As somebody who enjoys listening to beatmatched DJ mixes, I'm glad I don't have "perfect" pitch. I'd hate to have vast amounts of music sound "wrong" just because the speed and pitch was changed slightly to synchronize it with other tracks.
Relative pitch is very important for musicians, but absolute pitch is mostly useless. The only use I can think of is singing songs with a cappella intros, so you're in tune with the instruments that come in later, but even this is of very limited value. In a casual setting you can just play a note on an instrument before you start, and for a professional performance you're going to have IEMs that can play the reference note for you.
It can be dormant in adults. I discovered it when I was 16 after meeting a pianist who had it and “taught me” how to do it. I kept getting faster and more accurate as I practiced solfeggio in music school in my 20s.
Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.
Out of curiosity, did it shift up or down for you? I've had perfect putch from a young age, but now at 30 I hear everything a semiton higher (so e.g. a B sounds like a C to me, and I have to manually subtract the semitone to infer the real pitch and hope that I am not overcorrecting)
I feel like the pianist trained you rather than you achieving it like a little kid does. That happens sometimes if you put in the effort (learning/memorizing/training). While I am not old enough to know how it changes, could it be perhaps that what you had learned when you were 16 was in your mind a certain pitch and as ears change (a 16 year old can hear higher pitch than 30 year old), you don’t relearn it, therefore it’s shifted? Please correct me (pretty sure I’m wrong)
I have it from early age, and it also shifts now that I'm almost 40. I think the more constantly I use it though, the more it seems to settle back into accuracy.
That's not true for everyone. Some extraordinary musicians with perfect pitch also reported that it starts drifting for them as they age (I remember Oscar Peterson and Jacob Collier telling this)
You will probably claim it's not "real" perfect pitch, but many people use their tinnitus to help them. They identified their ring as having, for example, F#, and suddenly their relative pitch became absolute.
Approximately two billion people who speak tonal languages demonstrate that it's really not, I think, given that e.g. native cantonese speakers reproduce to within a quarter semitone across a lifetime barring something like neurological or significant hearing issues. They don't all have perfect pitch, that seems to be related more to music training early in life, but something like 60% of Mandarin speakers who were trained musically before age 6 have perfect pitch. In those cultures, not having at least relative pitch is a learning disability similar (or perhaps even more problematic) than dyslexia is in e.g. english speaking populations.
My kiddo has perfect pitch, and for them listening to a baroque period organ is kind of trippy because back in those days A was more like 436 Hz than 440. OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses. These days, they are grooving on Angine de Poitrine, so somehow they are OK with microtonal scales. It probably varies from person to person, but I can see where perfect pitch could give you another way to be annoyed by the world.
> OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses
That doesn't require perfect pitch. Most of the YouTube musicians noted for making videos of going on sites like Omegle and its successors and taking requests which they the then play perfectly after a short listen to the original if they don't know the song do not have perfect pitch for instance. Examples include The Dooo (guitar and piano), Frank Tedesco (piano), and Rob Scallon (violin).
I don't have perfect pitch—I can't name notes and chords instantly out of thin air—but I'm a musician and can immediately sense if the tuning is nonstandard. It can be trippy. I think that, yeah, it's basically a matter of personality whether it annoys you or intrigues you, perfect pitch or no...
I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).
You do not need perfect pitch to quickly learn fiddle tunes by ear (source: I play fiddle, can quickly learn by ear, do not have perfect pitch). You learn tunes primarily by relative pitch, which most people can develop.
There's also an element of violin-specific pitch detection; if you play violin for long enough, you can recognize the specific timbre of different notes on a violin (particularly easy for open strings) which helps ground you while listening to a tune.
I've heard of musicians with very strong senses of perfect pitch flocking to flute or oboe, because anything not keyed in C (perfect pitch equiv) results in too much cognitive dissonance. Clarinets are keyed in Bb (you play a C, out comes a Bb), horns in F (you play a C, out comes an F), trumpets in Eb (this should be clear), and so on...
Like motion sickness with musical tones - you see one thing on the page, you have a sense for what "note" you're playing, but out comes something else.
I have perfect pitch but it's not really useful, except for noticing that my instrument is getting sharper. But that doesn't matter since you have to be in tune with the rest of the band/orchestra.
>Clarinets are keyed in Bb (you play a C, out comes a Bb), horns in F (you play a C, out comes an F), trumpets in Eb (this should be clear), and so on...
In reality, you put your fingers in the position for a C on that specific instrument and you get a C. The name "transposing instrument" is misleading; the instrument itself does not transpose. It's purely a notation convention, intended to give you a consistent mapping between notation and fingering so it's easier to switch between instruments. If you only play one instrument there's no need for it. And even if you do, it's not strictly necessary, e.g. recorders are commonly available in both C and F and are conventionally not notated transposed. Professional players routinely switch between them for different pieces.
I expect it would be possible to train an image-processing LLM to OCR sheet music so it can be automatically transposed and re-engraved for compatibility with absolute pitch.
I'm a musician who doesn't have absolute pitch, but does have very strong relative pitch. My understanding is that perfect pitch is neat party trick, but actually a hindrance instead of a help in most musical circumstances. Relative pitch, on the other hand, is incredibly useful (and fortunately you can train and develop it later in life).
