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.)
> 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.
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.
IMO, as a lay guitar player of 25 years only recently taking it a little more seriously, overfocus on technical skill and overtraining can actually be a detriment. Overplaying is absolutely a real thing, and nothing kills the soul like being self-conscious.
Heh, 25 year overplayer on guitar here. My teacher’s advice recently was to quit trying to impress myself or others. I went home and ripped into some stuff by ear and I am the happiest I’ve been with my playing after years of overplaying and overanalysis. It’s nice to be able to say “oh in that section I played 42 notes demonstrating Lydian b2”, but it also feels entirely useless for what I’m trying to accomplish.
I think graduating from endless analysis and “lots of notes” playing is a part of the journey.
I think there’s kind of a delicate mix. When I practice analysis can be a good tool for idea generation, but I only have so much CPU and it leads to boring playing.
> 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
I disagree. I did 10 years of Suzuki as a kid, then switched to an intermediate/advanced teacher for another 10 years. I had to shore up a bit of reading for, let's say 9 months, but I read at a professional level and played a big chunk of the cello repertoire. My mom teaches Suzuki and many of her students followed the same teacher path as I did and excelled.
Imo Suzuki is very suited for kids, and anyone with that skill foundation can backfill things like reading skills relatively easy. I don't see a local maximum here.
I'm a string player, as are both of my kids, both now in college. What I've observed in the US is that the "Suzuki" method is not strictly followed. Most teachers introduce reading at a reasonable point.
At the same time, exclusive use of reading is a problem too. I believe having both skills is best.
Totally agree. I additionally always say "any butthead can learn to read" but the deep listening skills developed at a young age are much harder to acquire as time marches forward.
While true at some level, the challenge of learning to read as one gets older is frustrated by just having more distractions, plus already knowing how to play. A person who is already a good musician, has to be willing to take a big step backwards while they come up to speed on reading.
Also, there are degrees of reading skill, and a need for maintenance. I'm an amateur jazz bassist, but started on classical music and then maintained my reading chops by gravitating to gigs that require it, including the large ensemble that I've played with for 14 years. At this point, I'm a better reader than some of the degreed professional bassists who are better musicians overall but have let their reading chops atrophy. I get calls for gigs because of it.
Being a better reader can involve being quicker at it, dealing with more complex material, or letting it occupy less of your attention so you can focus on other aspects of musicianship.
> 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
I am not a professional musician but this feels a bit reductionist to me, in that it assumes the goal of any musical endeavor is to faithfully reproduce the music that was written down hundreds of years ago.
Some of the most celebrated musicians could not read music -- indeed some were blind -- but I would challenge you to find any musician who created anything worthwhile without having a trained ear.
It seems backwards to me to focus on the skill of reading over listening for what is fundamentally an auditory art form.
If you're trying to find the key details in an incredibly complex/long piece (eg the Hammerklavier Sonata) to create your own interpretation, reading is just the best way to pick them up because the information transfer medium is a lot denser. When the musical "kernel" is simpler (eg a jazz standard that you improvise the complexity on top of), notation basically isn't necessary. Neither of the examples I gave is necessarily harder than the other - it's just about how much information transfer you need.
I will also point out that the best baroque violinist I know is blind, and there's a braille system of music notation that blind musicians work with.
Replace reading music with writing in assembly and you have the software equivalent. People can write software without a higher level language, but their software will be better if they did. The same is true for musicians and reading sheet music.
> 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 ea
I completely disagree. Firstly, the entire value system of believing that one ought to play the Hammerklavier sonata exactly as played before is questionable.
I was trained to read music (and very little ear training) and honestly made to feel pretty terrible as a piano student due to my inability to do so without fidgeting and being a general 'problem' student. Funnily enough, for the ear training we were made to do, I was even 'ranked' bottom of the barrel. My brother was ranked high in all the categories
Except... here's the thing. Throughout my experience, I have been able to basically play anything by ear. In fact I can pretty much hear a song and play it on the piano (of course the classical training helps in terms of technique). I also produce tunes on the fly, and generally am entertaining. My brother (by his own admission) does not. He is a very good player for sure, but he has no interest in music. Yet, our 'classical' musical education ranked him higher. Thus, I really question the entire value system of forcing kids to 'read' music and only judging them on their ability to replicate, which seems to me to be the bulk of music education.
We must ask ourselves... what is the goal of musical education? To produce automatons that can replicate any musical piece written or to create a musician?
I'm sorry you had that experience as a kid - it sucks to have your passion drained like that.
Playing pieces from sheet music has nothing to do with "exact" replication. It has to do with understanding a work and faithfully interpreting it in your own style. New interpretations of the Hammerklavier and the Paganini caprices come out rather frequently.
Once a piece gets to a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do that without musical notation. Picking up each note by listening to the piece over and over just becomes intractable.
It also has nothing to do with how old a piece is - modern composers also use written notation as the primary communication medium of their musical intent (new music often comes with a MIDI mockup which is a poor replacement for a past recording).
Finally, I would suggest that the point of music education is to give you the tools to express your musical ideas. Some people want to play Liszt and Paganini - those pieces are really fun.
> with a classic dose of American "my child is better than you."
Off topic, but to me (an asian) this is an asian stereotype.
Seems like it's actually a stereotype for everyone. I wonder if people from an european country think "my child is better than you" is their stereotype too.
Just to share a different but sympathetic point of view, I grew up in white American suburban culture without particular awareness of Asians (till high school anyway), and the dynamic of “my child is better than you” was there (and unremarkable.) (We didn’t think of ourselves as Europeans but probably all were 100-200 years earlier). So I didn’t and still don’t really conceive of “my child is better than you” as a particularly Asian or even American trait, I consider it universal and associated with a mix of parental competitiveness, striving, and identity.
