14 ms·

How my children (n=2) acquired absolute pitch

198 points by bluecalm 3y ago

utopcell 3y ago
Quite a bit of negativity on the comments. I hope that's not the reason the article was taken down. I personally loved reading it, and for sure these kids benefited from this training. Makes you think what else we could be learning from 2 to 6. Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com/p/how-my-children-n2-acquired-absolute http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyr...
stuartjohnson12 3y ago
Came for the science, stayed for the prose. You have a g̶e̶n̶e̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶d̶e̶t̶e̶r̶m̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ talent for storytelling, that was a great read.
obilgic 3y ago
(n=2) :D
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  i also noticed the title is shorter as "How My 2 Children Acquired Absolute Pitch". but i smiled too.
ctvo 3y ago
> For my older son this ability has translated into what seems like a stunning effortlessness when it comes to his music lessons. He finds it easy to sit down at his instrument and improvise in any key. He composes beautiful music. He has been taking piano for a few years now, and even though he practices no more than 30 minutes a day on average, if he’s motivated, he can learn to play a simple Chopin composition within a week or two. There has to be a better way to brag about your children.
- planb 3y ago
  And I’m not even sure if haven perfect pitch helps this much in playing existing music on an instrument. You still need the routine and practice to move your hands fast and accurate (which for me learning to play the guitar is the much bigger problem than understanding what notes to play)
  - DennisP 3y ago
    I play piano, and memorizing notes takes me a while for new songs. I know what they sound like though. If I could skip most of the note-learning, I'd spend that much more time on practicing the movement. (And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.)
    - klodolph 3y ago
      Ordinary, relative pitch helps a lot learning new songs, and it is much more learnable. If you know what key you are in, and you can hear the intervals in a melody, you can play it back without needing absolute pitch to do it. > (And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.) That’s the circular dependency there—if you practice enough, you develop the skills to make it easier to learn songs, which makes it more fun to practice, so you practice more. I really think there are just two things you gotta do—“push through” and get the practice work done anyway, and make sure that you are practicing effectively.
    - coliveira 3y ago
      I have news for you: relative pitch can give you the same benefits. I for example play songs faster by ear than by reading notes. The only difference is that relative pitch takes time to develop, while it seems that absolute pitch is easier to acquire for the people who have it.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    But it saves you spending $20 once in your life to get a tuner!
- 3y ago
CoolestBeans 3y ago
Is absolute pitch actually a desirable skill? I'm a total amateur but from my perspective once your instrument is tuned up and you have some sort of reference point it makes more sense to think about things in relative terms. Like I don't really care what the actual chord I'm playing is, I just care that about what the root note is relative to the last chord I played, what quality the chord is (major, minor, any additional colorful interval added), and the maybe if it's inverted. Like if I learn a song and then for whatever reason I have to change what key it's in, all I gotta do is start playing a couple steps higher and lower and then I'm good. But if I had thought in absolute terms, I would be screwed. Am I off base here? I just play for fun I don't know.
- aldanor 3y ago
  It may be very undesirable as you grow older and your peception of pitch slowly slides over time, so you have to remind yourself that it's not correct and has to be adjusted. You can find interviews with many famous musicians talking about that.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  In my experience (I have pretty good relative pitch but not absolute), absolute is strictly better than relative pitch (ie. people with absolute pitch can do everything I can do with relative pitch, they can just also do absolute pitch)
  - klodolph 3y ago
    From what I’ve heard, absolute pitch can be distracting in certain scenarios, like if you are listening to something which does not use A=440 (more common than you might think, just imagine that some instrument in a band is flat, and then everybody else tunes to match that instrument, or consider choral music, which drifts over the course of a song for various reasons). The other problem is that absolute pitch often drifts as you age, so someone with AP in their 40s or 50s might start hearing everything as out of key, because their sense of pitch has drifted.
    - 3y ago
agos 3y ago
not sure if I agree that having AP ensures that learning music will be easy. at least for contemporary western music, identifying and producing a pitch is a nearly useless skill compared to identifying and producing intervals (relative pitch)
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Pretty much anyone who has absolute pitch has relative pitch.
  - fumeux_fume 3y ago
    That's great, but it's the absolute pitch that's not as useful
- klodolph 3y ago
  It’s hard to deny how useful AP is for people who transcribe music.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- tchaffee 3y ago
  Not easy, but less difficult. Not at all useless. When I've forgotten how to play a melody and don't have the sheet music I ask my wife which notes are wrong and in a matter of seconds she has me back on track. This is something that might take me so long I just give up and practice a different song. She can also listen to any song and instantly transcribe chords and melody for me. That's a huge time saver in learning a song. One which I don't lean on very often because I want to develop my own skills. But her ear enables her to learn and play songs far more quickly than me.
elros 3y ago
I read that as "How My Chicken" and honestly as much as I'm sure the process for children is interesting, I'd be lying if I said I don't find it more fascinating to get chicken to have absolute pitch instead :-)
- tchaffee 3y ago
  Sorry to disappoint you but all chickens are born with absolute pitch. It's how chickens communicate.
henjodottech 3y ago
Apparently some countries use a fixed solfeggio method while others don’t. Meaning that in any diatonic scale the tonic would always be ‘do’ or if fixed ‘do’ would always be a ‘c’. This caused me some confusion how one could use solfeggio methods to acquire perfect pitch.
skulk 3y ago
I don't think having absolute pitch makes you a better composer. OTOH, composing music as a child will likely lead to absolute pitch. My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child. Seeing the notes on the screen while playing and hearing them is almost certainly what made it click for me. I strongly believe that AP can be acquired at a rate that is an order of magnitude higher than what we observe today.
- criddell 3y ago
