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Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

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Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#121

Post by the_other »

freetime2 wrote: post #113
aboardRat4 wrote: post #111

Is there some program that teaches all this mumbo-jumbo that other commenters are using so freely in their comments? Ideally one which looks kinda like a game with scores and achievements. My understanding of music is quite basic, I know what the 12 notes are and that the "zero" of the frequencies starts at 440 Hz (but since everything is relative, it doesn't really matter that it's 440, it could be anything, but if…

I think Duolingo has a music course. No idea how good it is though or how deep it goes into theory.

It’s a reasonable course for helping yiu identify a single line of notes across the two staves. Or maybe just the “right hand” upper/trebble clef stave (the bormal one for most instruments).

It does teach a little anout scales. It wont teach chords. It doesn’t go very far into time signatures. It only has you play a virtual keyboard so it’s useless for learning how to feel your instrument.

It’s quite fun. My kid plays it every day and it’s helped get them feeling more confident to sit at our piano and noodle around. As a noodler myself, this seems valid.

It wont get you good enough to play pieces with other musicians, or to compose with weatern harmony. You’ll need extea tutorials for those.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#122

Post by qwertytyyuu »

mrob wrote: post #82

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 t…

If you compose, i can see it being a nice speed up on your process

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#124

Post by couchand »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #111

Is there some program that teaches all this mumbo-jumbo that other commenters are using so freely in their comments? Ideally one which looks kinda like a game with scores and achievements. My understanding of music is quite basic, I know what the 12 notes are and that the "zero" of the frequencies starts at 440 Hz (but since everything is relative, it doesn't really matter that it's 440, it could be anything, but if…

> I tried learning to play a recorder (flute) using some internet howtos as a guide, but got stuck at the first lesson, when the sound produced by the flute didn't match what the Fourier analyser in audacity measured.

> That is, I tried to play a C, but the Fourier transform resulted in a bimodal distribution, and none of the bumps was near the expected C frequency.

What a wonderful experiment! You've uncovered "harmonics": your recorder (or any instrument) sounds a complex mixture of frequencies, even when you play just a single note. The different mix of frequencies from one instrument to another is what gives each a unique sound, called the "timbre". The harmonics of wind instruments like your recorder are particularly complex! Try the same experiment with a stringed instrument, which will make something closer to a pure sine wave. Try it with anything that will make noise!

But I'd recommend not using Audacity to learn to play an instrument. You need your ears for this, so it may as much effort developing listening as developing playing technique. But in the end, don't worry too much about that, just have fun making music!

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#126

Post by dolia »

williamdclt wrote: post #108
dolia wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west Not even close to being true! - There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern conventi…

TIL, thanks.

The 2nd point stands though. A person with good or perfect pitch will quickly tune to another frequency.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#127

Post by james_marks »

Jtarii wrote: post #109

Perfect pitch is a party trick with extremely limited utility. Actual musicians use relative pitch.

"When you a realize a guitar cannot, in fact, be perfectly tuned, you are beginning to get somewhere with the guitar".

Paraphrasing and I don't remember the author, unfortunately.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#128

Post by nosioptar »

KomoD wrote: post #2

> 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_...

Yeah, the stuff on the repo is bullshit because it's ai slop.

I learned perfect pitch well after six. I know others who have too.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#129

Post by FelipeCortez »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #111

Is there some program that teaches all this mumbo-jumbo that other commenters are using so freely in their comments? Ideally one which looks kinda like a game with scores and achievements. My understanding of music is quite basic, I know what the 12 notes are and that the "zero" of the frequencies starts at 440 Hz (but since everything is relative, it doesn't really matter that it's 440, it could be anything, but if…

If you want to learn the mumbo-jumbo other commenters are using freely in their comments: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons

If you want to learn why your flute's FFT visualization has multiple bumps, get a copy of Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial from the local library

If you want to learn to play an instrument, hire a teacher!

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#130

Post by paytonjjones »

utopiah wrote: post #67

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?

I would take a look at https://github.com/pganssle/cim , which this is very closely based on!

My brief story: I was using that as a PWA, but encountered some snags when using it on mobile.

I cloned it and fixed those, which required switching to Android WebView instead of a PWA. I opened a PR but Paul said he preferred that I make my own fork with a new name. At that point I decided to do a full rewrite instead of just a fork (from Jekyll to TypeScript), and that's the version I posted here.

Edit: you can also clone and build the apk if you'd like, there are instructions at the bottom of the README

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