alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch
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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.
> 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/31686378/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!
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 ... so instead I'll just both you with : what do you think about this alternative? Is it any good?
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.
As someone who is pitch-challenged, thank you
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.
An interesting anecdote: I was a big trumpet player in high school, and developed perfect pitch but mainly only for trumpet sounds.
Perfect pitch is a party trick with extremely limited utility. Actual musicians use relative pitch.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.”
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not sure this can be taught
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
A decent chunk of my PyCon 2025 talk is also about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY