Teaching perfect pitch

Last updated on: July 31, 2009 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Teaching perfect pitch 2009-07-31T06:00:37-04:00 Gene Veith

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A Japanese music teacher named Kazuko Eguchi has devised a way to teach children younger than 4 years old perfect pitch:

The few who are born with perfect pitch say notes have a concrete identity and presence, almost like colors, and being able to intuitively recognize them gives music an almost three-dimensional quality. . . .

It is widely accepted that you cannot learn perfect pitch as an adult. But your child, it appears, can. . . .

The Eguchi Method is used by more than 800 teachers around Japan to teach perfect pitch to very young children, claiming a success rate of almost 100 percent for those who start before they are 4 years old. At the end of the training, which starts by matching chords with colored flags, a teacher will play random notes on the piano and the child, without looking, can identify them. . . .

The teacher starts by playing the three-note C major chord on a piano, and the child is instructed to raise a red flag. (It doesn’t have to be red, or even a flag; any simple symbol will do.) At home, the parent carries on the instruction by playing the C chord and the child, sitting where he cannot see the keyboard, raises the red flag. They do this a few times every day.

After a couple of weeks, a second chord and flag are added. Now the child has to raise a yellow flag for an F major chord, and the red for a C. Then a third and fourth chord join the mix. Eventually all the white-key chords are associated with a colored flag, then all those with black keys. The child names the chord only by its color.

Training sessions are meant to be quite short, a few minutes each, but repeated frequently. Chords are played in random sequence, never in the same order, to prevent the child from identifying any chord by its relation to another.

Later, the child calls out the individual notes that make up the chord. For C major, which is C-E-G, or do-mi-so, the child raises the red flag and says, “red, do-mi-so,” for example.

Eventually, the parent or teacher, after playing the chord, takes the highest note and plays it separately. The child names the chord, the individual notes, and then upon hearing the single note, identifies that one.

Beginning with chords, rather than individual notes, works better, according to practitioners, because it is like learning a person’s face rather than just the eyes.

Notice that this ties in to classical education: very young children learn at the “grammar” stage. Just as they have the remarkable power to learn their own language, they have the power to learn the basic rules and elements of other realms of knowledge, including the grammar of music. Have any of you had experience with the Eguchi method?

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