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Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

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Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#131

Post by NobodyNada »

williamdclt wrote: post #104
xdertz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I can tune a guitar to within a half a semitone of accuracy without reference just from knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound after 20 years of playing.

> knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound well that's the whole question isn't it? If you know how an open string is supposed to have, that's what people call absolute pitch?

Most people without absolute pitch have some level of "pitch memory", but it's not comprehensive or reliable. For instance, if you ask people to sing a pop song, they're significantly more likely than chance to sing it in the original key.

I know the Super Mario Bros. theme starts on an E, so I can identify an unknown pitch by recalling that theme and comparing using relative pitch. But that's quite a slow and unintuitive process, and it's easy to make a mistake. People with absolute pitch just hear the pitch without having to "recall" a reference note to compare to like that.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#132

Post by Hunpeter »

williamdclt wrote: post #106
dbcurtis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Baroque was 415Hz. I'm not aware of 436Hz having been a thing but 432Hz used to be standard before 440Hz came along. And nowadays, 442Hz is getting pretty common.

Afaik there wasn't a single widely accepted standard in the Baroque era, but rather different places had different tunings, with the "normal A" varying roughly between 400 and 500 Hz.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#134

Post by paytonjjones »

pganssle wrote: post #105

So I built the original web app for this (it's not stolen, it's open source and I told OP they could fork it). I've been glad to see it getting more attention over the years. One note of caution here is that with my older son we did this for a few years and it hasn't really worked as expected. He can identify all the chords perfectly every time, but when we started testing single notes, he was worse than chance at it…

Thanks for commenting and for doing all the hard work here! (For reference, the story here is that I was using pganssle's web app as a PWA, but encountered some snags on mobile that led me to make a PR, which eventually turned into a fork / TypeScript rewrite at pganssle's suggestion)

I was surprised when I learned about the Eguchi method recommending chords, as I assumed training single notes would be easier. A single note mode sounds like a great idea, I'll put it on the list to add to Bsharp as well. I was also thinking of adding Guitar sounds if I can find or create some good samples.

Maybe also an "identify the root of the chord" mode could be helpful to bridge from the chord sounds to single notes?

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#135

Post by mrob »

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…

>415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times

415Hz is one modern semitone below the standard 440Hz. Many (but not all) baroque instruments were tuned slightly lower than modern ones, and 415Hz is the most convenient slightly lower tuning that retains compatibility with modern instruments by transposing down a semitone.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#136

Post by paytonjjones »

utopiah wrote: post #112
a1o wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it is based on this https://github.com/pganssle/cim , which I think is this web app

Thanks! OP please consider linking their repo to "open-source CIM Trainer by Paul Ganssle" in your readme.

Done! It was linked under Attribution but it doesn't hurt to add a second link.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#137

Post by argee »

jpfromlondon wrote: post #76
toolslive wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have perfect pitch (never trained in it) but I've played violin a lot (started in college) and I can hear the G-ness, D-ness, A-ness, or E-ness of a note. I do have to be actually trying to listen though, except for if they are G3, D4, A4, or E5.

So I have the latter, but not the former (i.e., no perfect pitch). The difference is, I can choose not to observe it. It reminds me of how I've studied Japanese for 15 years, but I can still sometimes choose not to read certain kanji if I glance at a legible word — the same is not true for English, if I see something even for a split second I've already read it.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#138

Post by paytonjjones »

a1o wrote: post #97

Reading the CLAUDE.md, it looks like this is a rewrite from https://github.com/pganssle/cim

That's called out in the README under Attribution too, hopefully it didn't seem like I was trying to bury that!

> Derived from [pganssle/cim](https://github.com/pganssle/cim) by Paul Ganssle. Rebuilt as a separate tool with a distinct name at his request.

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