That said, I would acknowledge this dynamic does fit into particular other stereotypes of Asian (and Jewish) subcultures within the broader American context. You aren’t wrong that that could be in play. I’m just saying it’s not a “dog whistle” of Asian stereotyping without some additional Asian-signaling context. At least in my view/world.
The author exposed children to sounds and organized a way for them to play with them using cheap tools. She sang to them for a few minutes a day and then start practicing with the one who showed interest.
I really have no idea where the ideas about "what to mean to learn music" or racing through it came about.
>>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.
So instead of playing with your children for a few minutes a day when they are very young, singing to them and naming sounds it's better to go about it in a proper way: wait till they are 7, be careful not to expose them to music too much as you can spoil the whole thing should they attain a perfect pitch. Then make them really practice a few hours a day once they are old enough. Only this way you avoid racing through your musical education!
I'm not prescribing any musical education path here. Just maybe don't be so proud of your kids for their achievements at age 6? Life is long and even if you do treat it as a race, your "head start" means nothing in this area, except maybe as a party trick.
You are the one coming to with the race thing. If it was a race the children would be practicing for hours a day. Meanwhile they practice when they feel like it and have fun with sounds and music.
>>Just maybe don't be so proud of your kids for their achievements at age 6?
Interesting advice. I certainly wish my parents were proud of things I've learnt at the age of 6 or even earlier!
>>Life is long and even if you do treat it as a race, your "head start" means nothing in this area, except maybe as a party trick.
Sure but idk how you came to the conclusion the author has a different view on it. She wanted to expose her children to sounds and music early to increase their chance of not being tone deaf and missing out on music because of it (her own experience). This worked, kids had fun, one of them practice for "max 30 minutes", the other doesn't as he doesn't feel like it. How is it race, fighting for headstart or anything like that?
> You are the one coming to with the race thing. If it was a race the children would be practicing for hours a day. Meanwhile they practice when they feel like it and have fun with sounds and music.
> Sure but idk how you came to the conclusion the author has a different view on it. She wanted to expose her children to sounds and music early to increase their chance of not being tone deaf and missing out on music because of it (her own experience). This worked, kids had fun, one of them practice for "max 30 minutes", the other doesn't as he doesn't feel like it. How is it race, fighting for headstart or anything like that?
There is a particular subtext in this piece that I'm pretty sure you haven't picked up on. I suggest re-reading it. I am certainly not the one who introduced the notion of giving kids a "leg up" at learning music.
> Interesting advice. I certainly wish my parents were proud of things I've learnt at the age of 6 or even earlier!
Sounds great, but if they want to brag publicly about it, it had better be actually impressive.
It sounds to me that you're assuming leg up sentiment is in relation to professional musicians while the author is relating to herself: someone very bad at music (maybe because of lack of exposure to it during childhood).
I certainly wish my parents cared even a little bit for music and sounds. I didn't encounter the idea that sounds have names or distances between them make melodies until primary school. Music wasn't playing in my home and no one sang to me. As you can imagine I am hopeless when it comes to music. I can't even sing a sound I've just heard. Not even close. Her children definitely have leg up in comparison to me.
If I wanted kids I would be happy to encounter the article. Maybe I could save my children from the fate of musical tone deafness.
> 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.
It's certainly hard to see how it's useful in musical performance.
Hand - eye coordination, hand dexterity and to a lesser degree span, which btw up to an extent are as genetic as AP is -no matter how many grifters occasionally come up with Get AP as an adult with only 10 courses! scams, are going to be much valuable traits to possess when it comes to playing the piano.
> but I bet nobody has learned the Hammerklavier Sonata or a Paganini Caprice by ear.
Kogan learned the Waxman Carmen Fantasy by ear, off a vinyl record smuggled into the USSR due to not having the sheet music available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK51Awg9jR0
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.
- "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).
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.
From the musicians I've met who have it most have actually highlighted the annoying aspects of it more than the useful aspects, in that they can find it bothersome to hear music they're familiar with played in different keys or offset from standard pitch.
I've never experienced any correlation between pitch sensitivity and improvisation skill in groups of trained musicians.
I play a lot of improv and normally it takes no more than 2 notes playing along to determine the key of the piece and relative pitches are very learnable.
That one has an extra layer to it. Many people with absolute pitch will start drifting as they get older due to physical body changes. I've heard the comment of "now everything seems out of tune and annoying". I'm not sure I'd like to experience that as a trade-off.
I am not really convinced having absolute pitch will make you a better improviser than someone who has good relative pitch.
In most jazz music you will have the lead sheet so you don't really need to know anyway. Besides that, you don't really need to calculate anything if you have relative pitch. If you practice enough it's instant. If I hear a note or chord followed by another note or chord I can tell you their relationship in real time. Anyone who has done enough ear training can. In fact, it's one of those things where you either know instantly or you haven't practiced enough. I was never really in an in between state.
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.
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.
For Jazz musicians, scales can be a curse. It depends greatly on what you're training yourself to do. If you're training yourself to play notes in order, that's what you're going to be able do. A more helpful thing to aim for might be to train yourself to "hear-it -> play-it" for every degree of a scale, preferably in random order so you avoid the "consecutive notes" thing. Or, maybe better (at the risk of side-controversy that's probably not worth hashing over here), "hear-it -> play-it" for every degree of a mode.
Exactly. You have to internalize the process of "calculate" so that it's automatic, and occurs without thinking. And for other processes as well. My favorite teacher and I used to refer to it as "moving things into muscle memory". We're guitarists, but I imagine the conceit transfers to other instruments as well.
> [...] but it is much harder, as you have to calculate the intervals between notes in real time [...]
