7 ms·

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 pitc

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).
  - omnicognate 3y ago
    Quite likely I got it backwards. I couldn't remember the direction for sure and pretty much guessed.
  - eskaytwo 3y ago
    It seems more cognitive than due to physical effects in the ear. Adam Neely had a good YouTube video on it https://youtu.be/QRaACa1Mrd4 https://youtu.be/QRaACa1Mrd4
musicfan1 3y ago
As a person without absolute pitch, here is my take on its utility. It does not help technique, does not help for sight read music, and does not grant musical taste or compositional creativity. AP helps improvisation (mostly keyboard and strings, less so brass, and even less so woodwinds, I can explain later). Also, ease/speed of composition, allowing you to focus on the creative aspect of composing, or just simply composing more. You can become a great improviser with relative pitch, but it is much harder, as you have to calculate the intervals between notes in real time, whereas AP spits out the exact note automatically for you. You should ask your daughter if she would be interested in Jazz improvisation! That is where her AP would actually shine. We need another Stephane Grappelli! :D I am a violinist myself, and although I can play every scale and arpeggio in the books, I still can't play freely what I hear in my head vs my fingers even after years of working on my real time relative pitch.
- 49531 3y ago
  I'd argue interval training is more valuable than absolute pitch in improvisation. It's rare you find yourself in a scenario where key is unknown and unknowable, especially playing with other musicians. Being able to hear and distinguish a minor 3rd from major 3rd is much more valuable.
  - duderific 3y ago
    Additionally, it's the intervals that give music its emotional content. For example, a minor third sounds "sad" while a major third sounds "happy". Absolute pitches are meaningless in this regard. Playing a single note confers no meaning. It's only when subsequent notes are played that a context emerges, and music gains its emotional qualities.
    - itishappy 3y ago
      Wonder if folks with absolute pitch form emotional associations with different keys.
      - 3y ago
sdwr 3y ago
As a non-professional semi-musician, it also made me uncomfortable. The "my children are wonderful miracles" attitude shone through, in a way that feels unrealistic + overly magical. I met a Chinese couple last week coaching their young daughter in the pool. She's doing 2km daily, and is shaping up to be a pretty good swimmer. The article indulges more in this 5 minutes of tone practice than they ever have.
- robbyking 3y ago
  Why did you feel it necessary to include the family's race?
  - p0pcult 3y ago
    [dead]
  - sdwr 3y ago
    It's very relevant. Asian families (at least the ones who immigrate) tend to have 1 or 2 kids, and focus hard on them achieving material success in a safe profession. They also tend to micromanage to reach that goal. It's not a new stereotype, and it's not incorrect. I'm really sick of people thinking mentioning race or personal attributes is offensive. To me, real racism is about people not being welcome or safe. I don't know how that extended to "You have to pretend everyone is a soul without a body".
pclmulqdq 3y ago
> 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.) This article was a fascinatingly uneducated take on what it means to learn music mixed in with a classic dose of American "my child is better than you." Like many piano students who started early, I too played some easy Chopin music at ~6, and I bet most later starters also play some Chopin within 1-2 years of starting (in fact, I bet they reach the Chopin sooner). Perfect pitch is very much not required to be a professional musician, and seems to help only in a few areas, and only by accelerating your musical education a bit. I'm sure it makes things like the Suzuki method easier for young children, but you arguably shouldn't use the Suzuki method to teach music to your kids anyway since it tends to guide them to a local maximum by emphasizing ear training over reading. Learning pieces by listening rather than reading works for easy pieces, but I bet nobody has learned the Hammerklavier Sonata or a Paganini Caprice by ear. I really wish the idea of "racing" through your musical education with hacks like this would stop - the only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. My friends who went to international competitions at 18-20 were all practicing 5+ hours a day by age 12, and several of them actually started their music education at age 7-9 rather than obscenely early like this.
- lisasays 3y ago
  The only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. That, and actually digging music through forces coming out of your own soul (and not for the sake of meeting your parent's expectations ... or worse, serving as fodder for their half-baked education experiments) might have something to do with it. Don't see why your comment should be downvoted, BTW.
  - calt 3y ago
    > digging music through forces coming out of your own soul Agree. Art is art, and why do we make art? Well...? Technical skill helps with the nuance of the creation, but not with the "why."
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
How do things change if every single person in the musical ensemble had absolute pitch? How would it be better, and how would it be worse?
- quickquest234 3y ago
  You would have a big group of people who would really struggle if they ever had to play something familiar transposed, rather than just a handful. What the post you're replying to is alluding to is all the ways that pitch is simply not absolute. That can be for boring reasons: you're playing with an organ, or some other instrument with fixed or temperature dependent pitch, or in a different city with different conventions; but also for the interesting reason that the "correct" pitch of a C, say, is the result of a mostly-unconscious negotiation that considers ones' place within a chord that's sounding and the melody you're playing. Even equal-tempered tuned keyboard instruments involves compromise wrt placement of the octaves, etc.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
My son had one use for it: He could be employed to tune the cellos in the orchestra , and didn't have to use an instrument.
- Bud 3y ago
  Except that doesn't actually work. Absolute pitch is the ability to name a given tone, which is actually quite a wide range of frequency. It doesn't mean you can produce that tone anywhere nearly as accurately as is required to tune an orchestra. The intonation isn't that good.
flashgordon 3y ago
That's pretty insightful. I play carnatic (Indian classical music) violin and I don't have perfect (absolute?) Pitch. But the nature of carnatic music is it is all relative so I'm much better at pitch differences than absolutes.
antegamisou 3y ago
Honestly looks like another dumb American obsession, same with scoring high on specific subsets of IQ tests and deeming those who do so to be in the .0001% of intellect in the world!
- slily 3y ago
  Seems more fashionable to deny that general intelligence is real or that IQ tests can measure it with a fair degree of accuracy nowadays.
  - antegamisou 3y ago
    I knew someone would the fail “the IQ test” of the parent comment. There’s a reason I specifically noted scoring high on subsets/subtests, Raven Progressive Matrices being the most popularized form online, of full IQ tests (latest WAIS revision). So no neither here, nor in the previous comment was there any dismissal of the existence of intelligence or its means of estimation. Many like to brag about getting high on this subtype and therefore believe they’re on the far-right end of the distribution, however to get an accurate estimate of your position there, you need all the additional tests that measure processing speed, verbal reasoning, short-term memory, maybe other types of non-geometric abstract reasoning tests. As I said I’m not a big fan of the way Americans obsess over the reliability of RPMs for an accurate score estimation, but I’d wager a test with the types of questions found on the SATs/GREs would help form a very robust intelligence population distribution.
m3kw9 3y ago
Would equate it to math where you can do certain large arithmetic in your head.
tgv 3y ago
One thing I've always wondered about: how does your daughter experience other tuning systems? E.g. Baroque music is often played in other tunings, and relative to another frequency (an A can be as low as 400Hz or as high as 480Hz). Is there something "off" about it?
isitmadeofglass 3y ago
[dead]

