7 ms·

Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

217 points by paytonjjones 4mo ago

KomoD 4mo ago
> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6. I found some papers suggesting it is possible for adults, but more difficult. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_fast_and_accurate_absolute_pitch_judgment_in_adulthood https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...
- toolslive 4mo ago
  You will probably claim it's not "real" perfect pitch, but many people use their tinnitus to help them. They identified their ring as having, for example, F#, and suddenly their relative pitch became absolute.
  - Dilettante_ 4mo ago
    Now there's a hack in the most delightful sense of the word
  - jpfromlondon 4mo ago
    I've seen nothing to convince me that "absolute pitch" is anything other than relative pitch with excellent recall or persistent observation of pitch.
    - xdertz 4mo ago
      I agree. I can tune a guitar to within a half a semitone of accuracy without reference just from knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound after 20 years of playing.
      - williamdclt 4mo ago
        > knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound well that's the whole question isn't it? If you know how an open string is supposed to have, that's what people call absolute pitch?
        NobodyNada 4mo ago
        Most people without absolute pitch have some level of "pitch memory", but it's not comprehensive or reliable. For instance, if you ask people to sing a pop song, they're significantly more likely than chance to sing it in the original key. I know the Super Mario Bros. theme starts on an E, so I can identify an unknown pitch by recalling that theme and comparing using relative pitch. But that's quite a slow and unintuitive process, and it's easy to make a mistake. People with absolute pitch just hear the pitch without having to "recall" a reference note to compare to like that.
    - argee 4mo ago
      I don't have perfect pitch (never trained in it) but I've played violin a lot (started in college) and I can hear the G-ness, D-ness, A-ness, or E-ness of a note. I do have to be actually trying to listen though, except for if they are G3, D4, A4, or E5. So I have the latter, but not the former (i.e., no perfect pitch). The difference is, I can choose not to observe it. It reminds me of how I've studied Japanese for 15 years, but I can still sometimes choose not to read certain kanji if I glance at a legible word — the same is not true for English, if I see something even for a split second I've already read it.
      - jpfromlondon 4mo ago
        You don't really have relative perfect pitch because as you say, you can recognise the G-ness of a note I assume without reference. If anything I think this reinforces what I'm alluding to.
  - Tade0 4mo ago
    Also your teeth don't change too much in adulthood save for cavities and the like, so if you hum, they'll resonate in a rather stable frequency.
- sudo_cowsay 4mo ago
  It’s not “real” perfect pitch. It’s more like training and memorizing. It doesn’t come as naturally as it does for kids.
  - agos 4mo ago
    isn't perfect pitch for kids also training and memorizing? the learning method from the original post surely suggests so
    - casey2 4mo ago
      It's just like how foreigners will never truly learn a language; racist BS. Plenty of tonedef adults get into Julliard and can play circles around people with perfect pitch no matter how much they practice music.
- sudb 4mo ago
  There was an interesting study that I attempted to enroll in (but unfortunately was screened out by both age and childhood instrument learning) that was looking at psilocybin potentially giving adults the ability to acquire perfect pitch: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-study https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-stu...
- nosioptar 4mo ago
  Yeah, the stuff on the repo is bullshit because it's ai slop. I learned perfect pitch well after six. I know others who have too.
gcanyon 4mo ago
I've seen articles that say that absolute perfect pitch is a curse, not a gift, because it wanders with age, and then everything is "out of key".
- NobodyNada 4mo ago
  I'm a musician who doesn't have absolute pitch, but does have very strong relative pitch. My understanding is that perfect pitch is neat party trick, but actually a hindrance instead of a help in most musical circumstances. Relative pitch, on the other hand, is incredibly useful (and fortunately you can train and develop it later in life). Because most people don't have perfect pitch, (Western) music is built on the relationships between pitches rather than the absolute pitches. So with absolute pitch, you can play something by ear; with relative pitch, you can play something by ear in any key. Learning to think of the notes you're playing relatively instead of absolutely is already a difficult leap for most musicians, and my understanding (though I don't have absolute pitch so I can't compare from experience) is that absolute pitch makes this skill significantly harder to acquire, since you have to retrain your ear in addition to your hands. If I were offered a choice to trade my sense of relative pitch for absolute pitch, I most certainly would not take it. I know well the feeling of incongruity when my muscle memory is stuck in the wrong key, and absolute pitch would mean I'm stuck there all the time instead of being just able to shake my head, focus on the new key, and clear my mind of the old.
  - somenameforme 4mo ago
    Somehow this makes me think of the differences between tonal and inflective languages. Learning a tonal language can be brutal for a person who's used to expressing emotion/inflections through tone, and there is nothing more frustrating than trying to speak to somebody when saying a word phonetically correct but in a slightly wrong tune and, to them, what you're saying is completely incoherent. The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.
mystifyingpoi 4mo ago
What are the next steps after, let's say, a child is able to indentify all "colors"? They can distinguish F/A and F/C, then what? Should this app/method be combined with regular piano/other lessons, so the child knows what's even happening?
- paytonjjones 4mo ago
  The only age-sensitive part is the ability to map the chords to the colors. Eventually, you would want to teach them to map the color to the chord name and recognize the root of the chord. But that can be learned any time. Also keep in mind that if a kid learns all the colors, you'll want to continue practicing to "bridge" over the age where they would lose the ability to recognize perfect pitch. If they mastered this at age 4, they could still potentially lose the ability if they don't practice during that period.