Not necessarily the intervals between any two notes, but the note of interest in relation to the tonic. But still may require the relative position to be mapped (offset) to a specific note.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Not to be a buzzkill – this is a cool story! But it’s worth noting that perfect/absolute pitch can be a negative for musicians in some contexts, especially vocal music.
Since even the vast majority of musicians employ relative pitch, entire choruses can move together off of the original key, for good reasons and bad, but those with perfect pitch will (sometimes stubbornly) maintain the original key, even when doing so is counterproductive to the performance.
Lead singer in the ensemble is a little under the weather and can’t hit the high notes? Normally, you’d consider starting the piece down a step or two, and get on with the show without much trouble. But if you have members with perfect pitch, that may not be an option without some significant rehearsal to familiarize them.
This also translates to musical appreciation – I know people who can’t stand when a singer covers a song in a modified key, saying it sounds “wrong” and “terrible” compared to the original. For the vast majority of the audience, the key doesn’t matter terribly much, but for those with perfect pitch, the key is a significant attribute of the original piece, and it’s just as major as changing the words might be.
In other contexts, perfect pitch can be very handy, but it’s not always quite as “perfect” as it’s sometimes portrayed.
I used to be a harpsichord tuner, and I can tell you that perfect pitch would have driven me nuts dealing with A being 415, 430, or 440 (+/- 2) Hz on any given day, as well as dealing with unequal temperaments. I have very good relative pitch in comparison to the average musician, and that is a lot more useful (and an entirely learnable skill as an adult). I know a lot of musicians with perfect pitch, but only one piano tuner.
My sister has perfect pitch, and she definitely had a leg up learning music, but she can't stand baroque music played in authentic pitch/tuning. Some modern music also uses effects to raise and lower the pitch of the song, and those annoy her too: think about the Janet Jackson song that breaks hard drives - it is in E, but the tuning is almost A=450 thanks to the use of varispeed. That one is pretty far, but many other songs have A=435-445 thanks to post-production.
Her orchestra plays at A=441, and I think she has basically learned that tuning or doesn't care - it's only about 5 cents sharp (1/20th of a half step).
I have to ask out of curiosity, does this mean you worked full-time tuning harpsichords or rather that you did a lot of e.g. piano tuning and also occasionally tuned harpsichords? I'm hoping the former but expecting the latter.
I was a student at the time, and harpsichord tuning was a side job (~10 hours/week). My big "competitive advantage" over piano tuners was that I was very much into playing baroque music and knew a lot about unequal temperaments and harpsichord technology. I could also do pianos (tuning only, no maintenance), and did a few when needed, but harpsichords need tuning once a week plus an extra tune before every concert. For comparison, most pianos tend to get tuned on a several-monthly cadence, so you need a lot more clients to fill up a schedule.
Essentially, instead of a fee for service (like piano tuning) product, harpsichord tuning is a subscription product. However, I think there were <10 other people who tuned harpsichords in the same major metro area, so the market is pretty tiny.
This is all fascinating! Thank you for sharing! If I can keep bothering you with questions (or if you happen to be able to point me to a place to learn more about harpsichord tuning), I have more questions. But I also understand if you don't want to keep answering them! Despite being someone who doesn't know much about nor listen to much music, I've always had a soft spot for harpsichords.
Why do harpsichords need to be tuned so much more frequently? How long did they take to tune (and how does that compare to tuning a piano)? How was the pricing structured with such a regular need? Were most of the harpsichords you were tuning in academic institutions, arts institutions, private use, et cetera? And not a question but another thought, I'm surprised there were even a handful of people tuning them in your metro area!
A sibling comment mentioned that harpsichords tend to have wood frames, and so they are incredibly reactive to temperature and humidity. The pin blocks in harpsichords also are often a single piece of hardwood, while in a piano they are a laminate of specially selected quartersawn hardwoods, so they hold the tuning pins a lot more strongly. If you hire a piano tuner for your harpsichord, they also tend to torque the pins too hard, which weakens the pin block even more.
Depending on the instrument and temperament, a tuning could be ~45 min or up to 90 min. Small instruments in the family (spinets and virginals) could have <4 octaves and one stop, meaning <50 strings to tune, and the biggest instrument had 5 stops and a 5-octave keyboard, meaning more strings than a piano (300 vs about 230). The "standard" instrument is ~4.5 octaves with 3 stops, meaning ~150 strings.
The customer picks the temperament generally, and that has some effect on how long it takes. Quarter-comma tunings (4 fifths flat by a quarter of a comma, the rest remaining pure) like Werckmeister are the quickest, and took under an hour on the standard instrument, but tunings like Kellner (1/5th comma, but harder from an A reference) and Valloti (1/6th comma) took me at least 2 passes to touch up, so over an hour. I also did equal temperament tunings with a tuner, which are quick. For reference, it takes me about 90 minutes to 2 hours to do a piano, so I am a little slow by professional piano tuner standards, but harpsichords are definitely quicker.
I also frequently adjusted the tuning based on what repertoire was being played, rotating it so that the near-pure thirds would be in the keys of the repertoire and possibly raising leading tones a bit. It was also not uncommon to have a modern woodwind in an ensemble, which often meant only doing a slightly spicy version of equal temperament rather than using a full-on baroque tuning.
The harpsichords were pretty much all at schools - I started by tuning my school's instruments and expanded from there.
I generally charged my hourly rate for 4 services/instrument/month + some padding, with extras (concerts) going at an hourly rate. This was a "work study" arrangement at my school (although I had 15 hours/week of work study for <3 hours of work, and still gave them a discount at the standard student rate) and contract work outside.
There's a harpsichord in my family. The traditional harpsichord had a wooden frame, thus the materials just weren't stable.
