I was surprised, that my brainstorming could have actually been tried before, so I looked into the paper, but I could only find that they used different instruments and added noise. Clearly, 1000ms of noise is not much. I think I could remember a note after hearing 1000ms of noise.
Nonetheless, if volunteers with a limited amount of time and motivation can show an improvement, somebody with dedication and lots of time, can learn it too. I heard an anecdote of an old punk band lead singer who claimed, that after 30 years of playing, he finally learned absolute pitch. But that wasn’t the question. The question is, how to make learning more efficient.
Assuming that, in order to learn perfect pitch, one must train differently than to learn relative pitch:
Minimize the benefit of a reference tone by keeping the musical interval (distance between notes) big enough.
Add pauses and noise between notes, to remove the reference note from memory. Spread the training over the whole day.
To allow for immediate feedback, change other characteristics of the sound (e.g. harmonics) to make relative pitch less effective.
Add wrong tones to the exercise. Learn to find the correct note out of a sample with wrong tones. Start with learning a single note.
It’s been done. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/
I was surprised, that my brainstorming could have actually been tried before, so I looked into the paper, but I could only find that they used different instruments and added noise. Clearly, 1000ms of noise is not much. I think I could remember a note after hearing 1000ms of noise. Nonetheless, if volunteers with a limited amount of time and motivation can show an improvement, somebody with dedication and lots of time, can learn it too. I heard an anecdote of an old punk band lead singer who claimed, that after 30 years of playing, he finally learned absolute pitch. But that wasn’t the question. The question is, how to make learning more efficient.