- sowbug 4mo ago
  Rick Beato has at least one child with absolute pitch, with stunning ability to name chords and the discrete notes in them. Here's the short video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI I'm not a musician, but I'm told the kid's way of naming the chords is particularly adept from a musician's point of view, and that's because the dad (a very accomplished musician) helped teach the kid. I am sure Rick has made more videos about what he did.
- dolia 4mo ago
  Clearly, it makes sense to have perfect pitch only in connection with a particular instrument for practical purposes. Besides being a neat party trick, it gives more possibilities and makes things easier if a person wants to work with music professionally, especially with academical (aka "classical") music.
RickJWagner 4mo ago
As a banjo player, I have heard perfect pitch defined this way: “Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”
- samudrijan 4mo ago
  Funniest thing I’ve read in days. I’d say bravo, but yeehaw would be more appropriate.
- stavros 4mo ago
  Can someone explain this? I don't get it.
  - jpease 4mo ago
    Certainly, as jokes are by far best when they are explained. In this context the overall discussion is about pitch in the context of music. Here the jokester takes advantage of pitch having more than one meaning in English. One of the alternate meanings is to throw. Next the joke selects a banjo and an accordion, two instruments that are less popular and thus more likely to be understood by the general populace as being disparaged, which is a critical component for the audience to correctly infer the alternate meaning of pitch. You put it all together and we have this hilarious joke: A perfect throw is when a banjo is tossed into the garbage and it finds its perfect companion in an accordion that has similarly been discarded to the same trash receptacle. (Edit: stupid auto-correct)
  - JSR_FDED 4mo ago
    Pitch is another word for throw. The joke is that a perfect throw is one where a banjo Is thrown into the trash (this is already funny if you consider how careful musicians are with their instruments), and what makes it a perfect throw is that it lands on an accordion (the fact that the accordion is already in the trash is also funny) and the fact that one shitty instrument landing exactly on another shitty instrument would be an athletic achievement that is given the name of a desirable musical ability “perfect pitch”, is excellent.
ljcoco 4mo ago
not sure this can be taught
frafart 4mo ago
It can be dormant in adults. I discovered it when I was 16 after meeting a pianist who had it and “taught me” how to do it. I kept getting faster and more accurate as I practiced solfeggio in music school in my 20s. Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.
- sudo_cowsay 4mo ago
  I feel like the pianist trained you rather than you achieving it like a little kid does. That happens sometimes if you put in the effort (learning/memorizing/training). While I am not old enough to know how it changes, could it be perhaps that what you had learned when you were 16 was in your mind a certain pitch and as ears change (a 16 year old can hear higher pitch than 30 year old), you don’t relearn it, therefore it’s shifted? Please correct me (pretty sure I’m wrong)
  - dbalatero 4mo ago
    I have it from early age, and it also shifts now that I'm almost 40. I think the more constantly I use it though, the more it seems to settle back into accuracy.
    - sudo_cowsay 4mo ago
      Thank you! That's really interesting. So it's like a muscle I guess. More you use it = better.
      - thdr 4mo ago
        That's not true for everyone. Some extraordinary musicians with perfect pitch also reported that it starts drifting for them as they age (I remember Oscar Peterson and Jacob Collier telling this)
- markerz 4mo ago
  The loss with age is super commin, and all in the same direction (people hear more flat but guess more sharp).
delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
Don’t teach you kids perfect pitch. Introduce them to the wide variety of music from punk to jazz to classical and let them play with sounds. If they get into it, ask if they want a teacher in instrument of their liking. Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.
- paytonjjones 4mo ago
  I 100% agree that perfect pitch is less important than these other things. The only reason I think perfect pitch is worth prioritizing early is because of the developmental gate.
- rao-v 4mo ago
  Is there a good way to teach kids relative pitch (beyond exposing them to a broad range of music etc.)? I struggle with this and have tried multiple times to learn different instruments from different musical traditions and instructors and have mostly failed over the years.
  - pclmulqdq 4mo ago
    Everyone can learn good relative pitch with practice. Music schools do this regularly, and it's just a skill you can pick up. Start by identifying intervals, then learn chords, and then learn to write down music you hear, and so on. It just takes work.
    - laurieg 4mo ago
      I wonder if there's a bit of survivorship bias with this one. I've never been able to learn relative pitch after trying quite a lot of different methods, ear training app and playing a couple of musical instruments. If you're in a music school then perhaps your baseline musical ability is already relatively high?
      - pclmulqdq 4mo ago
throwawayk7h 4mo ago
What I dislike about this method is that it seems to be focussed on A=440 Hz, which is arbitrary. I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys.
- dolia 4mo ago
  Is there anything about notes and instruments tuning that is not arbitrary? But hear me out: there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west, so why not follow it for a kid? "I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys." - problem that never occurred to anyone with a perfect or just good pitch.
  - williamdclt 4mo ago
    > there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west Not even close to being true! - There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times. - 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s - 440Hz is the "official" standard since then - Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.
    - dolia 4mo ago
      TIL, thanks. The 2nd point stands though. A person with good or perfect pitch will quickly tune to another frequency.
    - mrob 4mo ago
