Tone - Learn Perfect Pitch!

Studies have suggested that we’re all born with at least the possibility of developing perfect pitch, and that it’s also an inheritable trait. Some of us have it right out of the box, while others have to work at it. Maybe, like foreign languages, if you start too late, you may never be completely perfect. And yet: What a great app! Before this, the only way to practice like this would have been to pay someone (or coerce a talented friend) to sit at a piano and play intervals and chords for you. Any pianist would suffer boredom doing it for 30 minutes straight, and they’d also start making mistakes. This app, instead, can help you keep your focus until YOU start to tire, and it has sometimes held my attention for an hour or more at a time. While I have yet to actually develop true perfect pitch, my overall sense is definitely improved. Fully perfect pitch still seems just out of reach, but maybe eventually I’ll get there. In the meantime, my relative pitch has improved tremendously, along with my general musicianship. This is an amazing tool for any musician. The younger you are to start this the better. But this writer is 62 years old and still finding it to be a great benefit.

I love music apps and this was instant love at first sight. It is so cute and so customisable. I just feel like using it all the time. Feels effortless and fun and elegant. I love the themes customisation and the sounds (cello made all the difference for me as cello player). Some minor flickering here and there but maybe cuz I’m on iOS beta. But I already stopped using it because I hate goodbyes (and we will be parting ways after my free trial ends). My biggest gripe (probably only too) is the price. Is the reason I wouldn’t give it 5 stars. I know subscription is here to stay and it helps developers to keep providing a good service. But at $99 a year for something that is a feature on many other music apps is not worth it for me. Granted this is the best looking pitch practice app I’ve ever seen in here, but I can’t justify to myself paying for a subscription for just one feature that I already have in two or three apps I paid a one-off fee. And these apps offer me a lot more features. Again, nowhere near as good looking as this, but no subscription either. I guess if there was a lifetime purchase option it would worth buying it, but again it would have to be a bit more competitive price. But it is undeniable the fact this app is gorgeous and would definitely help anyone aiming to practice pitch perfect!

As someone who has grown up around music but never had the focus to learn an instrument or sheet music, I’ve gotten by with more or less the guessing of notes and tone. However as I have an interest in learning and playing piano, being able to pick out and identify specific notes as opposed to an ambiguous melody is a challenge without learning to identify the sounds and their placement by sheet. I saw tone recommended recently and figured there was nothing to lose and more to gain, so I downloaded it and was extremely pleased with the simple yet fun way the app helps you memorize notes and tone. It’s a super simple game, and it’s a little repetitive, but personally I don’t find that a dealbreaker (heck, I can always take a break if it’s getting boring!) My only complaint is that I wish the settings were easier for my inexperienced self to understand. When I checked the settings to see how I could configure the lesson/game, my eyes started to glaze over trying to understand what it meant. I would so, so love a little mini tutorial of how to work the settings and other things like that little table of notes (idk what that does?? I’ve messed around with it and saw no change, so I’m not sure if I’m getting what that does...) That way I could use this app even more to its potential! I would really recommend this for those learning music!

I like the idea of pitch memory rather than perfect pitch. Being able to rely on yourself instead of available or non available musical instruments which may or may not be in tune.... of course A as 440 is a 20th century construct versus a 380 A in say, Bach’s day. Good relative pitch would suffice in many instances. While pitch memory is indispensable to a professional or ambitious amateur/ student. I wonder if the price isn’t discouragingly high for someone NOT making money in some portion of the industry. Three weeks of the subscription price would buy a pitch pipe as easily carry-able as a cell phone and without the problems of batteries running low. Maybe engineers, doctors and mechanics could do with perfect pitch but 1) they have machines for those diagnostics and 2) it’s an AMAZING mechanic who can diagnose an engine defect by sound. I like this idea but I’m frankly annoyed by the cost. (Not that programmers shouldn’t be paid but with a few well functioning apps and they can get a high paying software gig making more money than the best paid professional artists). I’m happy to concede the point if you can explain.... There should be theory, notation and a pitch finding function in the app for that price. Also NB this is all and only for western music and half tone scales. MUCH harder to hear for the western trained ear is Easter European and or African quarter tone scales. If someone could offer to train me to hear That, I’d pay good money for it.