Because most people don't have perfect pitch, (Western) music is built on the relationships between pitches rather than the absolute pitches. So with absolute pitch, you can play something by ear; with relative pitch, you can play something by ear in any key.
Learning to think of the notes you're playing relatively instead of absolutely is already a difficult leap for most musicians, and my understanding (though I don't have absolute pitch so I can't compare from experience) is that absolute pitch makes this skill significantly harder to acquire, since you have to retrain your ear in addition to your hands.
If I were offered a choice to trade my sense of relative pitch for absolute pitch, I most certainly would not take it. I know well the feeling of incongruity when my muscle memory is stuck in the wrong key, and absolute pitch would mean I'm stuck there all the time instead of being just able to shake my head, focus on the new key, and clear my mind of the old.
Somehow this makes me think of the differences between tonal and inflective languages. Learning a tonal language can be brutal for a person who's used to expressing emotion/inflections through tone, and there is nothing more frustrating than trying to speak to somebody when saying a word phonetically correct but in a slightly wrong tune and, to them, what you're saying is completely incoherent.
The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.
I learned this is especially valuable when switching between instruments with different constrained ranges (you can just adapt), as well as your voice changing over time.
I have it, it wanders a bit, but I don't know what you mean by "out of key". If it wanders, everything would relatively wander with it. I've never found it to be a curse in any case.
The problem with absolute pitch is that a choir without accompaniment will often drift a semitone or so over the duration of a song. Then if there are people with absolute pitch in the audience this can be cringy.
Modern 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise where every non-octave interval is slightly out of tune(as the 12th root of 2 is irrational) in order to facilitate modulation and playing in any key. Integer ratios (or closer to integer ratios) may sound more in tune, but they are mostly impossible in this temperament.
Keyboard instruments in other temperaments (for example some Baroque tunings) may split the black keys (for example) into separate sharp and notes; sharps are used for sharp keys and flats for flat keys.
Choirs and instrumentalists who can dynamically adjust the pitch of individual notes will often do so for better tuning. (Some software instruments can also adjust tuning dynamically as you play.)
Many (if not most) pieces of music (perhaps most famously Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier) were composed with a particular temperament in mind.
I'm guessing that what they meant by "proper harmony" is just intonation: where thirds and fifths are expressed by small, integer ratios of frequencies (e.g., a fifth is 3:2 and a major third is 5:4).
A just intoned major third is about 14 cents flatter than a major third played on a 12 tone equal temperament tuned instrument (e.g., piano).
I'm not sure how much this matters in terms of having or not having perfect pitch though. Some people with perfect pitch can hear the difference between JI and 12TET and correctly their singing accordingly.
Thanks OP, I was going to annoy you with a bunch of request, e.g. "Can I please just get the .apk because I use GrapheneOS without the PlayStore?" then I thought "looks simple enough, maybe I a Web page is enough... no app required" which lead me to https://eguchi.app ... so instead I'll just both you with : what do you think about this alternative? Is it any good?
For the "Chords", start with just Red and Blue. Then add Yellow.
I don't have perfect pitch, and I could not distinguish between Red and Blue, when Yellow was in the mix and the feedback sounds interrupted the trials.
Black and Green were much easier for me to differentiate, but Red / Blue is really difficult.
I’m just being jealous, but isn’t absolute pitch relative to the current tuning standard? What happens with orchestras tuned at 442 Hz? Reading comments from people with absolute pitch, it can be more an annoyance than a blessing.
What I dislike about this method is that it seems to be focussed on A=440 Hz, which is arbitrary. I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys.
Is there anything about notes and instruments tuning that is not arbitrary? But hear me out: there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west, so why not follow it for a kid?
"I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys." - problem that never occurred to anyone with a perfect or just good pitch.
I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote.
Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch.
For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch.
This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing.
When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over.
Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C.
It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.
In indian music, swaras only ever exist as relative pitch markers and as such even if you do have perfect pitch it doesn't impede anything. It just comes in the back of your mind as a separate thing like oh, this is 5, this is 1.5, etc, since they are different markers from the Sa..Pa..Sa...
A440 is higher than earlier tunings. Baroque is often A415 and A392 can be used for French harpsichord music.
Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major.
Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.
I did some baroque harpsichord tuning in my past. Nobody I knew in the field of baroque keyboard tuning had absolute pitch, because it would drive you crazy if you did with all the wandering A's. When you want to flex between A=440, A=430, and A=415 (392 is a lot less common) regularly and your ear is tuned to a 440 A, I hear it gets really annoying because everything seems flat. In comparison, a huge number of piano tuners and organ tuners have absolute pitch.
What are the next steps after, let's say, a child is able to indentify all "colors"? They can distinguish F/A and F/C, then what? Should this app/method be combined with regular piano/other lessons, so the child knows what's even happening?
Clearly, it makes sense to have perfect pitch only in connection with a particular instrument for practical purposes.
Besides being a neat party trick, it gives more possibilities and makes things easier if a person wants to work with music professionally, especially with academical (aka "classical") music.
Rick Beato has at least one child with absolute pitch, with stunning ability to name chords and the discrete notes in them. Here's the short video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
I'm not a musician, but I'm told the kid's way of naming the chords is particularly adept from a musician's point of view, and that's because the dad (a very accomplished musician) helped teach the kid. I am sure Rick has made more videos about what he did.