      >415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times 415Hz is one modern semitone below the standard 440Hz. Many (but not all) baroque instruments were tuned slightly lower than modern ones, and 415Hz is the most convenient slightly lower tuning that retains compatibility with modern instruments by transposing down a semitone.
SeanLuke 4mo ago
I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote. Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch. For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch. This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing. When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over. Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C. It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.
rahadbhuiya 4mo ago
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anon291 4mo ago
Perfect pitch is a useless skill. Good interval sensitivity for melody and good harmonic sense is more useful. I dunno I have relative pitch but extremely good and can play basically anything from ear. And in a bunch of different keys because I'm not impeded by perfect pitch sensitivity.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4mo ago
A440 is higher than earlier tunings. Baroque is often A415 and A392 can be used for French harpsichord music. Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major. Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.
- pclmulqdq 4mo ago
  I did some baroque harpsichord tuning in my past. Nobody I knew in the field of baroque keyboard tuning had absolute pitch, because it would drive you crazy if you did with all the wandering A's. When you want to flex between A=440, A=430, and A=415 (392 is a lot less common) regularly and your ear is tuned to a 440 A, I hear it gets really annoying because everything seems flat. In comparison, a huge number of piano tuners and organ tuners have absolute pitch.
vladsiu 4mo ago
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globular-toast 4mo ago
Is there any advantage to having perfect pitch apart from parent's bragging rights? It seems silly to waste the child's time on this. Let them learn music. If perfect pitch happens, it happens, but don't treat it as a singular goal.
utopiah 4mo ago
Thanks OP, I was going to annoy you with a bunch of request, e.g. "Can I please just get the .apk because I use GrapheneOS without the PlayStore?" then I thought "looks simple enough, maybe I a Web page is enough... no app required" which lead me to https://eguchi.app https://eguchi.app ... so instead I'll just both you with : what do you think about this alternative? Is it any good?
- gunalx 4mo ago
  aurora store isan option.
- est 4mo ago
  wat? what is yello, red or blue?
  - mi_lk 4mo ago
    If you click "Show Options" it'll show colors of the chords in order: red is C-major for example
  - capplexham 4mo ago
    Click "Show Options", then: - Check "Show chords on piano?" - Check "Play chord sounds" - Uncheck "Play feedback sounds" For the "Chords", start with just Red and Blue. Then add Yellow. I don't have perfect pitch, and I could not distinguish between Red and Blue, when Yellow was in the mix and the feedback sounds interrupted the trials. Black and Green were much easier for me to differentiate, but Red / Blue is really difficult.
    - neumann 4mo ago
      Red and Blue were so hard for me!
- jstanley 4mo ago
  This could do with a bit more explanation. It makes a noise and then has buttons labelled red, blue, and yellow. How am I supposed to know what colour that sound was? Do sounds naturally have associated colours? Is this even the question I'm being asked? It doesn't say what to do or how I am meant to choose the colour. EDIT: From some trial and error, I still don't get it. It seemed to me that blue was the low tone and red was the high tone but then I got a tone that was definitely lower than a previous yellow tone and it was supposedly blue. Potentially a bug?
pb060 4mo ago
I’m just being jealous, but isn’t absolute pitch relative to the current tuning standard? What happens with orchestras tuned at 442 Hz? Reading comments from people with absolute pitch, it can be more an annoyance than a blessing.
Madmallard 4mo ago
Don't think this was ever proven? Many thousands of kids go into music at a very young age every year, very few come out with absolute pitch.
d--b 4mo ago
> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6. What? That doesn’t sound true at all. Jude Kofie started the piano at the age of 8. But music prodigy apart, I defintely don’t have perfect pitch right now, but I am very confident that I could with some training. Like, when I sing a song without music, I usually am very close to the right tone. Mostly because I intuitively know how my voice is supposed to feel (the vocal chords move differently based on the tone). And I can clearly ear the different “colors” between different scales. And when I play the guitar a lot, after a month or so I start to be able to know where a note I hear is on the guitar.
mrob 4mo ago
As somebody who enjoys listening to beatmatched DJ mixes, I'm glad I don't have "perfect" pitch. I'd hate to have vast amounts of music sound "wrong" just because the speed and pitch was changed slightly to synchronize it with other tracks. Relative pitch is very important for musicians, but absolute pitch is mostly useless. The only use I can think of is singing songs with a cappella intros, so you're in tune with the instruments that come in later, but even this is of very limited value. In a casual setting you can just play a note on an instrument before you start, and for a professional performance you're going to have IEMs that can play the reference note for you.
- jayknight 4mo ago
  A little niche, but that would be handy while directing an a capella choir. Giving starting pitches without a pitch pipe or tuning fork would be useful.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- crote 4mo ago
  Doesn't most DJing software support constant-pitch speed adjustment? Pitch and speed are inherently linked when you are dealing with physical vinyl, but time-stretching in software isn't too complicated.
  - mrob 4mo ago
    >Doesn't most DJing software support constant-pitch speed adjustment? Modern software does, but there's always the risk of introducing artifacts, and I like older music that's usually mixed with pitch shifting.
- kome 4mo ago
  people with perfect pitch can recognize when pitch has been shifted, but it's not like they perceive it (necessarily) as wrong or annoying - it's a matter of taste. most of them can still enjoy microtones, detuned tracks, and beatmatched dj mixes just like everybody else.
a1o 4mo ago
