Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

journals.sagepub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 257 posts

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#131

Post by opan »

0x445442 wrote: post #58
bjoli wrote: post #50

I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…

Interesting, I didn’t know perfect pitch was something you could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His teachers always told us it was something you’re born with.

I had an English teacher tell me once that being a good speller was something you were born with (she was not the best speller despite teaching English, and I was pretty good, to be clear). I think saying stuff like that is just how people cope with their own lack of trained skills and how they justify not improving. I've seen similar excuses from people who don't quite feel like learning to solve a rubik's cube.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#132

Post by dbalatero »

amelius wrote: post #76

Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch? And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ? Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?

Relative pitch is quite helpful to have. However, I have absolute pitch and I find it quite helpful as well.

- I can hear things in my head and play them directly on the instrument more or less on the first try

- I can improvise with others and catch what key/etc they are in quickly

- As we practice, we get a sort of kinetic/physical memory for remembering music, but also this can feedback into that "hear things in head, play them on the instrument" – so I feel like memorizing things can be assisted by absolute pitch

- I can remember music I heard and play it back easier

There's a lot of people saying it's not helpful, but I have to wonder if they have experienced having it or not? If they have it and find it unhelpful that's fine… but I've experienced it as nothing _but_ helpful to me.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#133

Post by slmjkdbtl »

canjobear wrote: post #11
raincole wrote: post #8

While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.

My impression from talking to musicians with absolute pitch is that it’s more an annoyance than anything. They’re always hearing how things in the real world are slightly off pitch.

Have you really met people with perfect pitch with that level of resolution, like can tell 440hz from 432hz? I always thought that was a myth.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#134

Post by b800h »

You don't want perfect pitch. Various people suggested that one of my sons (aged 9) had absolute pitch, as he could remember the starting notes for pieces from memory. Unfortunately, the organ in our church is a quarter-tone sharp.

The goal should be very very very good relative pitch.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#135

Post by tomcam »

Tade0 wrote: post #116
ChainOfFools wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you also suffer from ( sometimes socially compromising) misophonia as well? I also have what I consider to be above average hearing sensitivity, although not to the point where artifacts from music compression bother me that much. I don't have an official testing result to prove or define this in quantifiable terms, only that I seem to notice things in the ambient sound environment that most others either don't no…

Oh, this is a fun (deep-fried sarcasm here) thing to have, ask me how I know. It's not well researched, but apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response. I started using it to gauge whether I'm upset with a particular person over something, because it would intensify in such cases, and reflect on that. Also helped my friend manually remove breath and lip sounds from a recording he wa…

> apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response.

OK I can come out of the closet. These sounds provoke a kind of panic inside me, but I never connected it to fight or flight. Feels very right to me.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#136

Post by opan »

flappyeagle wrote: post #80
amelius wrote: post #76

Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch? And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ? Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?

We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it".

Have you never argued over colors before? I wouldn't trust eyes to be that accurate or objective.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#137

Post by dekhn »

tomcam wrote: post #34

My theory and composition teacher in college went through this same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening t…

In the old days of PCs (maybe even now) there was a way to click the speaker at a specific frequency- I wrote a simple x86 code to click, delay, click, delay and proudly told my office mate that I could make my computer play A440.

He listened for a bit and said, nope that's 441 or so. I checked, and my program had a tiny bug where it wasn't delaying long enough. Fixed that, he verified it was now A440. He said he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost everything was out of tune.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#138

Post by tylerhou »

vajrabum wrote: post #41

Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit…

There are some downsides of perfect pitch. For one, choral singers with perfect pitch sometimes have a hard time re-tuning if the rest of the choir shifts pitch. (This can happen naturally over a long piece that has no accompaniment.)

Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch lose it when they hit a certain age. Imagine being an accomplished painter. One day, you wake up and see leaves as blue-ish green instead of green. It might be difficult to adjust to no longer being able to see the world in color.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#139

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #101
bjoli wrote: post #50

I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…

I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of thi…

[deleted]

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#140

Post by C-x_C-f »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #103
sparky_z wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, without hearing the 1st note to reference from.

I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked long-term.

I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that strategy makes sense
Post reply on HN