I couldn't find any apps that use this method to try it with my 3 y/o, so I started working on my own here: https://eguchi.app .
I'd love feedback if anyone is interested in trying it!
Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
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Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#212I 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…
Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do. Never occurred to me to practice perfect…
My experience with pitch memory is nearly identical to yours (but only 34 years playing cello, not 35).
Absolute (perfect) pitch really does seem to be a whole different thing neurally, akin to (and perhaps actually related to) the difference between learning a language before a critical age and learning one afterwards.
I'm gonna try to teach it to my kid, because, why not. Even if it's not that useful most of the time, there are definitely times when it would come in handy for me, e.g., being faster at transcribing notation from recordings. If he doesn't end up using it, that's fine.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#213My 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…
Did you ever test his ability to recognize pure sine waves?
Ofc, each note is actually composed of ~40 frequencies at different levels (timbre). That’s why different instruments playing the same “frequency” sound different
Heard somewhere that absolute pitch folks sometimes struggle with sine waves (no timbre)
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and friends and it’s a hard thing to explain with no one else notices. For me however it’s a largely positive experience. I am hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds, voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed digi…
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…
Unrelated to SCDS, I have misophonia* and hyperacusis#.
* Certain external sounds (mostly by other people) raise a limbic rage or anger, such as chewing, raking silverware with teeth, crunching, or rustling food packets. People who don't chew with their mouths closed are painful.
# Painful to hear certain intensities of certain frequencies. I believe the SCDS is also causing vestibular problems. For example, deep subsonic bass cause my eyes to slew up and to the side with the beat involuntarily, with momentary nausea (almost vertigo). It's beyond simple nystagmus. (It's not vertigo, but I've had that and bought the silly vertigo bubble level hat.)
SCDS maybe caused and worsened by the gradual thinning of my already paper-thin superior canal plate with age.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#215I 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…
Do you recommend any routine to help a young child learn absolute pitch? I’m talking under 3 years of age.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#216I do not have perfect pitch but the concept of pitch memory is something I’ve experienced. I’ll occasionally hear a chord or a pitch and then a song will also pop in my head. I started ear training in college and it was pretty rough but has come a long way
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#217About this time I always "begin" to wonder how helpful would it really be for someone born with perfect pitch today at A=440 if they would have instead been born during a previous century when the recognized standard pitch was seldom A=440? I would have to imagine it would drive some of them nuts.
I don’t think that’s how perfect pitch works, it might be more accurately described as tone memory. For example I’ve “memorized” the sound of standard C=262Hz and can work to other notes from there. But I imagine if C=259Hz instead it would have made no difference to my ability to recall it.
I'm with you on this actually.
I don't care if the acoustic piano is C=259 or the full 262. The guitar and bass (and electronic keyboard!) just need to tune to it either way, a good singer can then follow and everything will sound fine regardless.
But if people were truly born with perfect pitch you would expect them to be stuck at one particular reference frequency.
And conversely if they only gained outstanding pitch reference during certain formative years, you would expect that would have been relative to the prevailing external reference they were exposed to at the time.
So if some isolated child had great pitch but unfortunately was only exposed formatively to a non-standard reference they might be SOL if they could not adjust in later years to join a mainstream orchestra or something.
In addition the agreed-upon reference frequencies have been a moving target over the long run.
Perfect here may be more like perfect in a wide range of ways more so than really absolute.
Some people sure can tune an instrument in isolation using no external reference and it will be a perfect A=440 even without the ability to identify notes by name, that seems to be very helpful right there.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#218I taught my son perfect pitch. AMA.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#219What's with nerddom's fascination with absolute pitch? I've already made several lifetimes' worth of ruckus in my few and am continually only barely learning to listen. Is it because for so many of us music lessons have proved a more affordable form of childcare than the presence of a compassionate, listening human being?
If you ask me, it's pretty fucking neat if you're someone who from some early years is already fluent in the universal language of 440Hz. But chief, what do we do with the 438Hz ninjas from the other village then? And there surely must be a solution to many of existentialism's pointless crises to be found in elucidating a universal theory of how brains pick up language, music, (hello tonal languages), maths, and all other myriad traditional symbol systems using the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms.
But every day this spring, hearing the birds outside teaches me new unique facets of the sense of hearing. (It's a mad racket out there - there are the birds that I could possibly learn to name, and then there is this one that sounds totally out there - nuff said). Funny testament of how we seek to cultivate in others what we fail to cultivate in ourselves.
The committee for meta-ethics is mildly piffed at un(ac)countable replications of the natural phenomenon that, yes, young children can be taught symbol systems of arbitrary complexity up to maximum sensory perception (and, if they're anything like us, they'll even manage to pick up a bunch of metaphysical spooks on the way to the oceanic moment of unlearning it all and interfacing more directly with "real reality" beyond their nervous system lol)
Thankfully, if they're anything like us, by middle age they will have reverted back to monkeys.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#220I taught my son perfect pitch. AMA.
How did you do it? How old was he?