo kid or a 90+ adult; - what musical instrument you play (you don't even have to play one). The only requirement is to practice for 10 minutes a day. I was so excited about this ear trainer that I have developed a mobile app based on the Alain Benbassat method. I hope you will find it useful.

People used to believe that perfect pitch (more correctly known as "absolute pitch") is a skill you either were born with (or maybe acquired as a young child) or not--that it couldn't be developed later on. But this has been proven incorrect! Studies show that even adults can learn absolute pitch. Ask AI for an up-to-date summary of the evidence on this. The problem is, we don't yet know the best way to learn it. But we do know that the key is learning to ignore a note's pitch and instead focus on identifying it by its "colour" (or, chroma). Each of the 12 notes has a distinctive chroma, which is always present in the sound of the note regardless of which octave it's in. This chroma is not hidden; you always hear it. To demonstrate this, play a bunch of different octaves of the same note on any selection of instruments. Their pitches are all different, and each instrument sounds different, but the notes all sound the same, don't they? That sameness is the chroma. For some reason, most people's brains choose to simply focus on the pitch rather than the chroma when they're processing notes. Therefore, to learn absolute pitch, you need to train your brain to focus on the chroma rather than the pitch when processing notes. There are a couple challenges to doing this: (1) getting distracted by the timbre of the sound you're hearing and (2) relative pitch. WhichPitch is the only absolute pitch trainer that effectively helps you overcome these two challenges, and the method used is explained thoroughly in the How This App Works page in the app. Gradually--through consistent practice with WhichPitch over weeks or months--your brain will shift to processing notes based on their chroma rather than their pitch. After that, acquiring full absolute pitch is a simple matter of memorizing which chroma goes with which note. You may initially feel like you are making no progress, but be patient--a lot of the learning is happening subconsciously. Then, one day, you'll realize that each note is starting to sound completely distinct and unique. That's when you'll know you have succeeded at starting to shift your brain to processing notes using chromas rather than pitch. Technical notes (pun intended): The notes in this app use the A440 pitch standard with twelve-tone equal temperament, and the instruments' sounds are physically modeled rather than sampled (meaning they are computer-generated sounds, not recorded real instruments) to avoid any imperfections that could give non-chroma-related hints about which note you are hearing.