The only age-sensitive part is the ability to map the chords to the colors.
Eventually, you would want to teach them to map the color to the chord name and recognize the root of the chord. But that can be learned any time.
Also keep in mind that if a kid learns all the colors, you'll want to continue practicing to "bridge" over the age where they would lose the ability to recognize perfect pitch. If they mastered this at age 4, they could still potentially lose the ability if they don't practice during that period.
Perfect pitch is a useless skill. Good interval sensitivity for melody and good harmonic sense is more useful.
I dunno I have relative pitch but extremely good and can play basically anything from ear. And in a bunch of different keys because I'm not impeded by perfect pitch sensitivity.
Don’t teach you kids perfect pitch. Introduce them to the wide variety of music from punk to jazz to classical and let them play with sounds. If they get into it, ask if they want a teacher in instrument of their liking.
Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.
Colors are useful. Perfect pitch is pretty much useless. The exception being a composer or school conductor (you really gotta scold those children, haha). While it is a fun trick to have, the practicality of it is very different from knowing what different colors are. The most useful application of perfect pitch I’ve seen is my high school orchestra teacher honing our intonation.
Do you have it? I've gotten a lot of use out of it, and I find there's a lot of people without it that love to dismiss it in these kinds of threads as useless. It helps me improvise with others, learn things quickly, play in tune on my fretless instrument, to name a few.
I’ll admit, I don’t have perfect pitch. I do however have 2 friends with perfect pitch and a teacher with it. One of my friends says it is useless (they also play an instrument). The other 2 find that they are the exception to the “useless” rule. The other friend is training to be a composer and the teacher teaches students relative pitch with it. I’m sure if you used it properly it would indeed help with improv and learning. However, I don’t understand how it would help you play in tune. I feel like that’s more of relative pitch (which is what most professional musicians use). I also play a fretless instrument and I feel like playing in tune is more of muscle memory and subtly adjusting your fingers by the millimeter, and less about having perfect pitch. The areas between using perfect and relative pitch blurs a little though (which I think you might be confusing(?)).
For example, you can go like: Wham! “Oh that’s a little too high” and adjust (relative pitch)
Rather then: Wham! “Hmmmmmmm, that’s an an E not an F” (perfect pitch)
Fun fact: Itzhak Perlman promotes relative pitch and knowing the distance between notes rather than perfect pitch.
Nothing in the OP implies that kids shouldn't learn other things as well. I'm sure you meant your post in a good way, but this probably falls into the category of shallow dismissal (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It's all too easy for the top comment on a Show HN post to end up being a dismissal of the entire project - this is more the fault of upvoters than commenters, because the meaning gets subtly (or not so subtly) a lot more dismissive when it's stuck at the top of a thread. But we really want to avoid that on HN, especially when people are sharing their work.
I am not really saying that. Relative pitch and perfect pitch are mutually exclusive, while both taking quite much to learn, depending on individual. There’s also a multitude of people who have a perfect pitch and who are second rate musicians at best, so it is not a magical path to musical talent people often think it is. You could actually hamper your child’s musical progress with trying to teach them perfect pitch specifically. As with any arts, best thing you can do to your child (or to yourself, if you want to learn) is to find them a good teacher. It really is not a job for an app. Music is a socio-cultural phenomenon that we learn through play and social interaction, not just pitch and rhythm. It is not a programming language you just need to learn the syntax and basic algorithms for to become proficient.
If you want your kids to learn music, you should sing to them, dance with them, play music to them and just have instruments around at home they can play with. It same with language, reading, mathematics, anything really. So the imperative form in the title really irked me.
Saying that, I acknowledge this is Show HN and I am not speaking about the project per se (as in how it has been technically implemented), more about the general attitude the title and arguably the projects presents, where we think we can replace things we find challenging in life, arts or culture by shoving some code and a language model into it, but I too much answered as it were and argument someone making in more general post. I try to keep that in mind in the future.
I think your pushback is reasonable, but I want to speak up in defense of delis-thumbs-7e's comment, which I don't read as dismissive in a negative way.
In fact, I'd like to suggest that he's championing free range childhood by not making decisions for young people who might very realistically resent it as adults.
I know three people with perfect pitch. One of them thinks it's great (and is kind of annoying about it). The other two are constantly telling people that perfect pitch just means you're always exercising patience when your friends are singing, counting down the moments until they stop.
I agree with you about the bits I know anything about, and the rest sounds likely.
It just makes a significant difference when the context is a Show HN and the critical comment is at the top. If it is comment (say) #13 in a varied conversation, that comes across differently. This is more the fault of upvotes, as I mentioned, but it's hard to address those directly.
Is there a good way to teach kids relative pitch (beyond exposing them to a broad range of music etc.)? I struggle with this and have tried multiple times to learn different instruments from different musical traditions and instructors and have mostly failed over the years.
This is a general tip that goes beyond pitch and intervals: Learn to sing things that you play and hear. This is good for a lot of things. It's a way of developing your ear without the mechanics of your instrument getting in the way when you're starting out. You can "practice" when you don't have access to your instrument, even listening to the radio in your car. It will develop recognition of familiar musical patterns.
You can practice singing the intervals. What's a fifth sound like? You should be able to sing it. Or play it on your instrument and then sing it.