  > My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child. I have a similar anecdote. I had a small Casio keyboard that I gave to my daughter to play with when she was 3 or 4. There was no training or any kind of instruction beyond that. It was just another toy that was in her pile of toys and it wasn't something she played with very often. Many years later, we are in a music store and I hit a key on a piano and she tells me it's wrong. I didn't really understand what she was saying and then we found out the keyboard had some pitch shift mode enabled and she was right. That's the day we found out she had perfect pitch.
whafro 3y ago
Not to be a buzzkill – this is a cool story! But it’s worth noting that perfect/absolute pitch can be a negative for musicians in some contexts, especially vocal music. Since even the vast majority of musicians employ relative pitch, entire choruses can move together off of the original key, for good reasons and bad, but those with perfect pitch will (sometimes stubbornly) maintain the original key, even when doing so is counterproductive to the performance. Lead singer in the ensemble is a little under the weather and can’t hit the high notes? Normally, you’d consider starting the piece down a step or two, and get on with the show without much trouble. But if you have members with perfect pitch, that may not be an option without some significant rehearsal to familiarize them. This also translates to musical appreciation – I know people who can’t stand when a singer covers a song in a modified key, saying it sounds “wrong” and “terrible” compared to the original. For the vast majority of the audience, the key doesn’t matter terribly much, but for those with perfect pitch, the key is a significant attribute of the original piece, and it’s just as major as changing the words might be. In other contexts, perfect pitch can be very handy, but it’s not always quite as “perfect” as it’s sometimes portrayed.
- appletrotter 3y ago
  It sounds like people who have absolute pitch are a little worse at relative pitch than normal?
  - coliveira 3y ago
    Relative and absolute pitch are orthogonal. A person with absolute pitch needs to practice relative pitch. So, this is not necessarily the case. However, people with absolute pitch have far easier time reading notation, which may result in less familiarity with relative pitch.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  I used to be a harpsichord tuner, and I can tell you that perfect pitch would have driven me nuts dealing with A being 415, 430, or 440 (+/- 2) Hz on any given day, as well as dealing with unequal temperaments. I have very good relative pitch in comparison to the average musician, and that is a lot more useful (and an entirely learnable skill as an adult). I know a lot of musicians with perfect pitch, but only one piano tuner. My sister has perfect pitch, and she definitely had a leg up learning music, but she can't stand baroque music played in authentic pitch/tuning. Some modern music also uses effects to raise and lower the pitch of the song, and those annoy her too: think about the Janet Jackson song that breaks hard drives - it is in E, but the tuning is almost A=450 thanks to the use of varispeed. That one is pretty far, but many other songs have A=435-445 thanks to post-production. Her orchestra plays at A=441, and I think she has basically learned that tuning or doesn't care - it's only about 5 cents sharp (1/20th of a half step).
fumeux_fume 3y ago
Funny how some people believe that having AP is some kind of super power. It is neither necessary or sufficient for "learning music easily."
- coliveira 3y ago
  The main benefit is the automatic connection between note names and sounds. You can easily learn written music if you can just read the note and know how it sounds in your mind.
- musicfan1 3y ago
  Well, it sort of is a "super power". As you say, it won't teach you technique or musical taste, but it is a great help for improvisational music and composing. I have played music for quite some time and have worked on my relative pitch a fair bit, and I still struggle to improvise what I think in my head, whereas a person with perfect pitch would do it effortlessly and perfectly every time.
- boise 3y ago
  I have AP and I'm a terrible musician but it's a great party trick!
zwieback 3y ago
The fact that these kids can also improvise and compose makes me wonder if they were born with a lot of innate musical talent beyond pitch recognition. Of course that's the kind of "old thinking" the author doesn't want us to believe. I do believe AP can be taught to some degree. My pitch recognition isn't that great in general but when I play my instruments I can immediately tell if something is off so the super-strong feedback loop you gain from learning an instrument, especially something that can go off-pitch, is a strong driver.
- ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
  > innate musical talent Show me a proof there is such a thing and that it can be objectively measured.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    Anyone who spends a little time around children will quickly see that some have better hand eye coordination and are good at catching balls, some have an excellent sense of smell, some do very well with numbers, some can draw people's faces with little training, etc. Here is a list of things you can objectively measure to determine which children have innate musical talent. And it doesn't matter a great deal either. Innate talent plus no work will get you nowhere. No talent and work will get you somewhere although maybe not to the top. https://www.aimm.edu/blog/is-musical-talent-innate-or-acquired https://www.aimm.edu/blog/is-musical-talent-innate-or-acquir...
    - XajniN 3y ago
      There’s no such thing as talent.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        Everybody is born exactly the same, right?
        3y ago
zajio1am 3y ago
> Deutsch posed a question that really got me thinking: how come most people can identify and label colors with ease without needing any “reference colors” to do so, but absolute pitch is so rare People usually identify and label colors with much lower granularity. There are 7 conventional spectral colors with wide subjective boundaries between them, but e.g. piano has 88 distinct tones and that is still not full audible range.
- tzs 3y ago
  What are the limits of color discrimination, I wonder? Can we discriminate between close colors of light better than we can between close frequencies of sound? For pitch Googling suggests we can hear a difference of about 5 cents. A cent is 1/100th of a semitone, or 1/1200th of an octave, so N cents is a frequency ratio of 2^(N/1200). At 440 Hz (A above middle C) 5 cents would be a difference of 1.27 Hz. For light, a 5 cents difference would be about 2 nm wavelength at the red end of our visible range and about 1.1 nm at other end. (That's about 1 gHz frequency difference at the red and and 2 gHz at the other end). Can a human tell if two light sources differ in wavelength by 1-2 nm?
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    A trained musician can hear a pitch difference much smaller than 5 cents. I think designers and artists can also likely see a difference in wavelength of 1-2 nm, and probably a lot smaller.
    - mrob 3y ago
      Are they actually hearing the pitch difference, or are they hearing beat frequencies between simultaneous notes? You can hear beat frequencies even in monophonic music if the reverb is heavy enough.
