Mastery
18 of your last 20
A lesson is done when you can do it reliably, not when you've seen it once. The meter beside every lesson shows how close you are.
A course in pure sine tones
How far can your ear go?
Perfect Pitch Lab is a nine-stage ear training course built on sine waves. It starts with which of two notes is higher and goes as deep as the research does: differences of a few cents, melodic dictation, and absolute pitch learned as an adult.
The course
Nine stages, thirty-two lessons
Master a lesson by getting 18 of your last 20 answers right. Every lesson you finish joins your daily review, where it comes back mixed in with the others just as you start to forget it.
0/10
Start with Higher or lower
Ten minutes a day is the goal. Stage 1 is free with no account.
Stage 1 · Foundations
Higher or lower
Was the second note higher or lower?
Press Play to hear the first question. Headphones help: low sine waves are quiet on phone speakers.
How deep it goes
The rabbit hole, measured
Ear training has no single finish line, but research gives some useful markers along the way. This is what is known about each depth, and where the course takes you.
Surface
Higher or lower
People without musical training typically notice pitch differences of roughly 10–25 cents (a cent is 1/100 of a semitone). Trained musicians get down to about 2 cents. In one study, non-musicians reached musician-level thresholds after 4–8 hours of practice. Review
Stages 1–2
Scale degrees
Hearing each note by its role in a key is the core of relative pitch, and it's what most musicians mean by a good ear. It's learnable by anyone, and it transfers to every instrument and every key.
Stages 3–5
Intervals, chords, harmony
Naming any interval, any common chord and where a chord sits in its key covers the aural skills of a typical university music degree.
Stages 6–7
Modes, chromatic notes, dictation
Writing down a melody after hearing it is where ear training becomes useful every day: learning songs by ear, transcribing solos. Conservatory courses go on to two- and three-part dictation.
Stage 8
Fine pitch and intonation
Hearing whether a note is a few cents sharp or flat is the daily skill of string players, singers and tuners. Sine waves suit this well: two slightly mistuned sines beat against each other, and you learn to hear the beating slow down as they come into tune.
Stage 9
Absolute pitch, as an adult
Long thought impossible after childhood. In one study, musicians who trained for 25 hours identified on average 7 pitches at 90% accuracy within about 2 seconds (Wong et al.). In another, some adults with strong auditory working memory reached near-genuine performance after months of training and kept it (Van Hedger et al., 2019). Not everyone gets there, so treat this stage as an experiment.
Built to stick
How the course teaches
Spacing
Review just before you forget
Finished material comes back after 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 days. Miss one and it starts over. Spaced practice beats cramming across most kinds of learning.
Interleaving
Mixed, not blocked
Review mixes chords, intervals and degrees in one run, which forces you to work out what you're hearing instead of guessing from the lesson you're in.
Contrast
Hear your mistake
When you're wrong, one tap plays what you picked next to what it really was. The difference between two close sounds is what your ear needs to learn.
Production
Sing it first
Turn on Sing it first and the answers wait two seconds while you hum the note or chord. Connecting what you hear to what you can sing is how choirs and conservatories teach.
Adaptive
Difficulty that follows you
Fine-pitch lessons use a staircase: the gap shrinks after two right answers and grows after a wrong one, settling near your real threshold. Recognition lessons ask your weak answers more often.
Spacing and interleaving are well established in learning research generally. Direct studies on ear training are few: a study on clarinet practice found interleaving helped, and the course uses both because they're cheap and they don't hurt (Carter & Grahn, 2016).
Pricing
Start free. Unlock the rest when you're ready.
Stage 1 is free, no account needed. The full course is $3.99 a month, or $39 once to keep it for good.
Free
$0forever
- Stage 1: four lessons
- Higher or lower, do–mi–sol, major and minor
- Daily review of the lessons you've finished
- No account needed
Monthly
$3.99a month
- All nine stages, thirty-two lessons
- Progress saved to your account, on any device
- Intervals, chords, harmony, modes, dictation
- Fine-pitch and absolute pitch labs
- Cancel anytime
Lifetime
$39once, yours to keep
- Everything in Monthly, for good
- Every lesson added later
- Test out of stages you already know
- Costs less than monthly after ten months
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