An American maker, John Challis, developed a harpsichord using modern materials, that stays in tune for much longer.
They didn't take as long to tune, as mentioned above, because the historic temperaments were easier if you knew what you were doing, and there were no unisons (multiple strings per note) to get into agreement. Before the age of the modern piano, keyboard players had to tune their own instruments, so it was just part of learning to play.
The Challis harpsichords are fascinating, but I think also a bit of an acquired taste. The aluminum parts sound odd to me, but I assume they basically never lose their tuning.
I can finally ask someone this! I was thinking of getting my piano tuned to a spicier temperament, happy for certain keys to be noticeably out as long as other keys sound a bit sweeter.
Anything you'd recommend, or is it a shit idea on piano?
I would suggest Kellner or Valloti if you tend to play romantic period music, although those are a hair harder to tune than the easy ones like Werckmeister. Pianos can definitely take temperaments as long as you keep the A at 440 (to equalize tension on the harp).
Personally, I think Beethoven and Chopin sound great in Kellner, and I had my piano in Kellner for a very long time.
When I was a teenager, I took piano lessons from a teacher with perfect pitch. When I told her that our piano at home—an old American-made upright—couldn’t be tuned any higher than about A=435, she visibly shivered. She said she couldn’t stand playing pianos that were not tuned to A=440.
Ever since, I have never wished that I had perfect pitch.
Some hardware and software instruments can easily switch from modern A440 to A400 or any desired A frequency, and from equal temperament to various other temperaments - even dynamic tuning. They are really fun to play, particularly the dynamic tunings where you can get highly in-tune chords and scales in any key. Vocal ensembles can also dynamically adjust their tuning, producing amazing overtones. I imagine string and brass ensembles can as well.
Some (non equal-tempered) keyboard instruments have split sharp/flat keys so you can play more in tune in certain keys/scales.
Being able to distinguish these all of these tunings accurately and switch between them as needed seems like it would be a nice skill to have.
That sounds great. I would like to try playing a keyboard with dynamic tuning sometime.
I should have mentioned that I was a teenager in the early 1970s, and the only pianos I had access to then had strings and could not be retuned on the fly. In retrospect, I came to feel sorry for my teacher, as being conditioned to the arbitrary standard of A=440 prevented her from enjoying playing music on many of the pianos she would have happened to come across.
Wow this is so interesting! So you are saying that the person with absolute pitch often has lost the ability to intuitively follow relative pitch, such that they are having to transpose in their heads?
I had always assumed they could still intuitively match pitch and just had an extra information overlay.
Do these people you know who dislike transposed covers also dislike genres of music with dissonant elements, such as certain types of jazz or microtonal music?
It's not losing relative pitch at all[0], it's actually kind of the opposite. Relative pitch and absolute pitch are at odds with each other in some contexts. There are many reasons as to why, and if you search tuning theory [1] you can find some amount of technical information. In this post I'll only cover a tiny portion of the reason, there are many other reasons, but this is one fundamental reason why.
To give a basic gist, two of the most fundamental intervals in music are octave (2:1 frequency ratio) which is 1200 cents, and perfect fifth (3:2 frequency ratio) which is about 702 cents. You'll find that if you stack 12 of these perfect fifths you come back to the same note (seven octaves up) but 23.46 cents off. 23.46 cents off is very much audible by every human being who is not speech impaired, so it'll sound extremely jarring (dissonant). This makes musical composition within the tradition of Western art/church music challenging. So, to fix this, we use 700 cents as the interval of approximate perfect fifth and each semitones apart by 100 cents (so that perfect fifth is 7th note and octave the 12th). We call this system "12 tone equal temperement" which is standard in all genres of Western music (from classical to jazz to pop to rock... but other cultures have many other systems). Now your piano will be tuned to these notes (0, 100, 200, 300... cents) such that it's impossible to play other notes. When people learn absolute pitch, they learn these notes are C, C#, D, D# etc. But when an instrument with continuous pitch plays (such as violin, cello, human voice etc) you do not need to be bound by this tempering. So you can actually play a perfect fifth as 702 cents. As long as the piece is not so chromatic/atonal such that you need 12 perfect fifths to add up to seven octaves, it'll work out. But when someone with perfect pitch listens to this effect, it can feel jarring, particularly because music is "out of tune". This can make piano music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to just intonation (e.g. violinists) and violin music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to 12TET (e.g. pianists with perfect pitch).
[0] Note that relative pitch is required to understand spoken human language, so as long as you don't have a speech impediment, you can likely understand relative pitch just fine. Of course, ear training can help you label the intervals you hear and associate them with names, not something all laymen can do.
Most professional violinists play in perfect equal temperament. I never got that deep into string playing, but I assume that a lot of study of "intonation" is actually about unlearning the natural frequency ratios (3/2 for 5ths, 5/4 for 3rds, etc) and learning to use the equal tempered counterparts (2^(7/12) and 2^(1/3) respectively).
However, there are a lot of times when you can make music more interesting and exciting by adding some pure thirds (equal temperament is off by the most on thirds, and thirds are very harmonically important) at strategic places. You just can't do this on a keyboard instrument.
I think this very much depends on the context, and being a good virtuoso violinist (or cellist, or singer etc) picking the right temperament for the right effect. If you're playing in an orchestra with many other instruments, you likely have to stick with 12TET. If you're playing a violin concerto cadenza, if you're playing a piece for solo violin, you likely want to play in just intonation as much as possible. If you're playing a piece for accompanied solo violin (violin + accompanying piano or orchestra i.e. sonata or concerto) then it very much depends on the moment and what sounds good for the music. Especially for an instrument like violin, which is extremely sensitive to every tiny expression performer can add, it's hard to make blanket generalizations. Ultimately, it's all about the artistic style of the performer, and composer's vision.