Everyone can learn good relative pitch with practice. Music schools do this regularly, and it's just a skill you can pick up. Start by identifying intervals, then learn chords, and then learn to write down music you hear, and so on. It just takes work.
I wonder if there's a bit of survivorship bias with this one. I've never been able to learn relative pitch after trying quite a lot of different methods, ear training app and playing a couple of musical instruments. If you're in a music school then perhaps your baseline musical ability is already relatively high?
I really doubt it, and I am not surprised that apps didn't work. I also don't think playing a musical instrument actually gives as much insight here as you want - it's a very indirect transfer if you're learning via classical methods or if you are learning purely by reading. Jazz and contemporary methods involve a lot more "listen, then play back" rather than reading. If you want to work on ear training and theory, cross-training with some jazz or contemporary helps a lot.
The way music schools teach this is relatively brutal and annoying, with a _lot_ of repetition and testing (eg "sing a major second above this note" and "identify the interval" questions), but I am not sure any other method works. At the same time, everyone going through an ear training curriculum does pick up decent relative pitch. This can take a year or two for college music majors, so it's not exactly a casual exercise. However, I assume the major barrier to entry is not musical aptitude but willingness to put up with bullshit, because it feels like bullshit when you are doing it.
That sounds like a the ear training I have done but even after a couple of decades I don't have any real ability to tell the difference between intervals. For example, I listen to a musical interval and try singing up the major scale to match it but everything matches a fifth (in my internal melody). More recently I found the Sonofield app an interesting idea for learning the intervals but wasn't able to gain any consistency.
I remember many years ago in my music lessons being shocked that some people can hear multiple notes played simultaneously. I've never found much material on learning this skill.
Yes. Focus a few weeks on just learning the sound of a particular degree of the scale. Like you are just trying to teach what the dominant sounds like ('Ruffles and Flourishes' is appropriate for this, as an example). After it's correctly learned you go to a different one. After awhile you've taught them all.
"Sight singing" is the classic exercise to develop strong relative pitch. There are lots of resources on this — there was even a sight singing class at my college. It might be a little too challenging (and boring) for a young kid though.
If you're willing to give the app a try, I bet it could actually be a pretty solid way to learn relative as well as absolute pitch. Just manually play "Red" before you start to anchor yourself. I've noticed some improvement in my relative pitch just by practicing it with my daughter. I'd be interested to know if anyone ends up using it explicitly for that purpose.
I 100% agree that perfect pitch is less important than these other things. The only reason I think perfect pitch is worth prioritizing early is because of the developmental gate.
> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6.
What?
That doesn’t sound true at all.
Jude Kofie started the piano at the age of 8. But music prodigy apart, I defintely don’t have perfect pitch right now, but I am very confident that I could with some training.
Like, when I sing a song without music, I usually am very close to the right tone. Mostly because I intuitively know how my voice is supposed to feel (the vocal chords move differently based on the tone).
And I can clearly ear the different “colors” between different scales.
And when I play the guitar a lot, after a month or so I start to be able to know where a note I hear is on the guitar.
Is there any advantage to having perfect pitch apart from parent's bragging rights? It seems silly to waste the child's time on this. Let them learn music. If perfect pitch happens, it happens, but don't treat it as a singular goal.
Certainly, as jokes are by far best when they are explained.
In this context the overall discussion is about pitch in the context of music.
Here the jokester takes advantage of pitch having more than one meaning in English. One of the alternate meanings is to throw.
Next the joke selects a banjo and an accordion, two instruments that are less popular and thus more likely to be understood by the general populace as being disparaged, which is a critical component for the audience to correctly infer the alternate meaning of pitch.
You put it all together and we have this hilarious joke:
A perfect throw is when a banjo is tossed into the garbage and it finds its perfect companion in an accordion that has similarly been discarded to the same trash receptacle.
Pitch is another word for throw. The joke is that a perfect throw is one where a banjo Is thrown into the trash (this is already funny if you consider how careful musicians are with their instruments), and what makes it a perfect throw is that it lands on an accordion (the fact that the accordion is already in the trash is also funny) and the fact that one shitty instrument landing exactly on another shitty instrument would be an athletic achievement that is given the name of a desirable musical ability “perfect pitch”, is excellent.
As somebody who enjoys listening to beatmatched DJ mixes, I'm glad I don't have "perfect" pitch. I'd hate to have vast amounts of music sound "wrong" just because the speed and pitch was changed slightly to synchronize it with other tracks.
Relative pitch is very important for musicians, but absolute pitch is mostly useless. The only use I can think of is singing songs with a cappella intros, so you're in tune with the instruments that come in later, but even this is of very limited value. In a casual setting you can just play a note on an instrument before you start, and for a professional performance you're going to have IEMs that can play the reference note for you.
It can be dormant in adults. I discovered it when I was 16 after meeting a pianist who had it and “taught me” how to do it. I kept getting faster and more accurate as I practiced solfeggio in music school in my 20s.
Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.
Out of curiosity, did it shift up or down for you? I've had perfect putch from a young age, but now at 30 I hear everything a semiton higher (so e.g. a B sounds like a C to me, and I have to manually subtract the semitone to infer the real pitch and hope that I am not overcorrecting)
I feel like the pianist trained you rather than you achieving it like a little kid does. That happens sometimes if you put in the effort (learning/memorizing/training). While I am not old enough to know how it changes, could it be perhaps that what you had learned when you were 16 was in your mind a certain pitch and as ears change (a 16 year old can hear higher pitch than 30 year old), you don’t relearn it, therefore it’s shifted? Please correct me (pretty sure I’m wrong)
I have it from early age, and it also shifts now that I'm almost 40. I think the more constantly I use it though, the more it seems to settle back into accuracy.