Reading the CLAUDE.md, it looks like this is a rewrite from https://github.com/pganssle/cim https://github.com/pganssle/cim
- paytonjjones 4mo ago
  That's called out in the README under Attribution too, hopefully it didn't seem like I was trying to bury that! > Derived from [pganssle/cim](https://github.com/pganssle/cim https://github.com/pganssle/cim) by Paul Ganssle. Rebuilt as a separate tool with a distinct name at his request.
pganssle 4mo ago
So I built the original web app for this (it's not stolen, it's open source and I told OP they could fork it). I've been glad to see it getting more attention over the years. One note of caution here is that with my older son we did this for a few years and it hasn't really worked as expected. He can identify all the chords perfectly every time, but when we started testing single notes, he was worse than chance at it. In fact, when I activated the secret Easter egg "red only" mode, he was worse than me at choosing between C E and G (though with practice he can now do it perfectly). I'm working on a version where you can identify single notes instead of just chords. Also, I gave a talk about this a few years ago and the talk is on YT if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE A decent chunk of my PyCon 2025 talk is also about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY
- a_c 4mo ago
  Did it help your son to study music?
  - pganssle 4mo ago
    I'm not sure I understand the question, but I can answer both interpretations: 1. Did it (the chord trainer app) help my son when he was studying music? Not as far as I can tell. He has also been taking piano lessons and sometimes it helps a little with music theory to tie it back to the chords, but I don't think there's much transfer learning going on. He seems to have a good ear, but my other son is not picking up chords nearly as quickly, and I know a bunch of other kids have bounced off this app, so my older son may just already naturally have a good ear. 2. Did it (studying music) help my son (with identifying chords)? I don't think so. He made pretty steady progress in the chords before he started piano, and after he started piano it didn't get any easier. He also mentions things like, "The chords sound different on the piano", which makes me think I need to have more varied samples (even though the book says that consistency is key and you should practice on the same piano holding the chords for the same duration every time).
    - a_c 4mo ago
Jtarii 4mo ago
Perfect pitch is a party trick with extremely limited utility. Actual musicians use relative pitch.
- james_marks 4mo ago
  "When you a realize a guitar cannot, in fact, be perfectly tuned, you are beginning to get somewhere with the guitar". Paraphrasing and I don't remember the author, unfortunately.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
aboardRat4 4mo ago
Is there some program that teaches all this mumbo-jumbo that other commenters are using so freely in their comments? Ideally one which looks kinda like a game with scores and achievements. My understanding of music is quite basic, I know what the 12 notes are and that the "zero" of the frequencies starts at 440 Hz (but since everything is relative, it doesn't really matter that it's 440, it could be anything, but if you choose the zero to be too high or too low, your intervals risk getting out of the perceptible wavelengths), but I don't know what "chords" are and how "intervals" are expected to be played. I tried learning to play a recorder (flute) using some internet howtos as a guide, but got stuck at the first lesson, when the sound produced by the flute didn't match what the Fourier analyser in audacity measured. That is, I tried to play a C, but the Fourier transform resulted in a bimodal distribution, and none of the bumps was near the expected C frequency.
- freetime2 4mo ago
  I think Duolingo has a music course. No idea how good it is though or how deep it goes into theory.
  - aboardRat4 4mo ago
    Duolingo is garbage based on dry cramming.
  - a_c 4mo ago
    For music it is pretty useless
  - the_other 4mo ago
    It’s a reasonable course for helping yiu identify a single line of notes across the two staves. Or maybe just the “right hand” upper/trebble clef stave (the bormal one for most instruments). It does teach a little anout scales. It wont teach chords. It doesn’t go very far into time signatures. It only has you play a virtual keyboard so it’s useless for learning how to feel your instrument. It’s quite fun. My kid plays it every day and it’s helped get them feeling more confident to sit at our piano and noodle around. As a noodler myself, this seems valid. It wont get you good enough to play pieces with other musicians, or to compose with weatern harmony. You’ll need extea tutorials for those.
scottmsul 4mo ago
An interesting anecdote: I was a big trumpet player in high school, and developed perfect pitch but mainly only for trumpet sounds.
illuminator83 4mo ago
Phew .... I saw the title and thought this was some horrid LinkedIn post from a "Founder" dad about teaching his kids how to pitch their startup to investors ... Luckily it's not about that!
- KellyCriterion 4mo ago
  me too! :-))
dieselgate 4mo ago
Tangential to perfect pitch training I saw the movie The Tuner last weekend and it was amazing. Highly recommend to all out there. Believe it came out in 2025 but a local cinema was showing it on the big screen and saw it there.
jadbox 4mo ago
As someone who is pitch-challenged, thank you
avocadoking 4mo ago
For me its always difficult to judge if one should train such things with their children. Same goes with instruments. You need to train every other day and keep it up for a long time, which I never liked as a kid.
- thisislife2 4mo ago
  Unfortunately, the only way to be a top notch expert, with mastery over the art or sports, is to start young and with disciplined practice. Does it mean necessarily sacrificing childhood? I am unsure. Michael Jackson comes to mind as he has publicly commented that he didn't have a normal childhood. Jackie Chan also had a hard life as a child, training from a young age but he doesn't seem to resent it as much. However, he doesn't have a good relationship with his kids perhaps because he expected them to go through the same kind of hardship he did (it was normalised for him?)? Russian gymnasts and ballet dancers also train at a very young age. I guess it's a question many parents struggle with a lot - how much should you push your kids because sometimes it seems kids do waste a lot of time.
BiteCode_dev 4mo ago
Too bad you can't use the app if you don't have a google account.

