To complement our focus this month on choral singing, we turn our technophilic attention to improving our sight-singing abilities with a review of The Pure Pitch Method. This downloadable program by Ryan Cameron aims to train you, the music-theory challenged classical singer, in the elusive skill of pitch perfection.
A better-known program, David Lucas Burge’s Perfect Pitch, has been training wannabe pitch masters for 27 years, with mixed results. I remember sitting in my high school music theory class, and, as a class, listening to the introduction of the tapes, which one of the more zealous students had brought in to share. All I recall was that the concept had something to do with hearing the different colors inherent in the varied notes and keys, and how to base your recognition of the pitches on that difference in timbre. I also remember that the author got you really psyched up about his system, but that the student who had used the system said it wasn’t as easy as the author made it sound.
That class trained me well to recognize intervals—to identify a perfect fifth, a major seventh, even intervals spanning over an octave—and, finally, to sing them on command. This turned out to be the most useful thing I learned in high school. I became an excellent sight-reader and a quick study once I got to college and then to the real world. I couldn’t believe that my colleagues hadn’t learned to recognize a perfect fourth on the page and sing “Here comes the bride” in your mind to get to the next note.
The Pure Pitch program is designed to train you in this skill, with the added enticement of developing perfect pitch.
As with the Burge program, the introductory tracks and paragraphs were intriguing enough to carry my attention over to the next lesson. As opposed to Burge, the author advises you to listen for the pitch behind the tone, to strip away the timbre of the instruments and focus on the frequency of the pitch.
I moved onto the lessons eagerly. My relative pitch is very good, but I’ve never had perfect pitch. Perfect pitch seemed like one of those things you can either come by easily, by acquiring it at an early age, or with painstaking effort in adulthood, such as foreign language fluency or immense wealth.
The 39 lessons are divided into five mp3s each—the first 21 specializing in one interval, from a minor second to an augmented thirteenth, and the remaining 18 focusing on chords.
In the first section of the lesson, the author plays the featured interval, beginning sequentially on every note in the chromatic scale, starting with C and ending at the B above. That is, in the chapter on the minor third, he plays a C to an E-flat, a C-sharp to an E-natural, a D to an F, and so on until he reaches B to D. Then you move on to the next portion of the lesson.
This seemed a little tedious to me, but I also saw the point. Relative pitch training wants you to identify the interval as the interval, no matter where in the key it falls. In relative pitch, it’s the distance between the two pitches that matters, not the pitches themselves. As the name would imply, this is not the case with perfect pitch. If you are relying on perfect pitch, a D to a G sounds very different from an F-sharp to a B (or so I theorize). To the rest of us mere mortals, one sounds lower and the other higher, but we don’t concern ourselves with much besides that.
Ryan Cameron is trying to train us to hear the way a person with perfect pitch hears. He doesn’t tell us that a major sixth sounds like the “NBC” chime—he wants us to memorize the notes for their own sakes.
The second section of the lesson is “Interval Comparison.” Cameron plays two sets of intervals—say, a major third and a major second—starting on different pitches. Your job is not necessarily to identify the precise interval, but simply to ascertain which is the greater jump.
I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that wants to call out “minor sixth!” each time I hear it, and I felt like I needed a bigger challenge, so I just wrote down what the interval was anyway. I’m not sure if this detracted somehow from the effectiveness of the exercise, but I enjoyed the extra practice.
The third part of the lesson is the official “Interval Identification” exercise. In this exercise, as you can probably guess from the title, you identify the intervals you hear—minor ninth, major seventh, etc. Possibilities include any intervals that have been covered in the program so far, so if you’re on “major sixth,” you could hear anything from a unison up to a major sixth.
In the fourth part of the lesson the perfect pitch training begins. A note is played—either a C, your “primary anchor note,” or, in later lessons, a G, your “secondary anchor note”—over and over again, for two minutes, with silence in between, during which you are instructed to hear the note ringing in your head. This part of the lesson is meant for you to memorize a pitch, and to practice what the program calls “audiation,” the ability to hear notes in your head.
In the fifth and final section you pretend you have perfect pitch. Your anchor note is played again, and then you have to identify the notes played after it.
The first several times I did this exercise, I sort of cheated. I identified the notes by the intervals between them, not by their relation to the anchor tone, which I had supposedly memorized and had ringing in my head. After a while I told myself that I was probably defeating the purpose of the exercise, and started doing it the hard way (at least for me). It was much more challenging at first, and took me some time to get used to. I found the only way I could remember my anchor tone was to repeat it in my mind after every other pitch I heard—not very efficient in the real world, but a baby step for me.
That is all there is to it. I was expecting something more thought-provoking, but it’s really just selected ear training drills. “Audiation” seems to be about just memorizing individual pitches—not through any breakthrough techniques, but the old fashioned way—working on it over and over, every day.
I can’t tell you much about the chords section of the program, or what happens if you use this program long term. I got through the first 17 lessons, then couldn’t stand the monotony anymore. I was bored. The majority of the lessons and exercises were too easy for me, and besides, I didn’t feel like I was developing perfect pitch. With effort I could keep the anchor tones in my mind for the fifth exercise of each lesson, but the memory didn’t carry over after I was done. I would try to “guess” the C or G anchor tone before it was played, and while I was always close, my batting average did not improve as my studies progressed.
I already had a very good sense of pitch before I began testing this product. I’m an anomaly: I don’t have absolute pitch, but when I burst into song unaccompanied I almost always start on the right note.
In light of my limited work with this program, I’m not in a position to judge outright whether it works. The author suggests that you go through the lessons cumulatively. That is, if you are on day seven, you should do lessons one through seven. I certainly didn’t have the patience to take it that slowly. I was breezing through the lessons but not managing to memorize pitches for long enough after hearing them. It might work if you really took time throughout your day to “audiate” your pitches in your mind and took the time to constantly check yourself.
The exercises were very commonsensical, so The Pure Pitch Method doesn’t seem to be much of a method at all, but rather just exercises you know you should be doing anyway. They are certainly worth doing if you want to improve your sight-reading skills, but you don’t need to spend $97 on a set of mp3s to do that. You can do interval recognition with a friend at an instrument, or even by yourself, striking notes on a piano with your eyes closed. As for audiation, you can visualize and try to memorize an A, C, or other pitch of choice by yourself. Just make sure you do it every day, multiple times a day. Maybe—no guarantees, but maybe—you’ll one day achieve absolute pitch.
If you don’t have a friend who will play intervals for you, or you want to have the exercises in a handy format you can listen to on your iPod, you might head to www.purepitchmethod.com and give the product a try. It’s no shortcut, but we all know that those don’t work anyway.