      - pclmulqdq 3y ago
        Pitch difference is what I am referring to. Play one note after the other, and many musicians can hear 1 cent up or down. With simultaneous notes, counting the beats you can hear much smaller differences.
tzs 3y ago
Is perfect pitch good to have? I've read of older musicians with perfect pitch saying that when they get up near their 50s their perfect pitch drifts. They start hearing things as being higher or lower than they really are. For some that drift can be up to two semitones. This can make it very annoying to listen to music--it all sounds off. For everything you need as a musician relative pitch is fine, and won't go out of whack when you get older possibly ruining your ability to enjoy music.
lisasays 3y ago
The more fluent Asian students are in a tonal language, the more likely they are to have AP. And if they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than Caucasian students. So the complement of Asian is ... Caucasian? Seriously, I would expect a self-described furious shape rotator to know better.
- mcherm 3y ago
  I don't think the article in any way suggested that non-Asian = Caucasian, merely that "Caucasian" was the group whose reference point they compared it to.
- feoren 3y ago
  Could have been phrased better, but I think both points emphasize that it's the mastery of tonal language, not student's race, that seems to be making the difference.
  - lisasays 3y ago
    Hmm -- it definitely strikes me as not just poorly phrased, but quite weird that they brought up racial groupings at all. Otherwise they could have just said: If they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than students who grew up speaking non-tonal languages.
    - bluecalm 3y ago
      The racial grouping is brought up because it's a common claim that Asians (the children are half Asian if it's not clear enough from the text) have (or are born with) AP more often than other races. The author counters that while it's statistically true it might be not because of race but exposure to a tonal language (% wise more Asians speak a tonal language than Caucasians and those are the two that are relevant here).
kashunstva 3y ago
As a professional musician, this made me very uncomfortable for more reasons than I could easily count. Mainly, it seems to inflate the utility of absolute pitch. Some pros have it, other do not. Some composers have it, other do not. It really isn’t considered a mark of musical ability or competence. I’m a pianist and lack absolute pitch. My violinist daughter has infallibly accurate absolute pitch; but even with bowed instruments where it would seem to be an incredible asset, it’s less useful than one would think because you’re still always playing into the ensemble. You’re matching a consensus pitch within a changing harmonic context. That’s without getting into tuning systems, etc… There’s also something just a little reductionist about the whole enterprise of teaching your kids to have absolute pitch somewhat in isolation. (Yes, there’s something about playing Chopin etc. It just reads like an experiment in trying to develop musicianship by isolating one of a thousand parts rather than developing it holistically and organically.)
- omnicognate 3y ago
  One aspect of absolute pitch that I didn't know about until recently is that it almost always drifts when you get past a certain age. An acquiantance described how in middle age his perception of pitches had shifted by a semitone so the sensation he got for say an A5 was the sensation he used to get for an Aflat5. It got progressively worse from there. The thing is this doesn't mean you no longer have absolute pitch. You can still identify the pitches but they feel different, which can affect the enjoyment of music. All the sensations you get from familiar music are now permanently altered, which can take a lot of getting used to. I added this to a short list of reasons I tend to be rather glad I don't have absolute pitch.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - perihelions 3y ago
    - "for say an A5 was the sensation he used to get for an Aflat5" This affects me—probably from wearing loud headphones too long and too loud. Absolute pitch, except I now interpret everything one semitone sharp. (Opposite direction of your acquaintance, assuming neither of us got things backwards).
sudobash1 3y ago
There is a fun experiment you can do yourself to show that you have the capability for Absolute Pitch. Think of some pop songs or specific music recordings that you like listening to. Sing it, or play it in your mind. Then listen to the actual recording. If you can do this with some songs, then you have (at least the capability for) absolute pitch. The reasoning is simple. You can sing a song in any key you like (within the bounds of your vocal range). You don't even have to sing in a standard key. (You could sing it half-way between C# and D for instance). If you pick the exact right key out of the effectively infinite possibilities, you have remembered a specific pitch. If you can remember specific pitches, you can label them. (It's just that music always makes things easier. Writing a song to memorize something is an underused technique IMHO).
- caditinpiscinam 3y ago
  I can do this reliably for songs I've listened to recently (within the last couple of days), but after that I somehow "forget" the pitch. If I played a C scale on my guitar a few times in the morning every day, I could probably identify pitches correctly based on that reference. But I'd still need the reference.
earthbee 3y ago
I've heard that all people with absolute pitch will lose it once they get older into their 40s or 50s, as their sense of pitch drifts away from reality and everything will sound slightly out of pitch to them from then on.
- euroderf 3y ago
  FWIW this echoes another comment further up the page.
nardi 3y ago
Perfect pitch is actually kind of a curse in many, many contexts. I’d be very hesitant to experiment on my kids this way without their understanding of the consequences.
Mutlut 3y ago
Funny enough i just watched a documentary (in german) about child prodigies (musical ones) and david garrett said: there are no child prodigies, every note is trained hard. the gist was that a child prodigy is defined as a child who can play at 10 what professional can play but the kids need a few 'talents': 1. stamina and a lot of it 2. motivation/fun for playing music and 3. a ton of exercise. And this blog article sounds definitly much more involved while trying to give of the vibe of 'look i have prodigy kids' and 'i only do a little bit of excercising with them and its just 5 minutes a day or so'. Nonetheless, 30 minutes a day on avg is still so much more than a lot of other kids do and as others said, the bragging is annoying.
SpaceManNabs 3y ago
If I am ever fortunate enough to have a child in a world that can sustain them, I hope I let them choose their own path and that I can guide them with enough care to make them feel loved and guided but with enough distance that their choices are what they would have been if they saw all their possibilities.
a_c 3y ago
Perfect pitch is the monad in musical training. Everyone not having it thought they want to get it. Those who gets it would know it really isn't helping that much. Disclaimer, I don't get neither
Stephen304 3y ago
