Since launching HarmoniQ I’ve been closely following numerous learners via email and Reddit, and eight of those users have already achieved their perfect pitch goals. As I’ve tracked user progress, a common path emerged: specific lessons, breakthroughs, and stumbling blocks that many users are sharing along the way.
🎧 Lesson 1: “Am I cheating?”
Early on, several users mentioned they felt like they were “cheating,” when doing some lessons. HarmoniQ’s design uses evenly spaced intervals to avoid relative pitch interference, and early users didn’t find this clever, they found it startling. In tritone lessons, in particular, when users raced through after the first response, getting everything correct, they wondered if the app were just giving them the answers.
After some investigation it appeared these users were actually learning to leverage the chroma identity of the notes they were practicing. With a consistent interval and only two note options there was nothing for relative pitch to do. Learners defaulted to asking, “Is this the same or different?” Users often couldn’t name the note without thinking about it, but they still knew the answer because they could visualize the keyboard or in-app color scheme. That intuition kicked in fast.
🎯 Lesson 2: Precision Accelerator
The tritones section turned out to be even more useful than anticipated. I expected tritones units to gently guide users toward chroma awareness, but these users began recognizing chroma through differentiation. Learners in the tritones units could not reliably distinguish C♯ from D, but could always tell that a C♯ was not G. This was consistent across tritone pairs.
I asked early users to regularly try lessons with all 12 notes to see how they scored. The results from users in the tritones section, when tested with all 12 notes, appeared to be entirely random. This was expected, considering those users weren’t expected to be able to complete a lesson asking for all 12 notes. Once users moved on to the thirds units, however, I noticed something very interesting: user precision increased even if their score didn’t.
Even though the difference in accuracy score was minor, the distance users guessed from the correct note improved significantly. Users who completed the thirds units were almost always within three semitones of the correct answer, users who had completed the minor thirds units were within a whole step and so on. Once users got to lessons with all 12 notes, they were reliably able to identify every note. This pattern also seems to prove users aren’t relying on rote memorization when learning with HarmoniQ.
⚠️ Lesson 3: Advanced Lessons Are Too Hard
Here are the most common observations about advanced lessons:
- Users often start by answering too quickly, rather than breaking the lesson down to determine the correct responses. This usually led to guessing with little or no progress.
- Users often try to deliberately use only perfect pitch. One of the goals of the advanced lessons is to help keep relative pitch and perfect pitch in balance when you use them together, so ignoring relative pitch, even if you can, is counterproductive.
- Many users hear two notes yet can’t tell which is higher. This was frustrating for users, but it’s also a common complaint coming from people with perfect pitch that lack relative pitch training. Learners were able to overcome this with consistent practice.
These observations have already informed changes to the advanced lessons to make them less frustrating and more useful to learners, though there’s still a ways to go.
🛡️ Lesson 4: Timed Trials and Confidence
Timed trials were polarizing. Users who attempted them too early ended up avoiding them because they couldn’t finish trials due to low accuracy. When I asked users who had reached thirds to revisit timed tritone lessons, the trials suddenly clicked and their accuracy was strong enough to complete the lessons.
Time trials are about speed training, and they aren’t useful until the user’s accuracy is high enough. I’m reconsidering how and when to unlock timed trials, maybe only after reaching a sustainable accuracy threshold.
🧠 Lesson 5: The Biggest Barrier Is Overthinking
Psychologically, one of the biggest obstacles to learning perfect pitch should be the belief that, “you can’t learn perfect pitch.” Surprisingly, this was not an issue for any of the HarmoniQ users I’ve been following, though in retrospect it also makes sense that people that don’t believe you can learn perfect pitch haven’t been trying the app. The real blocker for HarmoniQ users has been overthinking. Users who try to logically deduce notes often fall back into relative-pitch strategies or outright guessing.
The solution? Stop thinking. If you want to learn, you need to engage your intuitive brain. Try just answering the tritone question: “same or different.” That approach made chroma recognition start to take shape immediately, even for users who initially struggled with overthinking.
🚀 How Can You Learn Faster?
Answer more quickly and stop trying to think about it. If you’re early in HarmoniQ or haven’t started yet, try the tritone approach: pick a reference note, then ask, “Is this the same?” Even without naming, you’re building chroma intuition. From there, progression happens naturally.
I’d like to extend a huge thanks to everyone who’s shared their journey with me. Your feedback makes learning easier and more fun every day. Ready to start your own perfect pitch journey? Download HarmoniQ now and experience the difference for yourself.