217 points by paytonjjones 4mo ago

KomoD 4mo ago

> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6. I found some papers suggesting it is possible for adults, but more difficult. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_fast_and_accurate_absolute_pitch_judgment_in_adulthood https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...

toolslive 4mo ago
You will probably claim it's not "real" perfect pitch, but many people use their tinnitus to help them. They identified their ring as having, for example, F#, and suddenly their relative pitch became absolute.
- Dilettante_ 4mo ago
  Now there's a hack in the most delightful sense of the word
- jpfromlondon 4mo ago
  I've seen nothing to convince me that "absolute pitch" is anything other than relative pitch with excellent recall or persistent observation of pitch.
  - xdertz 4mo ago
    I agree. I can tune a guitar to within a half a semitone of accuracy without reference just from knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound after 20 years of playing.
    - williamdclt 4mo ago
      > knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound well that's the whole question isn't it? If you know how an open string is supposed to have, that's what people call absolute pitch?
      - NobodyNada 4mo ago
        Most people without absolute pitch have some level of "pitch memory", but it's not comprehensive or reliable. For instance, if you ask people to sing a pop song, they're significantly more likely than chance to sing it in the original key. I know the Super Mario Bros. theme starts on an E, so I can identify an unknown pitch by recalling that theme and comparing using relative pitch. But that's quite a slow and unintuitive process, and it's easy to make a mistake. People with absolute pitch just hear the pitch without having to "recall" a reference note to compare to like that.
  - argee 4mo ago
    I don't have perfect pitch (never trained in it) but I've played violin a lot (started in college) and I can hear the G-ness, D-ness, A-ness, or E-ness of a note. I do have to be actually trying to listen though, except for if they are G3, D4, A4, or E5. So I have the latter, but not the former (i.e., no perfect pitch). The difference is, I can choose not to observe it. It reminds me of how I've studied Japanese for 15 years, but I can still sometimes choose not to read certain kanji if I glance at a legible word — the same is not true for English, if I see something even for a split second I've already read it.
    - jpfromlondon 4mo ago
      You don't really have relative perfect pitch because as you say, you can recognise the G-ness of a note I assume without reference. If anything I think this reinforces what I'm alluding to.
- Tade0 4mo ago
  Also your teeth don't change too much in adulthood save for cavities and the like, so if you hum, they'll resonate in a rather stable frequency.
sudo_cowsay 4mo ago
It’s not “real” perfect pitch. It’s more like training and memorizing. It doesn’t come as naturally as it does for kids.
- agos 4mo ago
  isn't perfect pitch for kids also training and memorizing? the learning method from the original post surely suggests so
  - casey2 4mo ago
    It's just like how foreigners will never truly learn a language; racist BS. Plenty of tonedef adults get into Julliard and can play circles around people with perfect pitch no matter how much they practice music.
sudb 4mo ago
There was an interesting study that I attempted to enroll in (but unfortunately was screened out by both age and childhood instrument learning) that was looking at psilocybin potentially giving adults the ability to acquire perfect pitch: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-study https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-stu...
nosioptar 4mo ago
Yeah, the stuff on the repo is bullshit because it's ai slop. I learned perfect pitch well after six. I know others who have too.

gcanyon 4mo ago

I've seen articles that say that absolute perfect pitch is a curse, not a gift, because it wanders with age, and then everything is "out of key".

NobodyNada 4mo ago
I'm a musician who doesn't have absolute pitch, but does have very strong relative pitch. My understanding is that perfect pitch is neat party trick, but actually a hindrance instead of a help in most musical circumstances. Relative pitch, on the other hand, is incredibly useful (and fortunately you can train and develop it later in life). Because most people don't have perfect pitch, (Western) music is built on the relationships between pitches rather than the absolute pitches. So with absolute pitch, you can play something by ear; with relative pitch, you can play something by ear in any key. Learning to think of the notes you're playing relatively instead of absolutely is already a difficult leap for most musicians, and my understanding (though I don't have absolute pitch so I can't compare from experience) is that absolute pitch makes this skill significantly harder to acquire, since you have to retrain your ear in addition to your hands. If I were offered a choice to trade my sense of relative pitch for absolute pitch, I most certainly would not take it. I know well the feeling of incongruity when my muscle memory is stuck in the wrong key, and absolute pitch would mean I'm stuck there all the time instead of being just able to shake my head, focus on the new key, and clear my mind of the old.
- somenameforme 4mo ago
  Somehow this makes me think of the differences between tonal and inflective languages. Learning a tonal language can be brutal for a person who's used to expressing emotion/inflections through tone, and there is nothing more frustrating than trying to speak to somebody when saying a word phonetically correct but in a slightly wrong tune and, to them, what you're saying is completely incoherent. The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.

mystifyingpoi 4mo ago

What are the next steps after, let's say, a child is able to indentify all "colors"? They can distinguish F/A and F/C, then what? Should this app/method be combined with regular piano/other lessons, so the child knows what's even happening?

paytonjjones 4mo ago
The only age-sensitive part is the ability to map the chords to the colors. Eventually, you would want to teach them to map the color to the chord name and recognize the root of the chord. But that can be learned any time. Also keep in mind that if a kid learns all the colors, you'll want to continue practicing to "bridge" over the age where they would lose the ability to recognize perfect pitch. If they mastered this at age 4, they could still potentially lose the ability if they don't practice during that period.
sowbug 4mo ago
Rick Beato has at least one child with absolute pitch, with stunning ability to name chords and the discrete notes in them. Here's the short video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI I'm not a musician, but I'm told the kid's way of naming the chords is particularly adept from a musician's point of view, and that's because the dad (a very accomplished musician) helped teach the kid. I am sure Rick has made more videos about what he did.
dolia 4mo ago
Clearly, it makes sense to have perfect pitch only in connection with a particular instrument for practical purposes. Besides being a neat party trick, it gives more possibilities and makes things easier if a person wants to work with music professionally, especially with academical (aka "classical") music.