Thank you! That's really interesting. So it's like a muscle I guess. More you use it = better.
That's not true for everyone. Some extraordinary musicians with perfect pitch also reported that it starts drifting for them as they age (I remember Oscar Peterson and Jacob Collier telling this)
The loss with age is super commin, and all in the same direction (people hear more flat but guess more sharp).
> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6.
I found some papers suggesting it is possible for adults, but more difficult.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...
You will probably claim it's not "real" perfect pitch, but many people use their tinnitus to help them. They identified their ring as having, for example, F#, and suddenly their relative pitch became absolute.
I've seen nothing to convince me that "absolute pitch" is anything other than relative pitch with excellent recall or persistent observation of pitch.
Now there's a hack in the most delightful sense of the word
It’s not “real” perfect pitch. It’s more like training and memorizing. It doesn’t come as naturally as it does for kids.
I've seen articles that say that absolute perfect pitch is a curse, not a gift, because it wanders with age, and then everything is "out of key".
Approximately two billion people who speak tonal languages demonstrate that it's really not, I think, given that e.g. native cantonese speakers reproduce to within a quarter semitone across a lifetime barring something like neurological or significant hearing issues. They don't all have perfect pitch, that seems to be related more to music training early in life, but something like 60% of Mandarin speakers who were trained musically before age 6 have perfect pitch. In those cultures, not having at least relative pitch is a learning disability similar (or perhaps even more problematic) than dyslexia is in e.g. english speaking populations.
My kiddo has perfect pitch, and for them listening to a baroque period organ is kind of trippy because back in those days A was more like 436 Hz than 440. OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses. These days, they are grooving on Angine de Poitrine, so somehow they are OK with microtonal scales. It probably varies from person to person, but I can see where perfect pitch could give you another way to be annoyed by the world.
> OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses
That doesn't require perfect pitch. Most of the YouTube musicians noted for making videos of going on sites like Omegle and its successors and taking requests which they the then play perfectly after a short listen to the original if they don't know the song do not have perfect pitch for instance. Examples include The Dooo (guitar and piano), Frank Tedesco (piano), and Rob Scallon (violin).
I don't have perfect pitch—I can't name notes and chords instantly out of thin air—but I'm a musician and can immediately sense if the tuning is nonstandard. It can be trippy. I think that, yeah, it's basically a matter of personality whether it annoys you or intrigues you, perfect pitch or no...
I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).
You do not need perfect pitch to quickly learn fiddle tunes by ear (source: I play fiddle, can quickly learn by ear, do not have perfect pitch). You learn tunes primarily by relative pitch, which most people can develop.
There's also an element of violin-specific pitch detection; if you play violin for long enough, you can recognize the specific timbre of different notes on a violin (particularly easy for open strings) which helps ground you while listening to a tune.
Nice Quebec rock finding its way in the world!
I've heard of musicians with very strong senses of perfect pitch flocking to flute or oboe, because anything not keyed in C (perfect pitch equiv) results in too much cognitive dissonance. Clarinets are keyed in Bb (you play a C, out comes a Bb), horns in F (you play a C, out comes an F), trumpets in Eb (this should be clear), and so on...
Like motion sickness with musical tones - you see one thing on the page, you have a sense for what "note" you're playing, but out comes something else.
I have perfect pitch but it's not really useful, except for noticing that my instrument is getting sharper. But that doesn't matter since you have to be in tune with the rest of the band/orchestra.
>Clarinets are keyed in Bb (you play a C, out comes a Bb), horns in F (you play a C, out comes an F), trumpets in Eb (this should be clear), and so on...
In reality, you put your fingers in the position for a C on that specific instrument and you get a C. The name "transposing instrument" is misleading; the instrument itself does not transpose. It's purely a notation convention, intended to give you a consistent mapping between notation and fingering so it's easier to switch between instruments. If you only play one instrument there's no need for it. And even if you do, it's not strictly necessary, e.g. recorders are commonly available in both C and F and are conventionally not notated transposed. Professional players routinely switch between them for different pieces.
I expect it would be possible to train an image-processing LLM to OCR sheet music so it can be automatically transposed and re-engraved for compatibility with absolute pitch.
I'm a musician who doesn't have absolute pitch, but does have very strong relative pitch. My understanding is that perfect pitch is neat party trick, but actually a hindrance instead of a help in most musical circumstances. Relative pitch, on the other hand, is incredibly useful (and fortunately you can train and develop it later in life).
Because most people don't have perfect pitch, (Western) music is built on the relationships between pitches rather than the absolute pitches. So with absolute pitch, you can play something by ear; with relative pitch, you can play something by ear in any key.
Learning to think of the notes you're playing relatively instead of absolutely is already a difficult leap for most musicians, and my understanding (though I don't have absolute pitch so I can't compare from experience) is that absolute pitch makes this skill significantly harder to acquire, since you have to retrain your ear in addition to your hands.