Seeing this made me curious to test my pitch accuracy after a few years of not playing music and I've discovered that my mind's A4 is now closer to 423 rather than 440 and it's driving me nuts. Feels like the Berenstein/stain Bears thing all over again
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  See Rick Beato on youtube...perfect pitch goes away.
renewiltord 3y ago
Cool stuff. Perhaps associated with Bloom's 2-sigma problem. Kids can learn all sorts of things when provided with consistent mastery learning.
deelowe 3y ago
I'm not sure what the of perfect pitch is in any realistic setting. As musicians, we're going to be matching the rest of the band and environment.
bluGill 3y ago
Absolute pitch in equal temperment. Which is a bad skill to have for many instruments. Tuning is a compromise, since chords are what count. A third is a 3:2 relationship between frequencies, an octave is 1:2, and a fifth is 4:3. (I might have the ratios above backwards). If you work out the math each will result in a different pitch for each note, and you need all 3
- recursive 3y ago
  A major third is 5:4. A fifth is 3:2. 3:4 is a fourth.
dools 3y ago
I would say that her children's musical abilities have nothing to do with absolute pitch and everything to do with having a super smart, well organised and consistent mother. Their earliest memories are of bonding with the world's most important person over music, almost every day of their lives. They speak 3 languages, they talk with their friends about synethsesia, etc. They're a family of absolute brain boxes. So I think following this method with your toddlers will probably recreate musical ability, and absolute pitch, but following a different musical routine with this level of regularity and consistency would also recreate the musical ability.
wkdneidbwf 3y ago
glad to see the other comments getting it right. relative pitch is a much more useful skill than perfect pitch. this mom sounds insufferable.
ambicapter 3y ago
Wow, a lot of slighted pro or semi-pro musicians in the comments, not a lot of hacker spirit. I didn't sense any competitiveness in this article at all, and author clearly described her embarrassment at being completely non-musical, and the desire for her kids to be at least not shut off completely from the musical world skill-wise. And she did it after being prompted by a very interesting question--why is "perfect pitch" considered so difficult for the human brain compared to distinguishing any color out of millions (well, we probably only have common words for a couple hundred), which is considered trivial? I thought that was a very cool way of putting it.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's a skill with limited usefulness that has real drawbacks. The comments seem well aware of that.
  - ambicapter 3y ago
    What are the drawbacks? Seems like a skill with very opportunity cost. She even drew a decision matrix in the post to illustrate her reasoning around it (whether or not you think that's accurate). The "downside" of attempting this was spending more time playing with her kids.
    - raynr 3y ago
      The slighted musicians, as you put it, have made plenty of experience-based comments on what the drawbacks are, and why the decision matrix is wrong. They accord with my own (admittedly amateur) experiences. I think it is disingenuous to dismiss their comments with a casual "whether or not you think that's accurate" - that's exactly what their comments are, they're disagreeing with the decision matrix and giving their reasons why. See especially the comments made by professional tuners (which matches what my own piano tuner tells me).
      - ambicapter 3y ago
        Maybe bring up the specific drawbacks you agree with, because many of the drawbacks mentioned seem really slight. One was that the musician was annoyed when an orchestra played in a slightly different pitch than what they preferred or what they were used to. Seems more like an OCD thing than something that actually impeded their musicianship.
magicbuzz 3y ago
One of the challenges of being a piano player - youtube search for a new piece you're interested in and there will be a video of a 4-5 year old playing it on a baby grand somewhere :-)
SoftTalker 3y ago
Article has been removed?
- hoistbypetard 3y ago
  https://archive.is/IlxyP https://archive.is/IlxyP
- phlummox 3y ago
  Besides the archive.is link already posted, you can find it on the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com/p/how-my-children-n2-acquired-absolute http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyr...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
whatscooking 3y ago
I have absolute pitch for select instruments only. For string instruments (especially for the violin which I play) you can ask me what note was played in the middle of the night and I’ll tell you exactly what it is. I can even most likely tell you which string and which position was used to play that note. But for other instruments like the piano, I can get close, but many times I’m within one or two notes. Surprisingly for wind instruments like the trumpet I also have almost as good accuracy as for the violin. Not sure why because I hardly ever heard a trumpet growing up.
- tgv 3y ago
  A piano (usually) has three strings per note, all slightly detuned. Perhaps that throws you off. You could try to see if your pitch perception is affected when someone plays three identical notes on a violin (although I imagine that's rather difficult, so perhaps a small ensemble is better).
longtimegoogler 3y ago
My child studied the Yamaha music program which starts at age 4 or 5 and emphasizes singing everything using fixed do solfege similar to Suzuki but with group classes They developed white key absolute pitch meaning they can recognize any natural tone by ear and can sing any pitch from memory. Many of the students developed some form of absolute pitch. However, I am not sure the utility of the skill. I am into jazz and tried to teach them some improvisation and they never showed a great aptitude or interest for it and they also struggle with relative pitch tasks, essentially converting the notes they recognize into the interval. In short, I came to the conclusion that absolute pitch recognition by itself won't make you a great musician.
louis8799 3y ago
I think relatively it is more important/useful for kids to retain the natural ability to sing high note
hislaziness 3y ago
The post is gone...
laurieg 3y ago
Absolute pitch is always held up as some kind of magical ideal but really this just gets in the way. I wish there was more information on training your relative pitch as a useful musical skill. After training I was able to do basic pitch related take like distinguish between major or minor and recognize the notes in a scale with fair accuracy. These skills are way more useful than plucking a Bb out of mid air
noveltyaccount 3y ago
Deleted, here's an archive https://archive.ph/2023.06.21-165851/https://furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com/p/how-my-children-n2-acquired-absolute https://archive.ph/2023.06.21-165851/https://furiouslyrotati...
LazyViking 3y ago
Seems like a lot of people are jealous about absolute pitch.
bmacho 3y ago
Article disappeared already, but conserved at https://archive.md/IlxyP https://archive.md/IlxyP
moneywoes 3y ago
Article not found
whydoineedthis 3y ago
the article is gone