RickJWagner 4mo ago

As a banjo player, I have heard perfect pitch defined this way: “Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”

samudrijan 4mo ago
Funniest thing I’ve read in days. I’d say bravo, but yeehaw would be more appropriate.
stavros 4mo ago
Can someone explain this? I don't get it.
- jpease 4mo ago
  Certainly, as jokes are by far best when they are explained. In this context the overall discussion is about pitch in the context of music. Here the jokester takes advantage of pitch having more than one meaning in English. One of the alternate meanings is to throw. Next the joke selects a banjo and an accordion, two instruments that are less popular and thus more likely to be understood by the general populace as being disparaged, which is a critical component for the audience to correctly infer the alternate meaning of pitch. You put it all together and we have this hilarious joke: A perfect throw is when a banjo is tossed into the garbage and it finds its perfect companion in an accordion that has similarly been discarded to the same trash receptacle. (Edit: stupid auto-correct)
- JSR_FDED 4mo ago
  Pitch is another word for throw. The joke is that a perfect throw is one where a banjo Is thrown into the trash (this is already funny if you consider how careful musicians are with their instruments), and what makes it a perfect throw is that it lands on an accordion (the fact that the accordion is already in the trash is also funny) and the fact that one shitty instrument landing exactly on another shitty instrument would be an athletic achievement that is given the name of a desirable musical ability “perfect pitch”, is excellent.

ljcoco 4mo ago

not sure this can be taught

frafart 4mo ago

It can be dormant in adults. I discovered it when I was 16 after meeting a pianist who had it and “taught me” how to do it. I kept getting faster and more accurate as I practiced solfeggio in music school in my 20s. Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.

sudo_cowsay 4mo ago
I feel like the pianist trained you rather than you achieving it like a little kid does. That happens sometimes if you put in the effort (learning/memorizing/training). While I am not old enough to know how it changes, could it be perhaps that what you had learned when you were 16 was in your mind a certain pitch and as ears change (a 16 year old can hear higher pitch than 30 year old), you don’t relearn it, therefore it’s shifted? Please correct me (pretty sure I’m wrong)
- dbalatero 4mo ago
  I have it from early age, and it also shifts now that I'm almost 40. I think the more constantly I use it though, the more it seems to settle back into accuracy.
  - sudo_cowsay 4mo ago
    Thank you! That's really interesting. So it's like a muscle I guess. More you use it = better.
    - thdr 4mo ago
      That's not true for everyone. Some extraordinary musicians with perfect pitch also reported that it starts drifting for them as they age (I remember Oscar Peterson and Jacob Collier telling this)
markerz 4mo ago
The loss with age is super commin, and all in the same direction (people hear more flat but guess more sharp).

delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago

Don’t teach you kids perfect pitch. Introduce them to the wide variety of music from punk to jazz to classical and let them play with sounds. If they get into it, ask if they want a teacher in instrument of their liking. Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.

paytonjjones 4mo ago
I 100% agree that perfect pitch is less important than these other things. The only reason I think perfect pitch is worth prioritizing early is because of the developmental gate.
rao-v 4mo ago
Is there a good way to teach kids relative pitch (beyond exposing them to a broad range of music etc.)? I struggle with this and have tried multiple times to learn different instruments from different musical traditions and instructors and have mostly failed over the years.
- pclmulqdq 4mo ago
  Everyone can learn good relative pitch with practice. Music schools do this regularly, and it's just a skill you can pick up. Start by identifying intervals, then learn chords, and then learn to write down music you hear, and so on. It just takes work.
  - laurieg 4mo ago
    I wonder if there's a bit of survivorship bias with this one. I've never been able to learn relative pitch after trying quite a lot of different methods, ear training app and playing a couple of musical instruments. If you're in a music school then perhaps your baseline musical ability is already relatively high?
    - pclmulqdq 4mo ago

throwawayk7h 4mo ago

What I dislike about this method is that it seems to be focussed on A=440 Hz, which is arbitrary. I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys.

dolia 4mo ago
Is there anything about notes and instruments tuning that is not arbitrary? But hear me out: there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west, so why not follow it for a kid? "I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys." - problem that never occurred to anyone with a perfect or just good pitch.
- williamdclt 4mo ago
  > there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west Not even close to being true! - There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times. - 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s - 440Hz is the "official" standard since then - Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.
  - dolia 4mo ago
    TIL, thanks. The 2nd point stands though. A person with good or perfect pitch will quickly tune to another frequency.
  - mrob 4mo ago
    >415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times 415Hz is one modern semitone below the standard 440Hz. Many (but not all) baroque instruments were tuned slightly lower than modern ones, and 415Hz is the most convenient slightly lower tuning that retains compatibility with modern instruments by transposing down a semitone.

