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> Also, the concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of a concept. It seems you really wis

> Also, the concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of a concept. It seems you really wish to believe anything can be mastered at any level, but it's just not true - no matter how disturbing that might sound. In pretty much any kind of mastery you can improve to some point and then your learning curve starts getting into the saturation due to your various genetical and psychological limitations. Your gains start getting smaller and smaller, and since life is limited it also limits what can be accomplished during it. People who were born with certain talent/predisposition will always win in that race (presuming they also work as hard as you), simply as they start off from a better starting position. You can't just decide as an adult to become a new Usain Bolt or Jordan or Novak Djokovic. If you haven't already started training hard as a kid it's just too late for you, no matter how much you wish it. And perfect pitch is just another extreme example of that as it seems to be closely related to the phase of speech development in kids, which ends when we're 8-11 years old. Try to pick up some foreign language that you know nothing of, just by listening and watching people use it, without any other help. And then compare your progress to a 2 or 3 years old kid who does the same seemingly effortlessly, even with the most complex languages in the world. Rick Beato has an interesting theory that kids can be directed to develop the perfect pitch by exposing them to a lot of advanced music with complex harmonies and scales, as the brain - he believes - treats music same as speech and recognizes the pitch of a sound as encoded information. But again it works only with kids. From what I've read about it there's no a single case known that someone beyond doubt proved to have had trained themselves a perfect pitch hearing as an adult.

dylan604 5y ago
With enough training and practice, I do believe that most people can accomplish quite a lot. Will that trained person be as good as a naturally gifted person? It depends on if the "gifted" person "wastes" their ability or is also training as well. If someone can hear a 440Hz tone, and state that it is an A, then that's pretty damn good and in 99.9999% of the time good enough. If they hear a 439Hz tone and also call that an A, then that's pretty damn good as well. For the rare person that could say that it's 1Hz off, then sure, that's even better, but there's always someone out there better. The person that wins the silver metal at the Olympics but lost by 0.01 seconds is still a really damn good athlete. So I'm not arguing someone can train themselves to be perfect pitch, but in all practical purposes it's close enough. If you can pin point the specific player in a group that is off pitch, it is still impressive. Does the person that can detect the 1Hz difference bring any more benefit than the person that says 439Hz and 440Hz is the same note? If it does and you're depending on a human for that level of accuracy, I'd suggest you're barking up the wrong tree and should be using intstrumentation for that.

dylan604 5y ago

With enough training and practice, I do believe that most people can accomplish quite a lot. Will that trained person be as good as a naturally gifted person? It depends on if the "gifted" person "wastes" their ability or is also training as well. If someone can hear a 440Hz tone, and state that it is an A, then that's pretty damn good and in 99.9999% of the time good enough. If they hear a 439Hz tone and also call that an A, then that's pretty damn good as well. For the rare person that could say that it's 1Hz off, then sure, that's even better, but there's always someone out there better. The person that wins the silver metal at the Olympics but lost by 0.01 seconds is still a really damn good athlete. So I'm not arguing someone can train themselves to be perfect pitch, but in all practical purposes it's close enough. If you can pin point the specific player in a group that is off pitch, it is still impressive. Does the person that can detect the 1Hz difference bring any more benefit than the person that says 439Hz and 440Hz is the same note? If it does and you're depending on a human for that level of accuracy, I'd suggest you're barking up the wrong tree and should be using intstrumentation for that.