An elusive musical gift could be at children’s fingertips

TOKYO — If you could give your child the gift of perfect pitch — the ability to identify a note simply by hearing it — would you? 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.

To put it simply, “If you taste a dish and you can name every ingredient — that is like having perfect pitch,” said pianist and music teacher Chizuko Ozawa.

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

Kazuko Eguchi started developing a method 40 years ago, when she was a young college music instructor frustrated both by her own lack of perfect pitch and the weaknesses she saw in her students. She attributed the problem to poor early training.

U.S. piano teachers will get a glimpse of her eventual solution this week. Tomoko Kanamaru, pianist and assistant professor of music at The College of New Jersey, will give a presentation titled “Can Perfect Pitch be Taught? Introduction to the Eguchi Method” at the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy in Lombard, Ill.

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.

Once learned, perfect pitch stays with a child for life, the teachers believe. But attaining it is not quick or easy, even for a 3-year-old. It also requires a committed and patient parent willing to invest a few minutes several times a day for up to two years. And it is all separate from learning to play the piano or any other instrument. In fact, the child never touches the keyboard during these ear training sessions.

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.

The Eguchi Method — a course for children that focuses on the piano and includes perfect pitch development as part of ear training — differs from other pitch training by focusing initially on chords instead of single notes. Eguchi says that starting with notes instead of chords leads some children to identify the note by its relative position to another note. Ozawa says remembering chords is easier for children; she compares it to remembering a face rather than just the eyes.

But other than the perceptual satisfaction of having perfect pitch, what are the benefits?

Eugene Pridonoff, a pianist and artist in residence at the University of Cincinnati who visits Eguchi’s Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo twice a year as a guest piano teacher, says he can see the results from early ear training.

“I’ll explain and demonstrate: They understand, are able to absorb, hear it and immediately reproduce it on their piano,” he said. “These kids were remarkably consistent and remarkably quick in that respect — in how sensitive their ears are to nuance.

“It’s clear that the musical ears of these kids are so well developed. Is it the Eguchi Method? To a great degree, it’s because they start so young,” he said. “That sort of discerning differences in groups of chords has to be activating brain connections beyond what most kids are getting.”

The music school has about 1,500 students, from toddlers to high-school teen-agers. The ideal starting age is 2½ to 3, and training is not effective after 8, said Kanamaru, the College of New Jersey professor.

A recent study by Ken’ichi Miyazawa and Yoko Ogawa published in the journal Music Perception looks at the incidence of perfect pitch among Japanese children who started music lessons at age 4 at an unnamed music school “run by the largest music corporation in Japan.” They reported that the accuracy of pitch improved from near-chance at age 4 to around 80 percent at age 7 and did not improve much after that.

Eguchi, 67, who is confined to a wheelchair because she suffers from acute articular rheumatism and can no longer play the piano or teach, said in a telephone interview that because of her illness, she was only able to give her daughter, Ayako, partial training.

But her grandchildren have learned at her music school.

“Ayako’s daughter can harmonize to the melody very smoothly. It’s almost like when she sees the music, she hears it,” Eguchi said. “She has a good ability to make judgments in sound. She can come up with different harmonization than she sees. When the key changes, it is very natural to her.”

Pridonoff says he is impressed with Eguchi’s success in Japan. But he is not sure how adaptable the method is to American society. “Very few children in the U.S. are able to start so young with such intensive guidance in the combination of teacher and parent,” he said. “What we have seen in Japan is that the mother is working with those children on a regular basis every day in addition to their having lessons.”

He added: “In our culture, in many families both parents are working, and we seem to want our children to be well-rounded, involved in a multitude of activities. It is rare in our country for children to start to specialize at such a young age.”

See video of flag training at http://www.washingtonpost.com/science.

To see if you have perfect pitch, Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego, has a test at http://deutsch.ucsd.edu, clicking on the article “Perfect Pitch: Language Wins Out Over Genetics” and then going to the bottom of the page. Or go directly to http://www.acoustics.org/press/157th/deutsch3.htm.