Excepting split sharp/flat keys (as seen in some non-equal-tempered harpsichords and organs), or some electronic instruments/plugins which can dynamically vary the pitch of each note.
The voice is the only instrument where you can "play" (sing) what note you think. So, the advantage of absolute pitch for improvisation is minimised.
However, AP would be advantage in vocal sight reading. With AP, you will never sing a wrong note, whereas a non-AP could make some mistakes, depending on how strong there musical ability/relative pitch is.
I am not sure shifting keys in singing would be hard for people with AP. Of course they would be aware of the exact new notes they would be singing whereas nonAP would simply thing "everything is X steps up/down" but relatively the same.
I don't think AP has an effect on tolerance to listening to a song in a different key, it is more your personal taste. I don't have AP, but I can tell when a song is in a different key from the original. I find it acceptable, so long as it is in tune. But I vastly prefer the original key simply due to familiarity. Also, some songs really do sound better in certain keys than others.
How so? I can definitely sing random pitches that don't conform to, say, 12-tone equal temperament. If I sing into a guitar tuner, I can make the meter move continuously from its flattest to sharpest position.
Their point is that there are dozens of instruments that also fit that criterion; i.e. the human voice is not the only instrument with that capacity.
Fretless sting instruments allow for continuous pitch modulation - that includes the violin family as well as others like pedal steel guitars, the Japanese shamisen, etc.
Certain wind instruments like slide trombones and slide whistles do the same.
There are also electronic instruments like the theremin or any synthesizer with a pitch bend wheel.
Audiation is a basic skill for any instrument. Accomplished musicians are trivially able to improvise complex melodies that they can play and sing simultaneously.
I'm a jazz guitarist who has developed the very bad habit of singing what I play while I improvise. Working hard to break it. But what I sing, and what I play is the same.
Being able to "think it, play it" is absolutely central to what I do when I improvise.
Relative and absolute pitch are orthogonal. A person with absolute pitch needs to practice relative pitch. So, this is not necessarily the case. However, people with absolute pitch have far easier time reading notation, which may result in less familiarity with relative pitch.
Wow, a lot of slighted pro or semi-pro musicians in the comments, not a lot of hacker spirit. I didn't sense any competitiveness in this article at all, and author clearly described her embarrassment at being completely non-musical, and the desire for her kids to be at least not shut off completely from the musical world skill-wise. And she did it after being prompted by a very interesting question--why is "perfect pitch" considered so difficult for the human brain compared to distinguishing any color out of millions (well, we probably only have common words for a couple hundred), which is considered trivial? I thought that was a very cool way of putting it.
What are the drawbacks? Seems like a skill with very opportunity cost. She even drew a decision matrix in the post to illustrate her reasoning around it (whether or not you think that's accurate). The "downside" of attempting this was spending more time playing with her kids.
The people in this thread are nuts. I play music at a very high amateur level and know a lot of people with both absolute and perfect pitch. They all enjoy showing it off and are great sight-readers. It's a little more annoying for them to hear music at a less-than-professional level, but no more so than anyone who develops their ear to distinguish between subtleties in other parts of playing like phrasing or rhythm.
(Maybe that's less true for true perfect pitch, though.)
The slighted musicians, as you put it, have made plenty of experience-based comments on what the drawbacks are, and why the decision matrix is wrong. They accord with my own (admittedly amateur) experiences. I think it is disingenuous to dismiss their comments with a casual "whether or not you think that's accurate" - that's exactly what their comments are, they're disagreeing with the decision matrix and giving their reasons why.
See especially the comments made by professional tuners (which matches what my own piano tuner tells me).
Maybe bring up the specific drawbacks you agree with, because many of the drawbacks mentioned seem really slight. One was that the musician was annoyed when an orchestra played in a slightly different pitch than what they preferred or what they were used to. Seems more like an OCD thing than something that actually impeded their musicianship.
Relative pitched people will be able to easily match what the next pitch ought to be if you play the beginning of a song they know in a new key. Absolutely pitched people (in my experience, unless they've been trained) find this difficult.
Imagine if, someone showed you a two and you just saw in your head what 2 + 1, 2+2, 2+3, 2+4 were intuitively. This would give you a leg up in elementary math (And beyond). This is similar to what relative pitched people experience. An absolute pitched person often just sees the two and if they see a three, the relationship between the two has to be learned.
Yeah, the same way there are real drawbacks of being a really good programmer. You are slightly annoyed (or worse!) when you see slightly out of tune code!
> For my older son this ability has translated into what seems like a stunning effortlessness when it comes to his music lessons. He finds it easy to sit down at his instrument and improvise in any key. He composes beautiful music. He has been taking piano for a few years now, and even though he practices no more than 30 minutes a day on average, if he’s motivated, he can learn to play a simple Chopin composition within a week or two.
There has to be a better way to brag about your children.
My older boy is also taking a few online music classes in his two non-dominant languages. (My kids are trilingual and I always look for ways to increase their non-dominant language exposure.)
It's just reality for immigrants from different countries living in America, you know? You gotta learn three to function and communicate with your grand parents and and the rest of the family as they rarely speak any English. That is especially so if you want to teach them something about culture in a country you grew up in.
(I am not the author, my family member is. I find the comments about bragging just silly. It's a lot of work to keep the family connections across cultures and languages).
There is no real culture left after just 2 generations.
We already live in a modern world. I have seen probably more culture from a lot more countries than anyone before us all.
It really takes time and energy to get culture. Culture is not just a few family traditions or a little bit of food.