If I were offered a choice to trade my sense of relative pitch for absolute pitch, I most certainly would not take it. I know well the feeling of incongruity when my muscle memory is stuck in the wrong key, and absolute pitch would mean I'm stuck there all the time instead of being just able to shake my head, focus on the new key, and clear my mind of the old.
Somehow this makes me think of the differences between tonal and inflective languages. Learning a tonal language can be brutal for a person who's used to expressing emotion/inflections through tone, and there is nothing more frustrating than trying to speak to somebody when saying a word phonetically correct but in a slightly wrong tune and, to them, what you're saying is completely incoherent.
The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.
> in any key
I learned this is especially valuable when switching between instruments with different constrained ranges (you can just adapt), as well as your voice changing over time.
I have it, it wanders a bit, but I don't know what you mean by "out of key". If it wanders, everything would relatively wander with it. I've never found it to be a curse in any case.
The problem with absolute pitch is that a choir without accompaniment will often drift a semitone or so over the duration of a song. Then if there are people with absolute pitch in the audience this can be cringy.
Proper harmony requires playing out of pitch.
Can you explain?
Modern 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise where every non-octave interval is slightly out of tune(as the 12th root of 2 is irrational) in order to facilitate modulation and playing in any key. Integer ratios (or closer to integer ratios) may sound more in tune, but they are mostly impossible in this temperament.
Keyboard instruments in other temperaments (for example some Baroque tunings) may split the black keys (for example) into separate sharp and notes; sharps are used for sharp keys and flats for flat keys.
Choirs and instrumentalists who can dynamically adjust the pitch of individual notes will often do so for better tuning. (Some software instruments can also adjust tuning dynamically as you play.)
Many (if not most) pieces of music (perhaps most famously Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier) were composed with a particular temperament in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament
Yes. It is why perfect pitch is not the solution to playing in a group.
I'm guessing that what they meant by "proper harmony" is just intonation: where thirds and fifths are expressed by small, integer ratios of frequencies (e.g., a fifth is 3:2 and a major third is 5:4).
A just intoned major third is about 14 cents flatter than a major third played on a 12 tone equal temperament tuned instrument (e.g., piano).
I'm not sure how much this matters in terms of having or not having perfect pitch though. Some people with perfect pitch can hear the difference between JI and 12TET and correctly their singing accordingly.
More impressive are the people who can count cycles, adjust between A440 and A400, etc.
Thanks OP, I was going to annoy you with a bunch of request, e.g. "Can I please just get the .apk because I use GrapheneOS without the PlayStore?" then I thought "looks simple enough, maybe I a Web page is enough... no app required" which lead me to https://eguchi.app ... so instead I'll just both you with : what do you think about this alternative? Is it any good?
aurora store isan option.
wat? what is yello, red or blue?
Click "Show Options", then:
- Check "Show chords on piano?"
- Check "Play chord sounds"
- Uncheck "Play feedback sounds"
For the "Chords", start with just Red and Blue. Then add Yellow.
I don't have perfect pitch, and I could not distinguish between Red and Blue, when Yellow was in the mix and the feedback sounds interrupted the trials.
Black and Green were much easier for me to differentiate, but Red / Blue is really difficult.
If you click "Show Options" it'll show colors of the chords in order: red is C-major for example
I’m just being jealous, but isn’t absolute pitch relative to the current tuning standard? What happens with orchestras tuned at 442 Hz? Reading comments from people with absolute pitch, it can be more an annoyance than a blessing.
What I dislike about this method is that it seems to be focussed on A=440 Hz, which is arbitrary. I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys.
Is there anything about notes and instruments tuning that is not arbitrary? But hear me out: there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west, so why not follow it for a kid?
"I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys." - problem that never occurred to anyone with a perfect or just good pitch.
I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote.
Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch.
For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch.
This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing.
When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over.
Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C.
It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.
This is super interesting, thanks for commenting. You've listed a lot of negatives of absolute pitch, and they all make a lot of sense.
But you also said you wouldn't trade it away. Why not? What are the positives that outweigh the negatives?
In indian music, swaras only ever exist as relative pitch markers and as such even if you do have perfect pitch it doesn't impede anything. It just comes in the back of your mind as a separate thing like oh, this is 5, this is 1.5, etc, since they are different markers from the Sa..Pa..Sa...
A440 is higher than earlier tunings. Baroque is often A415 and A392 can be used for French harpsichord music.
Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major.
Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.
I did some baroque harpsichord tuning in my past. Nobody I knew in the field of baroque keyboard tuning had absolute pitch, because it would drive you crazy if you did with all the wandering A's. When you want to flex between A=440, A=430, and A=415 (392 is a lot less common) regularly and your ear is tuned to a 440 A, I hear it gets really annoying because everything seems flat. In comparison, a huge number of piano tuners and organ tuners have absolute pitch.
What are the next steps after, let's say, a child is able to indentify all "colors"? They can distinguish F/A and F/C, then what? Should this app/method be combined with regular piano/other lessons, so the child knows what's even happening?
Clearly, it makes sense to have perfect pitch only in connection with a particular instrument for practical purposes.
Besides being a neat party trick, it gives more possibilities and makes things easier if a person wants to work with music professionally, especially with academical (aka "classical") music.