I only use this app for pitch training. As an ocarinst, I need to hear when my intonation is off. Before using this app, I couldn’t tell when I was out of tune, and I couldn’t learn a piece by ear to save my life. I’ve been using this app for several weeks now, and I’ve got to say—I’m impressed! It does just what it sets out to do without extra bells and whistles. Sure, you can pay extra to change the background color. Does it prevent you from using any necessary features? Absolutely not! I like the variety of instruments you can choose from, and the user-friendly interface. You can pick which notes you’d like to play, and even choose between three different octaves! This app has everything you need! While I’m sure there’s better out there, this is simplistic and meets all my needs. I can tell when I’m playing my ocarina out of tune, and I can learn simple pieces by ear. I’m glad I decided to choose this app to practice my ear training. It’s all I need.

I appreciate that there is a 7 day trial for this, BUT I think the $99 (for a year) price tag is a little greedy—especially when the developer(when introduced in the app) writes about his love of music and wanting to help others feel the same and achieve their musical goals. Despite the high price I am willing to pay because I am a singer and I’m trying to learn piano. It means a lot to me to be able to recognize notes by sound and to read music. Since installing the app a few days ago I have been encountering an extremely frustrating glitch that is both frustrating and discouraging. I open the app, click on practice or learn and the app immediately closes. The only fix that I’ve found for this is to uninstall and reinstall the app. As you may agree this is RIDICULOUS. Am I going to want to practice knowing that when I try, the app will close repeatedly until I uninstall and reinstall? The short answer is no, and I’m certainly not going to pay $100 for this aggravation. It’s extremely disappointing too, because the app itself is great and deserves 5 stars. I hope the development team sees this review and I hope they fix this extremely annoying glitch because I can’t take it anymore. If it gets fixed I’ll stick with it. Please fix!

So this game is just what the title says it is. It doesn’t have any in app purchases as far as I can tell, and I don’t have any trouble with getting it to work. You don’t need anything else like headphones or anything. It is just perfection. I really like games like this one just because they don’t glitch out, or they don’t have a bunch of adds. In this game, I haven’t seen any adds so far which is a super good sign! This game is a game that just makes me happy. Like it not only is fun, but it is a good helper for singing or playing an instrument!!!! I really love this because it shows you stuff, and it’s super fun to do with or without friends. It’s a great time consumer. It lets you know about different tones and how that stuff works. And it looks really cool when you play. I love the time running out thing too. Like when the time plays and the light is going down, I like that. So all in all, get this game kids, or adults or anything, because it is worth it and it’s free.

I’ve only tried this for 5 minutes, but I want to do more. It starts with buttons for C, D, E, F & G on screen. To begin, touch a button to play a tone. A waveform appears as the note is sounded. As you hear the tone, you select its letter name. If you were wrong the screen turns red and the correct name appears. If you were right the screen turns green, the correct name appears and a new sound plays. If you succeed, a third tone is sounded, and so on. Soon you are paying attention to intervals. With more trials, visual feedback of the correct name flashing reinforces name and tone correlation. The green color feedback reinforces making a correct response, and negative red feedback cautions and hopefully inhibits you from repeatedly selecting that choice again. Soon you’re hearing the tones in your head. And naming them. I like this so far. We’ll see how much progress occurs after a week’s free trial. I’ll update the review then.

Perfect pitch is something some of us we’re fortunate, or unfortunate, to be given at birth. While I do admit it is helpful being able to sign and note by name at the correct pitch, and it’s also great for songwriting.. it’s also a curse sometimes. It’s almost unbearable to attend live performances the majority of the time because we can’t just “not hear” every note the artist or band painfully plays or sings just a little pitched up or down. While everyone around me is just gleefully singing along and enjoying the “raw” aspect of the live performance, I am cringing at every minor vocal pitch mistake.. or that one backup guitar player who’s A string is inadvertently out of tune a half the entire time. It’s hard to explain, but the impact of these little “mistakes” gets far more attention from my perfect pitched brain than the rest of the music. So, maybe just enjoy not having perfect pitch be part of who you are. It’s not that great, all things considered.