198 points by bluecalm 3y ago

Quite a bit of negativity on the comments. I hope that's not the reason the article was taken down. I personally loved reading it, and for sure these kids benefited from this training. Makes you think what else we could be learning from 2 to 6. Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com/p/how-my-children-n2-acquired-absolute http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyr...

stuartjohnson12 3y ago

Came for the science, stayed for the prose. You have a g̶e̶n̶e̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶d̶e̶t̶e̶r̶m̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ talent for storytelling, that was a great read.

obilgic 3y ago

(n=2) :D

jjtheblunt 3y ago
i also noticed the title is shorter as "How My 2 Children Acquired Absolute Pitch". but i smiled too.

ctvo 3y ago

> For my older son this ability has translated into what seems like a stunning effortlessness when it comes to his music lessons. He finds it easy to sit down at his instrument and improvise in any key. He composes beautiful music. He has been taking piano for a few years now, and even though he practices no more than 30 minutes a day on average, if he’s motivated, he can learn to play a simple Chopin composition within a week or two. There has to be a better way to brag about your children.

planb 3y ago
And I’m not even sure if haven perfect pitch helps this much in playing existing music on an instrument. You still need the routine and practice to move your hands fast and accurate (which for me learning to play the guitar is the much bigger problem than understanding what notes to play)
- DennisP 3y ago
  I play piano, and memorizing notes takes me a while for new songs. I know what they sound like though. If I could skip most of the note-learning, I'd spend that much more time on practicing the movement. (And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.)
  - klodolph 3y ago
    Ordinary, relative pitch helps a lot learning new songs, and it is much more learnable. If you know what key you are in, and you can hear the intervals in a melody, you can play it back without needing absolute pitch to do it. > (And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.) That’s the circular dependency there—if you practice enough, you develop the skills to make it easier to learn songs, which makes it more fun to practice, so you practice more. I really think there are just two things you gotta do—“push through” and get the practice work done anyway, and make sure that you are practicing effectively.
  - coliveira 3y ago
    I have news for you: relative pitch can give you the same benefits. I for example play songs faster by ear than by reading notes. The only difference is that relative pitch takes time to develop, while it seems that absolute pitch is easier to acquire for the people who have it.
- ilyt 3y ago
  But it saves you spending $20 once in your life to get a tuner!
3y ago

CoolestBeans 3y ago

Is absolute pitch actually a desirable skill? I'm a total amateur but from my perspective once your instrument is tuned up and you have some sort of reference point it makes more sense to think about things in relative terms. Like I don't really care what the actual chord I'm playing is, I just care that about what the root note is relative to the last chord I played, what quality the chord is (major, minor, any additional colorful interval added), and the maybe if it's inverted. Like if I learn a song and then for whatever reason I have to change what key it's in, all I gotta do is start playing a couple steps higher and lower and then I'm good. But if I had thought in absolute terms, I would be screwed. Am I off base here? I just play for fun I don't know.

aldanor 3y ago
It may be very undesirable as you grow older and your peception of pitch slowly slides over time, so you have to remind yourself that it's not correct and has to be adjusted. You can find interviews with many famous musicians talking about that.
whimsicalism 3y ago
In my experience (I have pretty good relative pitch but not absolute), absolute is strictly better than relative pitch (ie. people with absolute pitch can do everything I can do with relative pitch, they can just also do absolute pitch)
- klodolph 3y ago
  From what I’ve heard, absolute pitch can be distracting in certain scenarios, like if you are listening to something which does not use A=440 (more common than you might think, just imagine that some instrument in a band is flat, and then everybody else tunes to match that instrument, or consider choral music, which drifts over the course of a song for various reasons). The other problem is that absolute pitch often drifts as you age, so someone with AP in their 40s or 50s might start hearing everything as out of key, because their sense of pitch has drifted.
  - 3y ago

agos 3y ago

not sure if I agree that having AP ensures that learning music will be easy. at least for contemporary western music, identifying and producing a pitch is a nearly useless skill compared to identifying and producing intervals (relative pitch)

whimsicalism 3y ago
Pretty much anyone who has absolute pitch has relative pitch.
- fumeux_fume 3y ago
  That's great, but it's the absolute pitch that's not as useful
klodolph 3y ago
It’s hard to deny how useful AP is for people who transcribe music.
- deleted 3y ago
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tchaffee 3y ago
Not easy, but less difficult. Not at all useless. When I've forgotten how to play a melody and don't have the sheet music I ask my wife which notes are wrong and in a matter of seconds she has me back on track. This is something that might take me so long I just give up and practice a different song. She can also listen to any song and instantly transcribe chords and melody for me. That's a huge time saver in learning a song. One which I don't lean on very often because I want to develop my own skills. But her ear enables her to learn and play songs far more quickly than me.

elros 3y ago

I read that as "How My Chicken" and honestly as much as I'm sure the process for children is interesting, I'd be lying if I said I don't find it more fascinating to get chicken to have absolute pitch instead :-)

tchaffee 3y ago
Sorry to disappoint you but all chickens are born with absolute pitch. It's how chickens communicate.

henjodottech 3y ago

Apparently some countries use a fixed solfeggio method while others don’t. Meaning that in any diatonic scale the tonic would always be ‘do’ or if fixed ‘do’ would always be a ‘c’. This caused me some confusion how one could use solfeggio methods to acquire perfect pitch.

skulk 3y ago

I don't think having absolute pitch makes you a better composer. OTOH, composing music as a child will likely lead to absolute pitch. My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child. Seeing the notes on the screen while playing and hearing them is almost certainly what made it click for me. I strongly believe that AP can be acquired at a rate that is an order of magnitude higher than what we observe today.