Rick Beato has at least one child with absolute pitch, with stunning ability to name chords and the discrete notes in them. Here's the short video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
I'm not a musician, but I'm told the kid's way of naming the chords is particularly adept from a musician's point of view, and that's because the dad (a very accomplished musician) helped teach the kid. I am sure Rick has made more videos about what he did.
The only age-sensitive part is the ability to map the chords to the colors.
Eventually, you would want to teach them to map the color to the chord name and recognize the root of the chord. But that can be learned any time.
Also keep in mind that if a kid learns all the colors, you'll want to continue practicing to "bridge" over the age where they would lose the ability to recognize perfect pitch. If they mastered this at age 4, they could still potentially lose the ability if they don't practice during that period.
Don't think this was ever proven?
Many thousands of kids go into music at a very young age every year, very few come out with absolute pitch.
Perfect pitch is a useless skill. Good interval sensitivity for melody and good harmonic sense is more useful.
I dunno I have relative pitch but extremely good and can play basically anything from ear. And in a bunch of different keys because I'm not impeded by perfect pitch sensitivity.
Don’t teach you kids perfect pitch. Introduce them to the wide variety of music from punk to jazz to classical and let them play with sounds. If they get into it, ask if they want a teacher in instrument of their liking.
Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.
Are these mutually exclusive?
As someone who enjoys music, from punk to jazz, I wish I could identify a C from a G as easily as I can identify blue from green.
We’re taught to use our eyes to identify colors, why not teach children to use their ears to identify notes?
Colors are useful. Perfect pitch is pretty much useless. The exception being a composer or school conductor (you really gotta scold those children, haha). While it is a fun trick to have, the practicality of it is very different from knowing what different colors are. The most useful application of perfect pitch I’ve seen is my high school orchestra teacher honing our intonation.
Do you have it? I've gotten a lot of use out of it, and I find there's a lot of people without it that love to dismiss it in these kinds of threads as useless. It helps me improvise with others, learn things quickly, play in tune on my fretless instrument, to name a few.
I’ll admit, I don’t have perfect pitch. I do however have 2 friends with perfect pitch and a teacher with it. One of my friends says it is useless (they also play an instrument). The other 2 find that they are the exception to the “useless” rule. The other friend is training to be a composer and the teacher teaches students relative pitch with it. I’m sure if you used it properly it would indeed help with improv and learning. However, I don’t understand how it would help you play in tune. I feel like that’s more of relative pitch (which is what most professional musicians use). I also play a fretless instrument and I feel like playing in tune is more of muscle memory and subtly adjusting your fingers by the millimeter, and less about having perfect pitch. The areas between using perfect and relative pitch blurs a little though (which I think you might be confusing(?)).
For example, you can go like: Wham! “Oh that’s a little too high” and adjust (relative pitch)
Rather then: Wham! “Hmmmmmmm, that’s an an E not an F” (perfect pitch)
Fun fact: Itzhak Perlman promotes relative pitch and knowing the distance between notes rather than perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch is an impediment for most music because kids get stuck only wanting particular pitches instead of proper intervals.
Nothing in the OP implies that kids shouldn't learn other things as well. I'm sure you meant your post in a good way, but this probably falls into the category of shallow dismissal (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It's all too easy for the top comment on a Show HN post to end up being a dismissal of the entire project - this is more the fault of upvoters than commenters, because the meaning gets subtly (or not so subtly) a lot more dismissive when it's stuck at the top of a thread. But we really want to avoid that on HN, especially when people are sharing their work.
I am not really saying that. Relative pitch and perfect pitch are mutually exclusive, while both taking quite much to learn, depending on individual. There’s also a multitude of people who have a perfect pitch and who are second rate musicians at best, so it is not a magical path to musical talent people often think it is. You could actually hamper your child’s musical progress with trying to teach them perfect pitch specifically. As with any arts, best thing you can do to your child (or to yourself, if you want to learn) is to find them a good teacher. It really is not a job for an app. Music is a socio-cultural phenomenon that we learn through play and social interaction, not just pitch and rhythm. It is not a programming language you just need to learn the syntax and basic algorithms for to become proficient.
If you want your kids to learn music, you should sing to them, dance with them, play music to them and just have instruments around at home they can play with. It same with language, reading, mathematics, anything really. So the imperative form in the title really irked me.
Saying that, I acknowledge this is Show HN and I am not speaking about the project per se (as in how it has been technically implemented), more about the general attitude the title and arguably the projects presents, where we think we can replace things we find challenging in life, arts or culture by shoving some code and a language model into it, but I too much answered as it were and argument someone making in more general post. I try to keep that in mind in the future.
I think your pushback is reasonable, but I want to speak up in defense of delis-thumbs-7e's comment, which I don't read as dismissive in a negative way.
In fact, I'd like to suggest that he's championing free range childhood by not making decisions for young people who might very realistically resent it as adults.
I know three people with perfect pitch. One of them thinks it's great (and is kind of annoying about it). The other two are constantly telling people that perfect pitch just means you're always exercising patience when your friends are singing, counting down the moments until they stop.
That sounds like a version of hell to me.
I agree with you about the bits I know anything about, and the rest sounds likely.
It just makes a significant difference when the context is a Show HN and the critical comment is at the top. If it is comment (say) #13 in a varied conversation, that comes across differently. This is more the fault of upvotes, as I mentioned, but it's hard to address those directly.