Amazing app for learning music note and chord recognition. You feel like you’re not learning anything at first but then you return to the piano the next day and subconsciously you’ve been building skills you never thought possible! The only feature I’d suggest from the app maker is for them to allow you to use your own instrument to answer in response to pitch or chord cues; eg if it plays and asks you to guess a certain tone (eg F sharp) the mic listens for you to (correctly) play back a note on the piano and gives you credit. The advantage of this feature is hat he learning would be more closely linked to your own instrument of choice 🎹

First of all, many people debate whether perfect pitch can be learned after the age of about 6. But there is a decent amount of literature claiming otherwise, and at this point one could find there is a trope to learning it as an adult. One of the main tenants of any practice of it, though, is constant, regular, long-form practice. Like, daily 30-minute intent practice over 10 years. That said, this app doesn’t do that, at least not in its methodology. Maybe it could work with regular, 30-min practice over many years, but the app isn’t robust enough to incite that sort of commitment out of it. As it is, it’s an excellent relative-pitch practice device. The main issue is that, once the user hears the first pitch of their practice session, the rest of the pitches from that point on are heard in relation to the first one — thus ‘relative’ pitch. The only way this could really be used for perfect pitch practice is to try at only the first pitch when you open the app, then put it away for 30 mins, listen to other stuff, then come back and try it again, over and over and over. FWIW, it IS still really great as an on-the-go ear training gismo. I’ve already thought about having my students use it, as it is very simple but has many options for scales etc. I have my doctorate in music composition, so I think about this stuff a lot. Thanks for the app regardless!

Anybody that studies/performs music knows you can just get tenuto for 4 dollars and it has way more functionality and lessons then this app... (Only 3 exercises for 99$ a year? Not even close to tenuto). If you are not into music theory and just want to play auraly (by ear) tenuto is still BY FAR the better option because you have all 3 exercises that the tone app has (pitch, chord, and interval identification) AND scale training with basic aural keyboard training to boot. I also assume anybody that wants to auraly learn also wants to play either the guitar or piano which TENUTO HAS. Practice exersizes like aural fret/key identification as well as chords, intervals, and scale identication are all included within tenuto. On top of that the company that makes tenuto has a sight that you can access this information FOR FREE. So why spend money on this subscription when you quite literally can get more for less. I'll give 1 star for excellent design but this is a rip off.

This app is really coming a long way in improvement. I appreciate those who work on it so that we, users, can improve our musical ear. I’ve always focused on the Perfect Pitch portion of this app and I can say that I can identify any more in any octave in less that half a second, which leads me to the feature request. Feature Request: Can an advanced Perfect Pitch practice be introduced? Something where two or more notes are play at the same time and we have to select which notes are being played.

The few minutes that I used the app aren’t really enough to review the app performance, but the dark pattens used to try to get me to subscribe are worthy of a negative review. Using the app constantly pushes you into paying for the pro model; this isn’t a bad thing by itself, but the methods used to persuade are very misleading. First, “asking” for pro upgrade consists of a full screen modal dialog which does not provide a method of closing until the user has scrolled to the bottom. Second, after closing the dialog a second dialog opens with a big button to upgrade. There is no obvious way to close this. The user needs to click on the payment button to proceed and then cancel out of the next screen. Third, most of the features in config are pay gated, but the user isn’t informed until an attempt to change the value is made, which starts the full cycle listed on my first point above. Additionally, there is no monthly payment option, and the upfront costs are very high. This isn’t really “dark” but it’s definitely a barrier to entry. It wouldn’t be nearly as annoying if you didn’t feel so pressured into upgrading. Please don’t support these bad practices by buying into them.

I wish there was a no star button !This app is so confusing first they have you think about a free trial Which is not cool of the apps as it was free. Then when they tell you the beats, it doesn’t make sense to you when you try to do it and it doesn’t listen to you. The app does not understand your voice and how does it work because it’s just kind of really really annoying to kinda see how the app works and I don’t think that this app is the one that you’re looking for because I was immediately able to delete the app and I did not do the free trial and I just did all the things that are free it did not reach my expectations at all didn’t reach my standards I didn’t understand how the app worked and I don’t think this is a good app or easy to adapt to singing

This app is gorgeous, with a very pleasing UI and color scheme. Some ear training apps feel too juvenile or alternatively too cold and scientific. Tone strikes a nice balance. It feels odd to me to have to choose # or b in pitch display; it should show both like F#/Gb. I like using the piano keyboard for input to avoid this eyesore but it’s buggy with the black keys. Also a bug where playback is muted after pause and resume. I’m not convinced it will help you train absolute pitch; once I hear one note my brain just uses relative pitch to find the next notes. My biggest concern is the price. For $99/yr there are many other ear training apps that offer these same features and more. I won’t be subscribing but the trial has been fun.