criddell 3y ago
> My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child. I have a similar anecdote. I had a small Casio keyboard that I gave to my daughter to play with when she was 3 or 4. There was no training or any kind of instruction beyond that. It was just another toy that was in her pile of toys and it wasn't something she played with very often. Many years later, we are in a music store and I hit a key on a piano and she tells me it's wrong. I didn't really understand what she was saying and then we found out the keyboard had some pitch shift mode enabled and she was right. That's the day we found out she had perfect pitch.

whafro 3y ago

Not to be a buzzkill – this is a cool story! But it’s worth noting that perfect/absolute pitch can be a negative for musicians in some contexts, especially vocal music. Since even the vast majority of musicians employ relative pitch, entire choruses can move together off of the original key, for good reasons and bad, but those with perfect pitch will (sometimes stubbornly) maintain the original key, even when doing so is counterproductive to the performance. Lead singer in the ensemble is a little under the weather and can’t hit the high notes? Normally, you’d consider starting the piece down a step or two, and get on with the show without much trouble. But if you have members with perfect pitch, that may not be an option without some significant rehearsal to familiarize them. This also translates to musical appreciation – I know people who can’t stand when a singer covers a song in a modified key, saying it sounds “wrong” and “terrible” compared to the original. For the vast majority of the audience, the key doesn’t matter terribly much, but for those with perfect pitch, the key is a significant attribute of the original piece, and it’s just as major as changing the words might be. In other contexts, perfect pitch can be very handy, but it’s not always quite as “perfect” as it’s sometimes portrayed.

appletrotter 3y ago
It sounds like people who have absolute pitch are a little worse at relative pitch than normal?
- coliveira 3y ago
  Relative and absolute pitch are orthogonal. A person with absolute pitch needs to practice relative pitch. So, this is not necessarily the case. However, people with absolute pitch have far easier time reading notation, which may result in less familiarity with relative pitch.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
I used to be a harpsichord tuner, and I can tell you that perfect pitch would have driven me nuts dealing with A being 415, 430, or 440 (+/- 2) Hz on any given day, as well as dealing with unequal temperaments. I have very good relative pitch in comparison to the average musician, and that is a lot more useful (and an entirely learnable skill as an adult). I know a lot of musicians with perfect pitch, but only one piano tuner. My sister has perfect pitch, and she definitely had a leg up learning music, but she can't stand baroque music played in authentic pitch/tuning. Some modern music also uses effects to raise and lower the pitch of the song, and those annoy her too: think about the Janet Jackson song that breaks hard drives - it is in E, but the tuning is almost A=450 thanks to the use of varispeed. That one is pretty far, but many other songs have A=435-445 thanks to post-production. Her orchestra plays at A=441, and I think she has basically learned that tuning or doesn't care - it's only about 5 cents sharp (1/20th of a half step).

fumeux_fume 3y ago

Funny how some people believe that having AP is some kind of super power. It is neither necessary or sufficient for "learning music easily."

coliveira 3y ago
The main benefit is the automatic connection between note names and sounds. You can easily learn written music if you can just read the note and know how it sounds in your mind.
musicfan1 3y ago
Well, it sort of is a "super power". As you say, it won't teach you technique or musical taste, but it is a great help for improvisational music and composing. I have played music for quite some time and have worked on my relative pitch a fair bit, and I still struggle to improvise what I think in my head, whereas a person with perfect pitch would do it effortlessly and perfectly every time.
boise 3y ago
I have AP and I'm a terrible musician but it's a great party trick!

zwieback 3y ago

The fact that these kids can also improvise and compose makes me wonder if they were born with a lot of innate musical talent beyond pitch recognition. Of course that's the kind of "old thinking" the author doesn't want us to believe. I do believe AP can be taught to some degree. My pitch recognition isn't that great in general but when I play my instruments I can immediately tell if something is off so the super-strong feedback loop you gain from learning an instrument, especially something that can go off-pitch, is a strong driver.

ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
> innate musical talent Show me a proof there is such a thing and that it can be objectively measured.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  Anyone who spends a little time around children will quickly see that some have better hand eye coordination and are good at catching balls, some have an excellent sense of smell, some do very well with numbers, some can draw people's faces with little training, etc. Here is a list of things you can objectively measure to determine which children have innate musical talent. And it doesn't matter a great deal either. Innate talent plus no work will get you nowhere. No talent and work will get you somewhere although maybe not to the top. https://www.aimm.edu/blog/is-musical-talent-innate-or-acquired https://www.aimm.edu/blog/is-musical-talent-innate-or-acquir...
  - XajniN 3y ago
    There’s no such thing as talent.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      Everybody is born exactly the same, right?
      - 3y ago

zajio1am 3y ago

> Deutsch posed a question that really got me thinking: how come most people can identify and label colors with ease without needing any “reference colors” to do so, but absolute pitch is so rare People usually identify and label colors with much lower granularity. There are 7 conventional spectral colors with wide subjective boundaries between them, but e.g. piano has 88 distinct tones and that is still not full audible range.

tzs 3y ago
What are the limits of color discrimination, I wonder? Can we discriminate between close colors of light better than we can between close frequencies of sound? For pitch Googling suggests we can hear a difference of about 5 cents. A cent is 1/100th of a semitone, or 1/1200th of an octave, so N cents is a frequency ratio of 2^(N/1200). At 440 Hz (A above middle C) 5 cents would be a difference of 1.27 Hz. For light, a 5 cents difference would be about 2 nm wavelength at the red end of our visible range and about 1.1 nm at other end. (That's about 1 gHz frequency difference at the red and and 2 gHz at the other end). Can a human tell if two light sources differ in wavelength by 1-2 nm?
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  A trained musician can hear a pitch difference much smaller than 5 cents. I think designers and artists can also likely see a difference in wavelength of 1-2 nm, and probably a lot smaller.
  - mrob 3y ago
    Are they actually hearing the pitch difference, or are they hearing beat frequencies between simultaneous notes? You can hear beat frequencies even in monophonic music if the reverb is heavy enough.
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      Pitch difference is what I am referring to. Play one note after the other, and many musicians can hear 1 cent up or down. With simultaneous notes, counting the beats you can hear much smaller differences.