SeanLuke 4mo ago

I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote. Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch. For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch. This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing. When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over. Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C. It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.

rahadbhuiya 4mo ago

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anon291 4mo ago

Perfect pitch is a useless skill. Good interval sensitivity for melody and good harmonic sense is more useful. I dunno I have relative pitch but extremely good and can play basically anything from ear. And in a bunch of different keys because I'm not impeded by perfect pitch sensitivity.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4mo ago

A440 is higher than earlier tunings. Baroque is often A415 and A392 can be used for French harpsichord music. Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major. Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.

pclmulqdq 4mo ago
I did some baroque harpsichord tuning in my past. Nobody I knew in the field of baroque keyboard tuning had absolute pitch, because it would drive you crazy if you did with all the wandering A's. When you want to flex between A=440, A=430, and A=415 (392 is a lot less common) regularly and your ear is tuned to a 440 A, I hear it gets really annoying because everything seems flat. In comparison, a huge number of piano tuners and organ tuners have absolute pitch.

vladsiu 4mo ago

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globular-toast 4mo ago

Is there any advantage to having perfect pitch apart from parent's bragging rights? It seems silly to waste the child's time on this. Let them learn music. If perfect pitch happens, it happens, but don't treat it as a singular goal.

utopiah 4mo ago

Thanks OP, I was going to annoy you with a bunch of request, e.g. "Can I please just get the .apk because I use GrapheneOS without the PlayStore?" then I thought "looks simple enough, maybe I a Web page is enough... no app required" which lead me to https://eguchi.app https://eguchi.app ... so instead I'll just both you with : what do you think about this alternative? Is it any good?

gunalx 4mo ago
aurora store isan option.
est 4mo ago
wat? what is yello, red or blue?
- mi_lk 4mo ago
  If you click "Show Options" it'll show colors of the chords in order: red is C-major for example
- capplexham 4mo ago
  Click "Show Options", then: - Check "Show chords on piano?" - Check "Play chord sounds" - Uncheck "Play feedback sounds" For the "Chords", start with just Red and Blue. Then add Yellow. I don't have perfect pitch, and I could not distinguish between Red and Blue, when Yellow was in the mix and the feedback sounds interrupted the trials. Black and Green were much easier for me to differentiate, but Red / Blue is really difficult.
  - neumann 4mo ago
    Red and Blue were so hard for me!
jstanley 4mo ago
This could do with a bit more explanation. It makes a noise and then has buttons labelled red, blue, and yellow. How am I supposed to know what colour that sound was? Do sounds naturally have associated colours? Is this even the question I'm being asked? It doesn't say what to do or how I am meant to choose the colour. EDIT: From some trial and error, I still don't get it. It seemed to me that blue was the low tone and red was the high tone but then I got a tone that was definitely lower than a previous yellow tone and it was supposedly blue. Potentially a bug?

pb060 4mo ago

I’m just being jealous, but isn’t absolute pitch relative to the current tuning standard? What happens with orchestras tuned at 442 Hz? Reading comments from people with absolute pitch, it can be more an annoyance than a blessing.

Madmallard 4mo ago

Don't think this was ever proven? Many thousands of kids go into music at a very young age every year, very few come out with absolute pitch.

d--b 4mo ago

> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6. What? That doesn’t sound true at all. Jude Kofie started the piano at the age of 8. But music prodigy apart, I defintely don’t have perfect pitch right now, but I am very confident that I could with some training. Like, when I sing a song without music, I usually am very close to the right tone. Mostly because I intuitively know how my voice is supposed to feel (the vocal chords move differently based on the tone). And I can clearly ear the different “colors” between different scales. And when I play the guitar a lot, after a month or so I start to be able to know where a note I hear is on the guitar.

mrob 4mo ago

As somebody who enjoys listening to beatmatched DJ mixes, I'm glad I don't have "perfect" pitch. I'd hate to have vast amounts of music sound "wrong" just because the speed and pitch was changed slightly to synchronize it with other tracks. Relative pitch is very important for musicians, but absolute pitch is mostly useless. The only use I can think of is singing songs with a cappella intros, so you're in tune with the instruments that come in later, but even this is of very limited value. In a casual setting you can just play a note on an instrument before you start, and for a professional performance you're going to have IEMs that can play the reference note for you.

jayknight 4mo ago
A little niche, but that would be handy while directing an a capella choir. Giving starting pitches without a pitch pipe or tuning fork would be useful.
deleted 4mo ago
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crote 4mo ago
Doesn't most DJing software support constant-pitch speed adjustment? Pitch and speed are inherently linked when you are dealing with physical vinyl, but time-stretching in software isn't too complicated.
- mrob 4mo ago
  >Doesn't most DJing software support constant-pitch speed adjustment? Modern software does, but there's always the risk of introducing artifacts, and I like older music that's usually mixed with pitch shifting.
kome 4mo ago
people with perfect pitch can recognize when pitch has been shifted, but it's not like they perceive it (necessarily) as wrong or annoying - it's a matter of taste. most of them can still enjoy microtones, detuned tracks, and beatmatched dj mixes just like everybody else.