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).
- omnicognate 3y ago
  Quite likely I got it backwards. I couldn't remember the direction for sure and pretty much guessed.
- eskaytwo 3y ago
  It seems more cognitive than due to physical effects in the ear. Adam Neely had a good YouTube video on it https://youtu.be/QRaACa1Mrd4 https://youtu.be/QRaACa1Mrd4

musicfan1 3y ago

As a person without absolute pitch, here is my take on its utility. It does not help technique, does not help for sight read music, and does not grant musical taste or compositional creativity. AP helps improvisation (mostly keyboard and strings, less so brass, and even less so woodwinds, I can explain later). Also, ease/speed of composition, allowing you to focus on the creative aspect of composing, or just simply composing more. You can become a great improviser with relative pitch, but it is much harder, as you have to calculate the intervals between notes in real time, whereas AP spits out the exact note automatically for you. You should ask your daughter if she would be interested in Jazz improvisation! That is where her AP would actually shine. We need another Stephane Grappelli! :D I am a violinist myself, and although I can play every scale and arpeggio in the books, I still can't play freely what I hear in my head vs my fingers even after years of working on my real time relative pitch.

49531 3y ago
I'd argue interval training is more valuable than absolute pitch in improvisation. It's rare you find yourself in a scenario where key is unknown and unknowable, especially playing with other musicians. Being able to hear and distinguish a minor 3rd from major 3rd is much more valuable.
- duderific 3y ago
  Additionally, it's the intervals that give music its emotional content. For example, a minor third sounds "sad" while a major third sounds "happy". Absolute pitches are meaningless in this regard. Playing a single note confers no meaning. It's only when subsequent notes are played that a context emerges, and music gains its emotional qualities.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Wonder if folks with absolute pitch form emotional associations with different keys.
    - 3y ago

sdwr 3y ago

As a non-professional semi-musician, it also made me uncomfortable. The "my children are wonderful miracles" attitude shone through, in a way that feels unrealistic + overly magical. I met a Chinese couple last week coaching their young daughter in the pool. She's doing 2km daily, and is shaping up to be a pretty good swimmer. The article indulges more in this 5 minutes of tone practice than they ever have.