Is there a good way to teach kids relative pitch (beyond exposing them to a broad range of music etc.)? I struggle with this and have tried multiple times to learn different instruments from different musical traditions and instructors and have mostly failed over the years.
This is a general tip that goes beyond pitch and intervals: Learn to sing things that you play and hear. This is good for a lot of things. It's a way of developing your ear without the mechanics of your instrument getting in the way when you're starting out. You can "practice" when you don't have access to your instrument, even listening to the radio in your car. It will develop recognition of familiar musical patterns.
You can practice singing the intervals. What's a fifth sound like? You should be able to sing it. Or play it on your instrument and then sing it.
Everyone can learn good relative pitch with practice. Music schools do this regularly, and it's just a skill you can pick up. Start by identifying intervals, then learn chords, and then learn to write down music you hear, and so on. It just takes work.
I wonder if there's a bit of survivorship bias with this one. I've never been able to learn relative pitch after trying quite a lot of different methods, ear training app and playing a couple of musical instruments. If you're in a music school then perhaps your baseline musical ability is already relatively high?
I really doubt it, and I am not surprised that apps didn't work. I also don't think playing a musical instrument actually gives as much insight here as you want - it's a very indirect transfer if you're learning via classical methods or if you are learning purely by reading. Jazz and contemporary methods involve a lot more "listen, then play back" rather than reading. If you want to work on ear training and theory, cross-training with some jazz or contemporary helps a lot.
The way music schools teach this is relatively brutal and annoying, with a _lot_ of repetition and testing (eg "sing a major second above this note" and "identify the interval" questions), but I am not sure any other method works. At the same time, everyone going through an ear training curriculum does pick up decent relative pitch. This can take a year or two for college music majors, so it's not exactly a casual exercise. However, I assume the major barrier to entry is not musical aptitude but willingness to put up with bullshit, because it feels like bullshit when you are doing it.
That sounds like a the ear training I have done but even after a couple of decades I don't have any real ability to tell the difference between intervals. For example, I listen to a musical interval and try singing up the major scale to match it but everything matches a fifth (in my internal melody). More recently I found the Sonofield app an interesting idea for learning the intervals but wasn't able to gain any consistency.
I remember many years ago in my music lessons being shocked that some people can hear multiple notes played simultaneously. I've never found much material on learning this skill.
Learning intervals by quotation can work. "Comet, it makes your teeth turn green" starts with a descending third and is a very memorable song.
Yes. Focus a few weeks on just learning the sound of a particular degree of the scale. Like you are just trying to teach what the dominant sounds like ('Ruffles and Flourishes' is appropriate for this, as an example). After it's correctly learned you go to a different one. After awhile you've taught them all.
"Sight singing" is the classic exercise to develop strong relative pitch. There are lots of resources on this — there was even a sight singing class at my college. It might be a little too challenging (and boring) for a young kid though.
If you're willing to give the app a try, I bet it could actually be a pretty solid way to learn relative as well as absolute pitch. Just manually play "Red" before you start to anchor yourself. I've noticed some improvement in my relative pitch just by practicing it with my daughter. I'd be interested to know if anyone ends up using it explicitly for that purpose.
I 100% agree that perfect pitch is less important than these other things. The only reason I think perfect pitch is worth prioritizing early is because of the developmental gate.
This. Slanted
> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6.
What?
That doesn’t sound true at all.
Jude Kofie started the piano at the age of 8. But music prodigy apart, I defintely don’t have perfect pitch right now, but I am very confident that I could with some training.
Like, when I sing a song without music, I usually am very close to the right tone. Mostly because I intuitively know how my voice is supposed to feel (the vocal chords move differently based on the tone).
And I can clearly ear the different “colors” between different scales.
And when I play the guitar a lot, after a month or so I start to be able to know where a note I hear is on the guitar.
Is there any advantage to having perfect pitch apart from parent's bragging rights? It seems silly to waste the child's time on this. Let them learn music. If perfect pitch happens, it happens, but don't treat it as a singular goal.
As a banjo player, I have heard perfect pitch defined this way:
“Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”
Funniest thing I’ve read in days. I’d say bravo, but yeehaw would be more appropriate.
Can someone explain this? I don't get it.
Certainly, as jokes are by far best when they are explained.
In this context the overall discussion is about pitch in the context of music.
Here the jokester takes advantage of pitch having more than one meaning in English. One of the alternate meanings is to throw.
Next the joke selects a banjo and an accordion, two instruments that are less popular and thus more likely to be understood by the general populace as being disparaged, which is a critical component for the audience to correctly infer the alternate meaning of pitch.
You put it all together and we have this hilarious joke:
A perfect throw is when a banjo is tossed into the garbage and it finds its perfect companion in an accordion that has similarly been discarded to the same trash receptacle.
(Edit: stupid auto-correct)
Pitch is another word for throw. The joke is that a perfect throw is one where a banjo Is thrown into the trash (this is already funny if you consider how careful musicians are with their instruments), and what makes it a perfect throw is that it lands on an accordion (the fact that the accordion is already in the trash is also funny) and the fact that one shitty instrument landing exactly on another shitty instrument would be an athletic achievement that is given the name of a desirable musical ability “perfect pitch”, is excellent.
Ahh thanks, I didn't consider that pitch is a synonym for throw.
not sure this can be taught