The concept seems pretty good. However, to speed eventual consistent tone recognition working with how the brain learns is essential. So something more than just guessing notes is needed to gain perfect pitch. First try to notice how each note has distinct characteristics. As you do, though, learning can only begin to occur when you are able to compare any wrong guess with the correct tone. To accomplish this simply allow dwell time on the incorrect guess and the correct note instead of just moving on to the next set. Learning occurs when our focus is on how the wrong guess and correct note are different. With such a tweak to the behavior of the app you may help develop more perfect pitchers.

After 10 years playing guitar I’m finally learning some piano and music theory. This app has been really helpful in training my ear and I love how it quantifies which notes I’m strong vs weak at identifying. I have two issues with it. 1 - the monthly price point seems too high for this. I will likely cancel after a few months. 2 - when using the keyboard view the sharp/flat/black keys are difficult to press (glitchy/buggy?). I’ve had to turn off the keyboard view (which I really liked for helping form my spacial awareness).

This app is amazing! It really helps when you are practicing perfect pitch! You can adjust the settings and customize the way you want to learn perfect pitch. If you want to learn how to hear notes in a low, medium, or an high octave, or even all of them simultaneously you can learn. You can learn all the notes in the piano, and there’s also the option to focus on what notes you want to learn in the chromatic scale. This app is a really good way to practice and I totally recommend it without a doubt! 🙌🏾🙌🏾💯

TLDR: Complete and disgraceful money grab. I really want to like the app as it can be a great resource for musicians. However, the $99 per year price is absolutely absurd for an app that should just be a $5-10 one time purchase. This is, in my opinion, a predatory move on the developers end. They are hoping people will start the 1 week free trial, forget to cancel it, then charge $99. For $99 per year there should also be many more features such as choosing separated intervals, arpeggiated chords, different instrument sounds, rhythmic practice, and more specific customizations overall. In my opinion save the $100-$200 you would spend over two years and buy a cheap keyboard. You will get much more use out of it.

This is a great ear trainer, but I am dubious that it would allow anyone to develop perfect, rather than relative, pitch. Other than that there are just a few glitches: the last note in each round of “perfect pitch” training has what seems like a 50/50 chance of just being wrong. Additionally, if you receive a call or an alarm goes off in the middle of the round, the audio will be either silent or a pure tone until you restart the level. Other than that, great app!

As a guitar and piano music developer, I can confirm that it is very important, if not essential, to be able to play any melody that you make up in your head. Tone teaches your brain to figure out what all of those notes are by their relation to each other and their pitch individually. With this app, (as long as you know what note it starts on) you can play anything you hear, even if it’s in your brain.

This is the most succinct approach to ear training that I have discovered. I was playing notes for myself before I found it, similarly to the “practice” function, but the ability to have notes randomly generated, and to control for pitch class and octave with a time limiting function creates a far more robust tool. I’ve made more rapid progress in ear training with Tone than in my entire career as a professional musician. It’s a simple, but highly effective, approach.

So fun and simple. Great job. One thing I’ve felt playing it is that as I’ve been trying to let myself be more intuitive and unconscious in my playing the game, I’ve felt like the buttons with the names of the notes are small enough that it sometimes feels like it’s ruining my flow to have to make sure I’m not pressing the wrong one with my finger. I wish they were just like a liittle bit bigger. That’s p much the only thing I can think to criticize. Thanks for making!

This app is fabulous. Pretty fresh out of my Master's, I've been supporting myself exclusively as musician for two years, and exclusively as a performer for one. I know music, but I've got a long way to go if I want to remain competitive. This app allows me to hone my skills in sessions as short as five seconds. If practice with this app doesn't lead to near perfect relative pitch, it won't matter, because the interval training I'm getting is invaluable. There are many programs and websites that provide this training, but only with Tone can I start in two taps. With headphones, I can do a session in line for lunch, or waiting for my SO to hop of the bathroom so we can get back to Netflix. If you make music, get this and put it on your home screen.

