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Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

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Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#141

Post by thisislife2 »

avocadoking wrote: post #140

For me its always difficult to judge if one should train such things with their children. Same goes with instruments. You need to train every other day and keep it up for a long time, which I never liked as a kid.

Unfortunately, the only way to be a top notch expert, with mastery over the art or sports, is to start young and with disciplined practice. Does it mean necessarily sacrificing childhood? I am unsure. Michael Jackson comes to mind as he has publicly commented that he didn't have a normal childhood. Jackie Chan also had a hard life as a child, training from a young age but he doesn't seem to resent it as much. However, he doesn't have a good relationship with his kids perhaps because he expected them to go through the same kind of hardship he did (it was normalised for him?)? Russian gymnasts and ballet dancers also train at a very young age.

I guess it's a question many parents struggle with a lot - how much should you push your kids because sometimes it seems kids do waste a lot of time.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#142

Post by pganssle »

paytonjjones wrote: post #134
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 sing…

I can't believe I didn't put this in the original repo, but this is where I got the piano samples from: https://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/mis.html

They have guitar samples as well, but it was a bit more complicated because with a piano you have one key per note, there's exactly one way to play C4♯ or whatever, but with a guitar the notes are overlapping, so C4♯ might be played on the B string or up on the G string, and I didn't really know how to choose samples for interpolation.

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

There is already a mode (it might turn on automatically for "white" chords after you reach black chords, I forget) that follows on to identifying one of the three notes, chosen at random, from the chord you just heard. That is what I'm doing with my son now and it seems to be bridging the gap, but I think a direct "which note is this" thing might work better for him.

That said, we're pretty far afield of the original Eguchi method at this point. According to the book, kids are supposed to just naturally understand the nature of notes as you improve. The book also mentions that the advanced students are doing stuff like listening to arbitrary combinations of up to 6 notes (not chords, just random combinations), but they don't really explain how that works. There's a decent amount more to do, but given that I'm not 100% convinced that it even works, I'm not sure how much it's worth it to do it.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#143

Post by dang »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #86
dang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Thank you for such a fine response - I really appreciate it.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#144

Post by casey2 »

agos wrote: post #118
sudo_cowsay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not “real” perfect pitch. It’s more like training and memorizing. It doesn’t come as naturally as it does for kids.

isn't perfect pitch for kids also training and memorizing? the learning method from the original post surely suggests so

It's just like how foreigners will never truly learn a language; racist BS. Plenty of tonedef adults get into Julliard and can play circles around people with perfect pitch no matter how much they practice music.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#145

Post by pganssle »

a_c wrote: post #117
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…

Did it help your son to study music?

I'm not sure I understand the question, but I can answer both interpretations:

1. Did it (the chord trainer app) help my son when he was studying music? Not as far as I can tell. He has also been taking piano lessons and sometimes it helps a little with music theory to tie it back to the chords, but I don't think there's much transfer learning going on. He seems to have a good ear, but my other son is not picking up chords nearly as quickly, and I know a bunch of other kids have bounced off this app, so my older son may just already naturally have a good ear.

2. Did it (studying music) help my son (with identifying chords)? I don't think so. He made pretty steady progress in the chords before he started piano, and after he started piano it didn't get any easier. He also mentions things like, "The chords sound different on the piano", which makes me think I need to have more varied samples (even though the book says that consistency is key and you should practice on the same piano holding the chords for the same duration every time).

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#146

Post by eventualcomp »

mrob wrote: post #84
eventualcomp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

>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 mapp…

> In reality, you put your fingers in the position for a C on that specific instrument and you get a C.

OK, my fault for poor communication. Let me try strongly typing this.

Clarinet: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-Bb. Flute: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-C. And finger-C is polymorphic on the instrument, or something.

Aside from that, I don't disagree with you.

One consideration is that with most instruments, being keyed the way they are, if you immediately transpose via LLM some of those instruments will have almost all their notes in unexpected ledger lines.

Which could have (en)grave implications.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#147

Post by musicale »

williamdclt wrote: post #107
musicale wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More impressive are the people who can count cycles, adjust between A440 and A400, etc.

> adjust between A440 and A400 Someone shared this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s I struggle to conceive being able to hear the difference, but _singing_ it entirely blows my mind

Ah yes, Jacob Collier. What I like is that he suggests an exercise that he used to practice microtonal singing: see how many intermediate pitches you can sing between two notes (could be a half step apart or you could start with a wider interval) and try to increase that number.

Of course if you sing Indian classical music (or several other non-Western musical traditions) then you will learn to sing quarter tones.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#148

Post by aboardRat4 »

FelipeCortez wrote: post #129
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!

>https://www.musictheory.net/lessons

Nice website! I will have a look. Unfortunately, their mobile version is for iOS only ;-(

>why your flute's FFT visualization has multiple bumps

I am not surprised it has multiple bumps, I am surprised that its dominant frequency is not at the expected note. I suspect that it's just because I am holding my fingers in a wrong way, but I don't know how to tell.

>get a copy of Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#149

Post by [deleted] »

james_marks wrote: post #127
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.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#150

Post by jpfromlondon »

argee wrote: post #137
jpfromlondon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't really have relative perfect pitch because as you say, you can recognise the G-ness of a note I assume without reference.

If anything I think this reinforces what I'm alluding to.

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