robbyking 3y ago
Why did you feel it necessary to include the family's race?
- p0pcult 3y ago
  [dead]
- sdwr 3y ago
  It's very relevant. Asian families (at least the ones who immigrate) tend to have 1 or 2 kids, and focus hard on them achieving material success in a safe profession. They also tend to micromanage to reach that goal. It's not a new stereotype, and it's not incorrect. I'm really sick of people thinking mentioning race or personal attributes is offensive. To me, real racism is about people not being welcome or safe. I don't know how that extended to "You have to pretend everyone is a soul without a body".

pclmulqdq 3y ago

> 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.) This article was a fascinatingly uneducated take on what it means to learn music mixed in with a classic dose of American "my child is better than you." Like many piano students who started early, I too played some easy Chopin music at ~6, and I bet most later starters also play some Chopin within 1-2 years of starting (in fact, I bet they reach the Chopin sooner). Perfect pitch is very much not required to be a professional musician, and seems to help only in a few areas, and only by accelerating your musical education a bit. I'm sure it makes things like the Suzuki method easier for young children, but you arguably shouldn't use the Suzuki method to teach music to your kids anyway since it tends to guide them to a local maximum by emphasizing ear training over reading. Learning pieces by listening rather than reading works for easy pieces, but I bet nobody has learned the Hammerklavier Sonata or a Paganini Caprice by ear. I really wish the idea of "racing" through your musical education with hacks like this would stop - the only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. My friends who went to international competitions at 18-20 were all practicing 5+ hours a day by age 12, and several of them actually started their music education at age 7-9 rather than obscenely early like this.

lisasays 3y ago
The only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. That, and actually digging music through forces coming out of your own soul (and not for the sake of meeting your parent's expectations ... or worse, serving as fodder for their half-baked education experiments) might have something to do with it. Don't see why your comment should be downvoted, BTW.
- calt 3y ago
  > digging music through forces coming out of your own soul Agree. Art is art, and why do we make art? Well...? Technical skill helps with the nuance of the creation, but not with the "why."

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

How do things change if every single person in the musical ensemble had absolute pitch? How would it be better, and how would it be worse?

quickquest234 3y ago
You would have a big group of people who would really struggle if they ever had to play something familiar transposed, rather than just a handful. What the post you're replying to is alluding to is all the ways that pitch is simply not absolute. That can be for boring reasons: you're playing with an organ, or some other instrument with fixed or temperature dependent pitch, or in a different city with different conventions; but also for the interesting reason that the "correct" pitch of a C, say, is the result of a mostly-unconscious negotiation that considers ones' place within a chord that's sounding and the melody you're playing. Even equal-tempered tuned keyboard instruments involves compromise wrt placement of the octaves, etc.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

My son had one use for it: He could be employed to tune the cellos in the orchestra , and didn't have to use an instrument.

Bud 3y ago
Except that doesn't actually work. Absolute pitch is the ability to name a given tone, which is actually quite a wide range of frequency. It doesn't mean you can produce that tone anywhere nearly as accurately as is required to tune an orchestra. The intonation isn't that good.

flashgordon 3y ago

That's pretty insightful. I play carnatic (Indian classical music) violin and I don't have perfect (absolute?) Pitch. But the nature of carnatic music is it is all relative so I'm much better at pitch differences than absolutes.

antegamisou 3y ago

Honestly looks like another dumb American obsession, same with scoring high on specific subsets of IQ tests and deeming those who do so to be in the .0001% of intellect in the world!

slily 3y ago
Seems more fashionable to deny that general intelligence is real or that IQ tests can measure it with a fair degree of accuracy nowadays.
- antegamisou 3y ago
  I knew someone would the fail “the IQ test” of the parent comment. There’s a reason I specifically noted scoring high on subsets/subtests, Raven Progressive Matrices being the most popularized form online, of full IQ tests (latest WAIS revision). So no neither here, nor in the previous comment was there any dismissal of the existence of intelligence or its means of estimation. Many like to brag about getting high on this subtype and therefore believe they’re on the far-right end of the distribution, however to get an accurate estimate of your position there, you need all the additional tests that measure processing speed, verbal reasoning, short-term memory, maybe other types of non-geometric abstract reasoning tests. As I said I’m not a big fan of the way Americans obsess over the reliability of RPMs for an accurate score estimation, but I’d wager a test with the types of questions found on the SATs/GREs would help form a very robust intelligence population distribution.

m3kw9 3y ago

Would equate it to math where you can do certain large arithmetic in your head.

tgv 3y ago

One thing I've always wondered about: how does your daughter experience other tuning systems? E.g. Baroque music is often played in other tunings, and relative to another frequency (an A can be as low as 400Hz or as high as 480Hz). Is there something "off" about it?

isitmadeofglass 3y ago

[dead]