tzs 3y ago

Is perfect pitch good to have? I've read of older musicians with perfect pitch saying that when they get up near their 50s their perfect pitch drifts. They start hearing things as being higher or lower than they really are. For some that drift can be up to two semitones. This can make it very annoying to listen to music--it all sounds off. For everything you need as a musician relative pitch is fine, and won't go out of whack when you get older possibly ruining your ability to enjoy music.

lisasays 3y ago

The more fluent Asian students are in a tonal language, the more likely they are to have AP. And if they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than Caucasian students. So the complement of Asian is ... Caucasian? Seriously, I would expect a self-described furious shape rotator to know better.

mcherm 3y ago
I don't think the article in any way suggested that non-Asian = Caucasian, merely that "Caucasian" was the group whose reference point they compared it to.
feoren 3y ago
Could have been phrased better, but I think both points emphasize that it's the mastery of tonal language, not student's race, that seems to be making the difference.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Hmm -- it definitely strikes me as not just poorly phrased, but quite weird that they brought up racial groupings at all. Otherwise they could have just said: If they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than students who grew up speaking non-tonal languages.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    The racial grouping is brought up because it's a common claim that Asians (the children are half Asian if it's not clear enough from the text) have (or are born with) AP more often than other races. The author counters that while it's statistically true it might be not because of race but exposure to a tonal language (% wise more Asians speak a tonal language than Caucasians and those are the two that are relevant here).

kashunstva 3y ago

As a professional musician, this made me very uncomfortable for more reasons than I could easily count. Mainly, it seems to inflate the utility of absolute pitch. Some pros have it, other do not. Some composers have it, other do not. It really isn’t considered a mark of musical ability or competence. I’m a pianist and lack absolute pitch. My violinist daughter has infallibly accurate absolute pitch; but even with bowed instruments where it would seem to be an incredible asset, it’s less useful than one would think because you’re still always playing into the ensemble. You’re matching a consensus pitch within a changing harmonic context. That’s without getting into tuning systems, etc… There’s also something just a little reductionist about the whole enterprise of teaching your kids to have absolute pitch somewhat in isolation. (Yes, there’s something about playing Chopin etc. It just reads like an experiment in trying to develop musicianship by isolating one of a thousand parts rather than developing it holistically and organically.)

omnicognate 3y ago
One aspect of absolute pitch that I didn't know about until recently is that it almost always drifts when you get past a certain age. An acquiantance described how in middle age his perception of pitches had shifted by a semitone so the sensation he got for say an A5 was the sensation he used to get for an Aflat5. It got progressively worse from there. The thing is this doesn't mean you no longer have absolute pitch. You can still identify the pitches but they feel different, which can affect the enjoyment of music. All the sensations you get from familiar music are now permanently altered, which can take a lot of getting used to. I added this to a short list of reasons I tend to be rather glad I don't have absolute pitch.
- deleted 3y ago
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- perihelions 3y ago
  - "for say an A5 was the sensation he used to get for an Aflat5" This affects me—probably from wearing loud headphones too long and too loud. Absolute pitch, except I now interpret everything one semitone sharp. (Opposite direction of your acquaintance, assuming neither of us got things backwards).

sudobash1 3y ago

There is a fun experiment you can do yourself to show that you have the capability for Absolute Pitch. Think of some pop songs or specific music recordings that you like listening to. Sing it, or play it in your mind. Then listen to the actual recording. If you can do this with some songs, then you have (at least the capability for) absolute pitch. The reasoning is simple. You can sing a song in any key you like (within the bounds of your vocal range). You don't even have to sing in a standard key. (You could sing it half-way between C# and D for instance). If you pick the exact right key out of the effectively infinite possibilities, you have remembered a specific pitch. If you can remember specific pitches, you can label them. (It's just that music always makes things easier. Writing a song to memorize something is an underused technique IMHO).

caditinpiscinam 3y ago
I can do this reliably for songs I've listened to recently (within the last couple of days), but after that I somehow "forget" the pitch. If I played a C scale on my guitar a few times in the morning every day, I could probably identify pitches correctly based on that reference. But I'd still need the reference.

earthbee 3y ago

I've heard that all people with absolute pitch will lose it once they get older into their 40s or 50s, as their sense of pitch drifts away from reality and everything will sound slightly out of pitch to them from then on.

euroderf 3y ago
FWIW this echoes another comment further up the page.

nardi 3y ago

Perfect pitch is actually kind of a curse in many, many contexts. I’d be very hesitant to experiment on my kids this way without their understanding of the consequences.

Mutlut 3y ago

Funny enough i just watched a documentary (in german) about child prodigies (musical ones) and david garrett said: there are no child prodigies, every note is trained hard. the gist was that a child prodigy is defined as a child who can play at 10 what professional can play but the kids need a few 'talents': 1. stamina and a lot of it 2. motivation/fun for playing music and 3. a ton of exercise. And this blog article sounds definitly much more involved while trying to give of the vibe of 'look i have prodigy kids' and 'i only do a little bit of excercising with them and its just 5 minutes a day or so'. Nonetheless, 30 minutes a day on avg is still so much more than a lot of other kids do and as others said, the bragging is annoying.