Besides, i do think culture became much more generic the last 30 years due to how we are now connected. Everyone has coca cola (which is ridiculous), everyone ewars colorful tshirts from adidas and all the other brands we know. We took culture and mangeld it in sending cheap old cloth to other countries, exporting everything and stop embracing local things.
And even if you do, sometimes you see how those local people cook (in which conditions) and than you are happy about the generic imported coca cola because they never heard of hygene.
There was a Youtube Video were someone interviewed people in germany / munich and asked them how living here changed them. And thats very interesting culture wise: They said things which were very german like 'no longer talking to anyone on the street just for fun' or being more on time etc. I bet this cultural trades took much more than just a few weeks to get ingrained.
Don't know what to tell you, other than that the whole piece just reeks of compulsive status signalling. And why would one throw their "just look at our little prodigies-in-bloom" story up on the internet -- except to have people comment on it? Or is it only fawning and applauding comments they were expecting?
I wrote the original comment, and I (obviously) agree. It's cringe, and could have been written without these additions. It reminds me of the Tiger mom articles popularized with Amy Chua's work.
>Don't know what to tell you, other than that the whole piece just reeks of compulsive status signalling.
some cultures expect status signaling, a parent who does not do it is thought to be ashamed of the kids, and so the kids must not be very good. Some other cultures use it as a "language of love" to their children, encouraging them further. Some other cultures don't speak positively or much at all (ever hear about the old Swedish farmer who loved his wife soooo much he almost told her?) And even in those cultures there is a way to express pride or not express it, it's calibration.
Culture needs translation just like language. You can still read between the lines of the pride and learn something about what the parent is doing and how it's working. We don't have to like everybody we work with, everybody who teaches us, etc. in order to learn from them.
So teaching your children native languages of their parents as well as letting them play with sounds when they are young "reeks of status signalling" to you. I mean you gotta be careful these days not to let you kids have fun with learning or exposure to various activities. God forbid they learn a language or some music before the time you deem proper or in a way the parent chooses - unbearable elitism!
When people share stories like that they don't necessary expect applause or criticism. Honestly it's not your place to express it and against the site guidelines as well. If you want to learn about commenting just read what most of others have done in this thread - they commented about the topic at hand which is perfect pitch, early exposure to music and various ways to approach it.
I certainly have learnt something from those and got to read some interesting related stories.
So teaching your children native languages of their parents as well as letting them play with sounds when they are young "reeks of status signalling" to you.
Obviously not, and I don't see how what I said could be read that way.
It's taking the trouble to write stuff like the original article (in such gushing, self-congratulatory tones) and throwing it up on the internet that reeks of you-know-what.
Especially since these don't sound like self-driven accomplishments on the part of these kids. Or even remotely near it.
This is a hilarious comment because from what I remember (article seems to be down) the biggest descriptor I remember her giving is that its an app that leaks memory. I think that was the very first thing she said about it.
Speaking of which, there are anecdotes about twins who invent and use their own "DIY" spoken languages, but I've never read a good academic treatment of the topic and I don't even know what the proper search terms would be.
And I’m not even sure if haven perfect pitch helps this much in playing existing music on an instrument. You still need the routine and practice to move your hands fast and accurate (which for me learning to play the guitar is the much bigger problem than understanding what notes to play)
I play piano, and memorizing notes takes me a while for new songs. I know what they sound like though. If I could skip most of the note-learning, I'd spend that much more time on practicing the movement.
(And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.)
Ordinary, relative pitch helps a lot learning new songs, and it is much more learnable. If you know what key you are in, and you can hear the intervals in a melody, you can play it back without needing absolute pitch to do it.
> (And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.)
That’s the circular dependency there—if you practice enough, you develop the skills to make it easier to learn songs, which makes it more fun to practice, so you practice more. I really think there are just two things you gotta do—“push through” and get the practice work done anyway, and make sure that you are practicing effectively.
I have news for you: relative pitch can give you the same benefits. I for example play songs faster by ear than by reading notes. The only difference is that relative pitch takes time to develop, while it seems that absolute pitch is easier to acquire for the people who have it.
Literally anything about how you or your brain/children/microdosing regime/reinvention of sobriety are better than lowly average people has a coin toss chance of getting automatic upvotes on here.
Is absolute pitch actually a desirable skill? I'm a total amateur but from my perspective once your instrument is tuned up and you have some sort of reference point it makes more sense to think about things in relative terms. Like I don't really care what the actual chord I'm playing is, I just care that about what the root note is relative to the last chord I played, what quality the chord is (major, minor, any additional colorful interval added), and the maybe if it's inverted.
Like if I learn a song and then for whatever reason I have to change what key it's in, all I gotta do is start playing a couple steps higher and lower and then I'm good. But if I had thought in absolute terms, I would be screwed.
Am I off base here? I just play for fun I don't know.
You're right that it's not at all necessary for being a professional musician, but it doesn't hurt either. It's particularly helpful if you want to be able to sit down and play a song you know from memory in its original key. More of party trick than anything else. It seems to me that having perfect pitch is more of an indicator that your brain is highly tuned to remembering pitches accurately -- it's not that perfect pitch itself helps, but that people with perfect pitch just also have very good ears in general.
It may be very undesirable as you grow older and your peception of pitch slowly slides over time, so you have to remind yourself that it's not correct and has to be adjusted. You can find interviews with many famous musicians talking about that.
In my experience (I have pretty good relative pitch but not absolute), absolute is strictly better than relative pitch (ie. people with absolute pitch can do everything I can do with relative pitch, they can just also do absolute pitch)
From what I’ve heard, absolute pitch can be distracting in certain scenarios, like if you are listening to something which does not use A=440 (more common than you might think, just imagine that some instrument in a band is flat, and then everybody else tunes to match that instrument, or consider choral music, which drifts over the course of a song for various reasons). The other problem is that absolute pitch often drifts as you age, so someone with AP in their 40s or 50s might start hearing everything as out of key, because their sense of pitch has drifted.