This is by far the best ear training app I've used. It definitely helps train, but falls a bit short on its advertising of training perfect pitch. Since notes are played one after another, I think it helps mostly with relative pitch. But that's not a bad thing! In the future, I think more options, including a true "perfect pitch" mode (possibly playing a series of unidentified notes in between) would give the app even more longevity. Overall I definitely recommend!

This is a great app and can make a fun party game. For people interested in music. The $99 subscription price is steep tho. I am terrible with reading and following through with unsubscribing to apps so Thank God I happened to check the day of and stopped it. I do still have it on my phone as the free version gives me enough options for my intended use which is to training my ears to distinctly recognize all 12 notes in the scale accurately I started at %50 and am now consistently at %80 or above. Thank You

I bought a premium license for this app when it first came out with the guarantee I would have it forever. Unfortunately, this license magically disappeared and now I have to buy a subscription. Also, it makes absolutely no sense to me that this app requires a subscription. Don’t get me wrong, the developer did a really good job designing this app and it deserves some sort of payment, but a subscription is incredibly greedy. There are apps like Tenuto which require a single purchase, and this app should be doing the same thing. Just based on this fact alone, I would advise people to look for a different ear training app.

Aside from the very first tone that is tested, the tones test the mind's ability to exercise relative pitch rather than perfect pitch. The app itself is very elegant and I think it can be an incredible tool to build aural ability, especially when using the multiple octaves with all chromatic notes included. Settings are easy to access and everything feels very responsive and well-designed.

Overall the app is pretty decent at aural learning. There’s only three different exercises to choose from but they do a pretty good job at helping your aural skills. The app wants you to pay $10/month for training courses but you really don’t get anything extra, you just get a more structured training regimen over a 45 day period. You can still so everything the app has to offer without paying. Just make your own training regimen. I wish there were more exercises but for what it is its a decent app

This app is amazing! After only using it for a few days, I've already seen improvement in my pitch. When I realized I could only learn up to 6 lessons in each category without premium, I was fully ready to spend a few bucks and purchase the full app. But then it reveals that is $99 for a whole year?!? That's insane, especially since the app says it only takes 45 to achieve perfect pitch and has 45 lessons per category. This is outrageous. There NEED to be other payment options. If not for this, my rating would have been 5 stars🤷‍♀️...

As someone who has struggled with learning perfect pitch, this app is a godsend. It’s both fun and effective, with no excess to bloat the experience. My only complaint (aside from the lofty subscription price, but that’s another story) is that the app often misidentifies taps when black keys are involved, causing you to incur errors when you actually were trying to press the correct key. Otherwise, I love the app and it is phenomenal!

In two days I could identify notes in seconds and very easily play piano by ear. My pitch was already very good, so understand that not everyone will have this quick results, but I am genuinely so impressed with this app and how far it has come. The Learn feature makes it so easy to teach yourself, and pitch becomes second nature. I definitely recommend this app to anyone interested in improving their ear!

This app is so good! I love using it to practice and it also teaches in such a good way when you use the teach options. Getting ready to go to college for music and my aural training class is by far my most anxiety causing, but this app has made me feel the most prepared I can. Highly recommend this super simplistic and straight forward app for any musician!

I discovered this app and was very excited for the potential to use this with my students. I have been looking for an ear training app that is simple to use for all my students and thought I found it here! However, without an option to hear the intervals or chords separately, I’m honestly hesitant to use this with my kids. A student really needs to hear it both ways (both separately and together) especially if they’re in the early ages of learning. Hopefully that feature will come in an update.

As a long-time guitar player, I have gotten increasingly lazy about tuning my strings, “by ear”, ever since inexpensive digital tuners became ubiqitous. Much like hand-held calculator apps erode our elementary math skills, we need to find ways to retrain our brains to think intuitively. I find that TONE’s feedback-scoring method helps me listen actively and competively. The immediate feedback is extremely motivating — and I’m glad to be back on my personal path to perfect pitch. Steve Lowe Feb 28, 2018.