SpaceManNabs 3y ago

If I am ever fortunate enough to have a child in a world that can sustain them, I hope I let them choose their own path and that I can guide them with enough care to make them feel loved and guided but with enough distance that their choices are what they would have been if they saw all their possibilities.

a_c 3y ago

Perfect pitch is the monad in musical training. Everyone not having it thought they want to get it. Those who gets it would know it really isn't helping that much. Disclaimer, I don't get neither

Stephen304 3y ago

Seeing this made me curious to test my pitch accuracy after a few years of not playing music and I've discovered that my mind's A4 is now closer to 423 rather than 440 and it's driving me nuts. Feels like the Berenstein/stain Bears thing all over again

InCityDreams 3y ago
See Rick Beato on youtube...perfect pitch goes away.

renewiltord 3y ago

Cool stuff. Perhaps associated with Bloom's 2-sigma problem. Kids can learn all sorts of things when provided with consistent mastery learning.

deelowe 3y ago

I'm not sure what the of perfect pitch is in any realistic setting. As musicians, we're going to be matching the rest of the band and environment.

bluGill 3y ago

Absolute pitch in equal temperment. Which is a bad skill to have for many instruments. Tuning is a compromise, since chords are what count. A third is a 3:2 relationship between frequencies, an octave is 1:2, and a fifth is 4:3. (I might have the ratios above backwards). If you work out the math each will result in a different pitch for each note, and you need all 3

recursive 3y ago
A major third is 5:4. A fifth is 3:2. 3:4 is a fourth.

dools 3y ago

I would say that her children's musical abilities have nothing to do with absolute pitch and everything to do with having a super smart, well organised and consistent mother. Their earliest memories are of bonding with the world's most important person over music, almost every day of their lives. They speak 3 languages, they talk with their friends about synethsesia, etc. They're a family of absolute brain boxes. So I think following this method with your toddlers will probably recreate musical ability, and absolute pitch, but following a different musical routine with this level of regularity and consistency would also recreate the musical ability.

wkdneidbwf 3y ago

glad to see the other comments getting it right. relative pitch is a much more useful skill than perfect pitch. this mom sounds insufferable.

ambicapter 3y ago

Wow, a lot of slighted pro or semi-pro musicians in the comments, not a lot of hacker spirit. I didn't sense any competitiveness in this article at all, and author clearly described her embarrassment at being completely non-musical, and the desire for her kids to be at least not shut off completely from the musical world skill-wise. And she did it after being prompted by a very interesting question--why is "perfect pitch" considered so difficult for the human brain compared to distinguishing any color out of millions (well, we probably only have common words for a couple hundred), which is considered trivial? I thought that was a very cool way of putting it.

Tao3300 3y ago
I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's a skill with limited usefulness that has real drawbacks. The comments seem well aware of that.
- ambicapter 3y ago
  What are the drawbacks? Seems like a skill with very opportunity cost. She even drew a decision matrix in the post to illustrate her reasoning around it (whether or not you think that's accurate). The "downside" of attempting this was spending more time playing with her kids.
  - raynr 3y ago
    The slighted musicians, as you put it, have made plenty of experience-based comments on what the drawbacks are, and why the decision matrix is wrong. They accord with my own (admittedly amateur) experiences. I think it is disingenuous to dismiss their comments with a casual "whether or not you think that's accurate" - that's exactly what their comments are, they're disagreeing with the decision matrix and giving their reasons why. See especially the comments made by professional tuners (which matches what my own piano tuner tells me).
    - ambicapter 3y ago
      Maybe bring up the specific drawbacks you agree with, because many of the drawbacks mentioned seem really slight. One was that the musician was annoyed when an orchestra played in a slightly different pitch than what they preferred or what they were used to. Seems more like an OCD thing than something that actually impeded their musicianship.

magicbuzz 3y ago

One of the challenges of being a piano player - youtube search for a new piece you're interested in and there will be a video of a 4-5 year old playing it on a baby grand somewhere :-)

SoftTalker 3y ago

Article has been removed?

hoistbypetard 3y ago
https://archive.is/IlxyP https://archive.is/IlxyP
phlummox 3y ago
Besides the archive.is link already posted, you can find it on the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com/p/how-my-children-n2-acquired-absolute http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyr...

deleted 3y ago

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whatscooking 3y ago

I have absolute pitch for select instruments only. For string instruments (especially for the violin which I play) you can ask me what note was played in the middle of the night and I’ll tell you exactly what it is. I can even most likely tell you which string and which position was used to play that note. But for other instruments like the piano, I can get close, but many times I’m within one or two notes. Surprisingly for wind instruments like the trumpet I also have almost as good accuracy as for the violin. Not sure why because I hardly ever heard a trumpet growing up.

tgv 3y ago
A piano (usually) has three strings per note, all slightly detuned. Perhaps that throws you off. You could try to see if your pitch perception is affected when someone plays three identical notes on a violin (although I imagine that's rather difficult, so perhaps a small ensemble is better).

longtimegoogler 3y ago

My child studied the Yamaha music program which starts at age 4 or 5 and emphasizes singing everything using fixed do solfege similar to Suzuki but with group classes They developed white key absolute pitch meaning they can recognize any natural tone by ear and can sing any pitch from memory. Many of the students developed some form of absolute pitch. However, I am not sure the utility of the skill. I am into jazz and tried to teach them some improvisation and they never showed a great aptitude or interest for it and they also struggle with relative pitch tasks, essentially converting the notes they recognize into the interval. In short, I came to the conclusion that absolute pitch recognition by itself won't make you a great musician.

louis8799 3y ago

I think relatively it is more important/useful for kids to retain the natural ability to sing high note

hislaziness 3y ago

The post is gone...

laurieg 3y ago

Absolute pitch is always held up as some kind of magical ideal but really this just gets in the way. I wish there was more information on training your relative pitch as a useful musical skill. After training I was able to do basic pitch related take like distinguish between major or minor and recognize the notes in a scale with fair accuracy. These skills are way more useful than plucking a Bb out of mid air

noveltyaccount 3y ago

Deleted, here's an archive https://archive.ph/2023.06.21-165851/https://furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com/p/how-my-children-n2-acquired-absolute https://archive.ph/2023.06.21-165851/https://furiouslyrotati...

LazyViking 3y ago

Seems like a lot of people are jealous about absolute pitch.

bmacho 3y ago

Article disappeared already, but conserved at https://archive.md/IlxyP https://archive.md/IlxyP

moneywoes 3y ago

Article not found

whydoineedthis 3y ago

the article is gone