I don't have perfect pitch, just an average hobby musician, but I can immediately tell when an orchestra is tuned up or down (A 440Hz vs 441 or 442, or baroque, really low).
I also find out of tune music extremely distressing, and can't stand it. My ears actually have this weird "bleeding" sensation if I listen to out of tune music long enough.
Unfortunately I don't. I wish I did though. I have tried some training, to no avail. When hear a pitch I have no notion of uniqueness.
However, since I listen to so much music and tune my violin to A 440Hz every time I play, my ear knows when something is off even by a degree or two when listening to some European orchestras. And I think every musician hates out of tune music :)
There is a really cool phenomenon with some musicians who play instruments with a one to one correspondence between a pitch and feeling + fingering (so woodwinds, and sort of brass) that have played long tones for so long that they have internalized the "feeling" of a note and can (with a small delay) seem like they have absolute pitch. Really cool stuff. A youtuber called Saxologic dubbed this ability "Real Pitch". Really interesting video showing this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4zo6POThHc
The skill you are describing is usually called “absolute pitch”—someone without absolute pitch cannot easily tell the difference between A=440 and A=432 in isolation (to say nothing of something like A=442).
> And I think every musician hates out of tune music :)
The notion of “out of tune” is different for people with and without absolute pitch. Someone with absolute pitch can hear something as “out of tune” just because it uses A=432 instead of A=440, whereas someone without absolute pitch will hear it as in tune. That is, more or less, THE characteristic difference between having absolute pitch and not having absolute pitch.
I don’t have absolute pitch. I’ll hear a guitar as out of tune if it is not tuned to itself. Like, if one string is flat relative to the others. However, if you tune a guitar to standard tuning in A=432, that sounds “in tune” to me. I think I have a decent sense of tuning—you can tune to equal temperament, and you can tune to just intonation, and I can tell the difference between the two. But I cannot tell the difference between A=440 and A=432.
The difference between 440 and 442 is exceptionally small, I’d be surprised if you could hear the difference in an A/B test.
With all due respect, I think you may be underestimating the amount of training that you would need. My sister has perfect pitch, but only really honed her skill at it after ~5 years of music theory/ear training classes. That was about when I learned to identify intervals by ear.
Singers also get "real pitch," I think, and in general, when you know the sound of an instrument's registers really well, it can be a hack for professionals to turn their relative pitch into "perfect pitch."
Also, FWIW most professional musicians I know can't tell whether their A is sharp or flat by a few cents (eg the difference between 440 and 442), but they can tell interval size immediately. The interval sizing tends to determine "out of tune" rather than the frequency of the A.
> Like if I learn a song and then for whatever reason I have to change what key it's in, all I gotta do is start playing a couple steps higher and lower and then I'm good. But if I had thought in absolute terms, I would be screwed.
I don't have absolute (or very good relative) pitch, but I find transposing something I already know pretty easy. I was able to sight read concert C sheet music and play it up a step on a Bb trumpet, for instance, whereas trying to find intervals that I don't already know is really difficult for me. So if were magically granted AP, I think playing up or down a step would be simple.
I think it depends on what you do in music. I also just play for fun and do not care about trying to gain absolute pitch (not that this is an option from what I've read).
My friend's brother has absolute pitch. I've played 10 note chords for him & he can pick out every note and also tell me if each note is in tune, sharp, or flat.
He is a high school band director. I can imagine that this is a very useful skill for his job.
> Deutsch posed a question that really got me thinking: how come most people can identify and label colors with ease without needing any “reference colors” to do so, but absolute pitch is so rare
People usually identify and label colors with much lower granularity. There are 7 conventional spectral colors with wide subjective boundaries between them, but e.g. piano has 88 distinct tones and that is still not full audible range.
What are the limits of color discrimination, I wonder? Can we discriminate between close colors of light better than we can between close frequencies of sound?
For pitch Googling suggests we can hear a difference of about 5 cents. A cent is 1/100th of a semitone, or 1/1200th of an octave, so N cents is a frequency ratio of 2^(N/1200).
At 440 Hz (A above middle C) 5 cents would be a difference of 1.27 Hz.
For light, a 5 cents difference would be about 2 nm wavelength at the red end of our visible range and about 1.1 nm at other end. (That's about 1 gHz frequency difference at the red and and 2 gHz at the other end). Can a human tell if two light sources differ in wavelength by 1-2 nm?
A trained musician can hear a pitch difference much smaller than 5 cents. I think designers and artists can also likely see a difference in wavelength of 1-2 nm, and probably a lot smaller.
Are they actually hearing the pitch difference, or are they hearing beat frequencies between simultaneous notes? You can hear beat frequencies even in monophonic music if the reverb is heavy enough.
Yup, think that's right about the limit of the eye. It's neat that spectral resolution is so similar for both eyes and ears, particularly considering how different their range is:
> It's neat that spectral resolution is so similar for both eyes and ears, particularly considering how different their range is
Probably because it's not necessarily just resolution of the eyes and ears, but resolution of the brain that perceives that information. How "perception" works is still somewhat of a mystery.
I got this board game called "Hues and Cues"; it has a large board with a color grid and players take turns drawing cards of a color on the board and give a couple verbal hints to try to get the other players to guess the color. After playing it with multiple people and adjusting the rules all sorts of ways I don't think humans are as good as identifying colors as you think.