I downloaded this app to practice perfect pitch, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for! The app reminds you that you’re using the free version often enough to feel restricted sometimes, but you still have access to enough in the free version to do a lot! Overall, it’s quite a good app and I recommend it to all of you musicians out there!

I used to be really good at identifying notes and tones. But stress and life has made me a little foggy in my mid-fifties. I’ve seen quick improvement and noticed that taking a few minutes to focus and listen is not only helping me identify tones, but the moment feels like a little meditation. I don’t think about anything else but really listening and trying to visualize the note on a keyboard.

As a musician who doesn’t get to play music for a living but still wants to find time to get those extra practice reps in, this is perfect. On top of actually being productive with my skills, it’s far more fulfilling than flinging an object around my screen. It’s been a long time since my music theory classes, but this is dragging me back in more than I expected it would.

I play piano and do a lot of competitions that require me to use my ear to figure out chords, which was really hard for me to do in the past. This app really helped me practice recognizing my augmented and diminished chords, and I feel a lot more confident about my ear training! There were no ads, but there was a paywall if you wanted to continue the learning aspect. So this app is just good for practicing your skills, not for learning😊.

I cannot speak too highly about this app. Not only does it do everything it claims (I can’t really speak to perfect pitch, but it contains all the tools), but it makes you WANT to practice, be it for 5 minutes at a time or hours. AND I read hundreds of reviews and the creators implemented ALL the requests for enhancements and fixes. Simple and great.

This is an amazing app, I sometimes have trouble knowing the notes because they only have a certain range of instruments that play the sound, it gets a little confusing. But other than that it’s an AMAZING app and is very simple to work, I’ve had not so good experience with other apps. The other apps didn’t let me fix the tuner, but this app is simple to work!

If you're looking for a pitch app this is it. Very Well made and thought out. I really enjoyed the piano mode which allows you to hit the notes on a piano as you hear them which internalized them on another level . Its more relative pitch then perfect but it's still great and I can pretend I have perfect pitch. Side note: This pattern of making all apps a yearly cost is absurd . Other then that it's a great app .

as someone who is somewhat fluent in music, I like this app, as it helps people who are taking a music theory class or want to learn about music. however, the one problem I have is that when differentiating intervals or chords, the notes are only played harmonically. if I had to change anything, I would suggest playing the notes melodically, and then harmonically. thank you :)

The full version of the costs $99 a year, which I simply cannot justify, but the free version has good functionality for an amateur. There were some irritating bugs signing up, but the day to day interaction with the app is fine. I think I had trouble signing in because I didn’t want to give my email. Restarting the app didn’t help, but giving an email address did.

Can’t get it to run. Go to the App Store, click on contact App Support, brings you to the developers website, with absolutely no links functioning, except for the ones that bring you back to the App Store. Read reviews, see that they’re going to nag me to sign up for a paid version for $99/year? When you open the app, they ask you your name, and say the email address in optional. However, the Next button does not become active until you enter an email address? Sorry. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. Deleted...

Great little game. I’m not sure if my ears are getting better at recognizing the tone of each note or if I’m just getting better at guessing how much higher or lower each note is than the last. Either way, going to keep playing it just to familiarize myself worth the tones of each note! Highly recommend!

I would like to be able to re-establish tonic after every run of the game, I’m not quite sure how to do that or if it’s possible. I also think the app should display both sharps and flats together, (for instance, C#\Db vs one or the other) Also perfect pitch is not a learned skill, so the app should be marketed as a tool for developing a near-perfect relative pitch. Makes a good free app though! I’m using it with a fixed-do solfege system in mind.

I wish I didn’t have to leave a review to see my score. This app does is simple,but effective, and the price is right. Two suggestions for improvements are to keep a running record of scores so the user could track their improvements over time, and to give the user the option to display their top ten scores.

I haven’t started it yet. I thought this was a free app that I could upgrade to a pro version if things go well. In the first two minutes, I had to give a fake email address into a so-called “optional” text field to proceed. Immediately after that I find out it actually costs over $100 per year. Sort of puts me off and I’m toying with writing an app of my own to teach myself to identify notes by hearing.