Relative pitch: what it is and how to train it
The pitch skill every musician uses and anyone can improve, with a 5-question exercise.
Relative pitch is the ability to identify a note by its relation to other notes: the interval between two notes, the quality of a chord, or a note's degree in a key (do, re, mi). Unlike perfect pitch, it is trainable at any age, and it is what musicians use to play by ear, sing in tune and transcribe music.
5-question relative pitch exercise
Each question sets a key with do-mi-sol-do, then plays one more note. Name it as do, re, mi, fa or sol. The key changes every time; the sound of each degree does not.
Score: / 5 (your score updates as you answer)
What does relative pitch let you do?
- Recognise intervals: hear that two notes are a perfect fifth apart.
- Hear chord qualities: major, minor, dominant seventh.
- Follow a key: know that a note is "sol" or "ti" and where the melody wants to go.
- Play a tune by ear after hearing it, starting from any note.
Everyone starts with some
You recognise Happy Birthday whether it is sung by a child or a bass: you hear the pattern of intervals, not the exact pitches. Six-month-old infants already remember melodies this way: they recognised a familiar tune transposed to another key (Plantinga & Trainor, 2005).
Can relative pitch be trained?
Yes, and quickly at first. Untrained listeners needed only 4 to 8 hours of practice to reach classical musicians' thresholds for telling two pitches apart (Micheyl et al., 2006). Musical-interval discrimination also improved with training, and the gain carried over to naming intervals (Little et al., 2019). Compare that with absolute pitch, where only some adults reach high accuracy after about 32 hours of intensive training (Van Hedger et al., 2019).
How to train relative pitch
| Stage | What to train | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Higher or lower, same or different | Two notes, then short melodies |
| 2 | Scale degrees (do, re, mi...) | Hear a key, name the last note, like the exercise above |
| 3 | Intervals | Link each interval to a song you know |
| 4 | Chord qualities | Major vs minor first, then sevenths |
| 5 | Progressions and melodies | Hear I, IV, V; write down short tunes |
Frequently asked questions
Can relative pitch be learned?
Yes, at any age. Pitch discrimination and interval recognition both improve with practice; in one study, untrained listeners reached musicians' pitch-discrimination thresholds after 4 to 8 hours of training (Micheyl et al., 2006).
How long does it take to develop relative pitch?
It varies. Many learners recognise the common intervals after a few weeks of short daily practice; fluent hearing of chords and progressions takes months. Regular short sessions work better than rare long ones.
Do I already have relative pitch?
Almost certainly some: if you recognise Happy Birthday whether it is sung high or low, you are using relative pitch. Even six-month-old babies recognise melodies this way.
Is relative pitch enough to play by ear?
Yes. Playing by ear means finding notes from their relation to the key and to each other, which is exactly relative pitch. You only need one reference note to start.
Keep going
Sources
- Plantinga, J. & Trainor, L. J. (2005). Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code. Cognition, 98(1), 1–11. Six-month-olds recognised a familiar melody by its relative pitch, whatever key it was played in.
- Micheyl, C., Delhommeau, K., Perrot, X. & Oxenham, A. J. (2006). Influence of musical and psychoacoustical training on pitch discrimination. Hearing Research, 219(1–2), 36–47. Untrained listeners needed 4 to 8 hours of practice to reach the pitch-discrimination thresholds of classical musicians.
- Little, D. F., Cheng, H. H. & Wright, B. A. (2019). Inducing musical-interval learning by combining task practice with periods of stimulus exposure alone. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81. Musical-interval discrimination improved with training that mixed practice and passive listening, and transferred to interval identification.
- Van Hedger, S. C., Heald, S. L. M. & Nusbaum, H. C. (2019). Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults. PLOS ONE, 14(9), e0223047. Six adults, about 32 hours of training over 8 weeks; two reached accuracy comparable to people with absolute pitch, one passed every test; most improved only partly.