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Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

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Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#101

Post by chadgpt3 »

poly2it wrote: post #89
daynthelife wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Pitch perception shifts with age?

It's well known people with perfect pitch always lose it in middle age, the reason is unknown, but it's always extremely upsetting when it happens, and since perfect pitch isn't very useful to begin with, it's actually a curse.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#102

Post by poly2it »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #101
poly2it wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pitch perception shifts with age?

It's well known people with perfect pitch always lose it in middle age, the reason is unknown, but it's always extremely upsetting when it happens, and since perfect pitch isn't very useful to begin with, it's actually a curse.

Does that imply that people with age actually interpret pitches differently? The pitch reading would be correct "locally", within your brain.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#103

Post by somenameforme »

mathieuh wrote: post #99
somenameforme wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hear…

I guess you can get a bit of an idea of what this is like by listening to French people speak English. French doesn’t have phonemic syllable stress like English does and so French people often make mistakes with this. For a native English speaker the syllable stress is an integral part of the word and being phonemic it actually distinguishes between two words that otherwise sound the same. The commonest category of t…

I think one difference is that to a native speaker daMages still sounds like damages. But in a language where 'ma' not only has a ton of different homophones, but entirely different sets of meaning based upon the tone, things get out of hand quickly. For instance in Chinese, "mother scolds a horse" = "ma ma ma ma" with the entire meaning determined by tones alone.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#104

Post by williamdclt »

xdertz wrote: post #87
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 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?

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#105

Post by pganssle »

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. In fact, when I activated the secret Easter egg "red only" mode, he was worse than me at choosing between C E and G (though with practice he can now do it perfectly).

I'm working on a version where you can identify single notes instead of just chords.

Also, I gave a talk about this a few years ago and the talk is on YT if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE

A decent chunk of my PyCon 2025 talk is also about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#106

Post by williamdclt »

dbcurtis wrote: post #32
gcanyon wrote: post #3

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".

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.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#107

Post by williamdclt »

musicale wrote: post #47
mreid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#108

Post by williamdclt »

dolia wrote: post #79
throwawayk7h wrote: post #23

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.

> 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 convention, there was no such standard in baroque times. - 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s - 440Hz is the "official" standard since then - Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays

So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.

Re: Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

#110

Post by [deleted] »

laurieg wrote: post #28
pclmulqdq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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