a1o 4mo ago

Reading the CLAUDE.md, it looks like this is a rewrite from https://github.com/pganssle/cim https://github.com/pganssle/cim

paytonjjones 4mo ago
That's called out in the README under Attribution too, hopefully it didn't seem like I was trying to bury that! > Derived from [pganssle/cim](https://github.com/pganssle/cim https://github.com/pganssle/cim) by Paul Ganssle. Rebuilt as a separate tool with a distinct name at his request.

pganssle 4mo ago

So I built the original web app for this (it's not stolen, it's open source and I told OP they could fork it). I've been glad to see it getting more attention over the years. One note of caution here is that with my older son we did this for a few years and it hasn't really worked as expected. He can identify all the chords perfectly every time, but when we started testing single notes, he was worse than chance at it. In fact, when I activated the secret Easter egg "red only" mode, he was worse than me at choosing between C E and G (though with practice he can now do it perfectly). I'm working on a version where you can identify single notes instead of just chords. Also, I gave a talk about this a few years ago and the talk is on YT if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE A decent chunk of my PyCon 2025 talk is also about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY

a_c 4mo ago
Did it help your son to study music?
- pganssle 4mo ago
  I'm not sure I understand the question, but I can answer both interpretations: 1. Did it (the chord trainer app) help my son when he was studying music? Not as far as I can tell. He has also been taking piano lessons and sometimes it helps a little with music theory to tie it back to the chords, but I don't think there's much transfer learning going on. He seems to have a good ear, but my other son is not picking up chords nearly as quickly, and I know a bunch of other kids have bounced off this app, so my older son may just already naturally have a good ear. 2. Did it (studying music) help my son (with identifying chords)? I don't think so. He made pretty steady progress in the chords before he started piano, and after he started piano it didn't get any easier. He also mentions things like, "The chords sound different on the piano", which makes me think I need to have more varied samples (even though the book says that consistency is key and you should practice on the same piano holding the chords for the same duration every time).
  - a_c 4mo ago

Jtarii 4mo ago

Perfect pitch is a party trick with extremely limited utility. Actual musicians use relative pitch.

james_marks 4mo ago
"When you a realize a guitar cannot, in fact, be perfectly tuned, you are beginning to get somewhere with the guitar". Paraphrasing and I don't remember the author, unfortunately.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

aboardRat4 4mo ago

Is there some program that teaches all this mumbo-jumbo that other commenters are using so freely in their comments? Ideally one which looks kinda like a game with scores and achievements. My understanding of music is quite basic, I know what the 12 notes are and that the "zero" of the frequencies starts at 440 Hz (but since everything is relative, it doesn't really matter that it's 440, it could be anything, but if you choose the zero to be too high or too low, your intervals risk getting out of the perceptible wavelengths), but I don't know what "chords" are and how "intervals" are expected to be played. I tried learning to play a recorder (flute) using some internet howtos as a guide, but got stuck at the first lesson, when the sound produced by the flute didn't match what the Fourier analyser in audacity measured. That is, I tried to play a C, but the Fourier transform resulted in a bimodal distribution, and none of the bumps was near the expected C frequency.

freetime2 4mo ago
I think Duolingo has a music course. No idea how good it is though or how deep it goes into theory.
- aboardRat4 4mo ago
  Duolingo is garbage based on dry cramming.
- a_c 4mo ago
  For music it is pretty useless
- the_other 4mo ago
  It’s a reasonable course for helping yiu identify a single line of notes across the two staves. Or maybe just the “right hand” upper/trebble clef stave (the bormal one for most instruments). It does teach a little anout scales. It wont teach chords. It doesn’t go very far into time signatures. It only has you play a virtual keyboard so it’s useless for learning how to feel your instrument. It’s quite fun. My kid plays it every day and it’s helped get them feeling more confident to sit at our piano and noodle around. As a noodler myself, this seems valid. It wont get you good enough to play pieces with other musicians, or to compose with weatern harmony. You’ll need extea tutorials for those.

scottmsul 4mo ago

An interesting anecdote: I was a big trumpet player in high school, and developed perfect pitch but mainly only for trumpet sounds.

illuminator83 4mo ago

Phew .... I saw the title and thought this was some horrid LinkedIn post from a "Founder" dad about teaching his kids how to pitch their startup to investors ... Luckily it's not about that!

KellyCriterion 4mo ago
me too! :-))

dieselgate 4mo ago

Tangential to perfect pitch training I saw the movie The Tuner last weekend and it was amazing. Highly recommend to all out there. Believe it came out in 2025 but a local cinema was showing it on the big screen and saw it there.

jadbox 4mo ago

As someone who is pitch-challenged, thank you

avocadoking 4mo ago

For me its always difficult to judge if one should train such things with their children. Same goes with instruments. You need to train every other day and keep it up for a long time, which I never liked as a kid.

thisislife2 4mo ago
Unfortunately, the only way to be a top notch expert, with mastery over the art or sports, is to start young and with disciplined practice. Does it mean necessarily sacrificing childhood? I am unsure. Michael Jackson comes to mind as he has publicly commented that he didn't have a normal childhood. Jackie Chan also had a hard life as a child, training from a young age but he doesn't seem to resent it as much. However, he doesn't have a good relationship with his kids perhaps because he expected them to go through the same kind of hardship he did (it was normalised for him?)? Russian gymnasts and ballet dancers also train at a very young age. I guess it's a question many parents struggle with a lot - how much should you push your kids because sometimes it seems kids do waste a lot of time.

BiteCode_dev 4mo ago

Too bad you can't use the app if you don't have a google account.