Previously, I had heard that the best way of teaching kids absolute pitch is to have them listen to modern jazz and modern classical music, where unexpected pitches often show up. That innately trains them to think of individual note pitch as an important detail to listen to. That would suggest that reference pitches aren't needed, beyond giving each note a name later in life when the kids go for musical training, which in turn means that color and pitch discrimination are actually fairly similar processes, we just decide that one is important and the other is not.
I didn't realize there were methods like Deutsch's, and they honestly seem a little wonky. I'm glad it worked for her.
> ... listen to modern jazz and modern classical music, where unexpected pitches often show up. That innately trains them to think of individual note pitch as an important detail to listen to.
I don't think the absolute value any pitch class carries is of much intrinsic musical interest. Musical comprehension is not aided by knowing the pitch-class of a specific note, but in perceiving its relationship to other tones.
I'm guessing you picked those two genres of music because they are often referred to as "dissonant" or "noise". As far as modern classical music is concerned, much of the material has a unity between the foreground, background, and middle-ground details. Imagine you've been listening to an orchestra busily sawing away on pitch set [0 1 4] (in all its permutations) and then you realize the lonely glockenspiel's three disembodied notes over the last minute and a half spelled [0 1 4].
Training someone to listen to such a piece so that they might tell you the glockenspiel's second note was an e-flat does not improve anyone's musical comprehension. Training someone to listen to such a piece so that pitch-relationships in the foreground can be heard to form relationships at different scales of the composition does greatly aid in musical comprehension (and is routinely accomplished -- pretty much anyone can do it).
I think the big thing to note here is that kids don't intuitively do Schenkerian analysis on the music they listen to. I agree with you that a lot of music has a lot more internal structure than most people think, but it's reductive to say that dissonant music contains only "expected" pitches (as heard by an untrained ear).
Yes, children can learn to hear pitch-relationships at different scales of a composition. Schenker wouldn't have much to say about post-tonal music, but really we are talking about a matter of perception, not analysis, even if I used analytical notation to explain.
Musical comprehension depends on the relationships between pitches. A modest investment in ear training will pay handsome dividends in comparison to absolute pitch acquisition (even if the later worked).
I agree completely. Absolute pitch is extraneous for musicians at any level, and not worth the effort from the original article.
IMO if you want your kid to have absolute pitch, you should expand your own musical palate by listening to some Schoenberg or Stravinsky with your child. If you want your children to be musicians, you don't need to do that but you should give them some theory and ear training lessons.
Rick Beato made several videos about perfect pitch, also featuring his kid who has PP and can identify entire chords. Apparently his opinion is that the key was listening to atonal music at an early age, like you say.
I don't think having absolute pitch makes you a better composer. OTOH, composing music as a child will likely lead to absolute pitch.
My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child. Seeing the notes on the screen while playing and hearing them is almost certainly what made it click for me. I strongly believe that AP can be acquired at a rate that is an order of magnitude higher than what we observe today.
> My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child.
I have a similar anecdote. I had a small Casio keyboard that I gave to my daughter to play with when she was 3 or 4. There was no training or any kind of instruction beyond that. It was just another toy that was in her pile of toys and it wasn't something she played with very often.
Many years later, we are in a music store and I hit a key on a piano and she tells me it's wrong. I didn't really understand what she was saying and then we found out the keyboard had some pitch shift mode enabled and she was right. That's the day we found out she had perfect pitch.
Absolute pitch in equal temperment. Which is a bad skill to have for many instruments. Tuning is a compromise, since chords are what count. A third is a 3:2 relationship between frequencies, an octave is 1:2, and a fifth is 4:3. (I might have the ratios above backwards). If you work out the math each will result in a different pitch for each note, and you need all 3
I would say that her children's musical abilities have nothing to do with absolute pitch and everything to do with having a super smart, well organised and consistent mother. Their earliest memories are of bonding with the world's most important person over music, almost every day of their lives. They speak 3 languages, they talk with their friends about synethsesia, etc. They're a family of absolute brain boxes.
So I think following this method with your toddlers will probably recreate musical ability, and absolute pitch, but following a different musical routine with this level of regularity and consistency would also recreate the musical ability.
There is a fun experiment you can do yourself to show that you have the capability for Absolute Pitch. Think of some pop songs or specific music recordings that you like listening to. Sing it, or play it in your mind. Then listen to the actual recording. If you can do this with some songs, then you have (at least the capability for) absolute pitch.
The reasoning is simple. You can sing a song in any key you like (within the bounds of your vocal range). You don't even have to sing in a standard key. (You could sing it half-way between C# and D for instance). If you pick the exact right key out of the effectively infinite possibilities, you have remembered a specific pitch. If you can remember specific pitches, you can label them. (It's just that music always makes things easier. Writing a song to memorize something is an underused technique IMHO).
I can do this reliably for songs I've listened to recently (within the last couple of days), but after that I somehow "forget" the pitch. If I played a C scale on my guitar a few times in the morning every day, I could probably identify pitches correctly based on that reference. But I'd still need the reference.
Seeing this made me curious to test my pitch accuracy after a few years of not playing music and I've discovered that my mind's A4 is now closer to 423 rather than 440 and it's driving me nuts. Feels like the Berenstein/stain Bears thing all over again
Came for the science, stayed for the prose. You have a g̶e̶n̶e̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶d̶e̶t̶e̶r̶m̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ talent for storytelling, that was a great read.
If I am ever fortunate enough to have a child in a world that can sustain them, I hope I let them choose their own path and that I can guide them with enough care to make them feel loved and guided but with enough distance that their choices are what they would have been if they saw all their possibilities.
Apparently some countries use a fixed solfeggio method while others don’t. Meaning that in any diatonic scale the tonic would always be ‘do’ or if fixed ‘do’ would always be a ‘c’. This caused me some confusion how one could use solfeggio methods to acquire perfect pitch.
Well, it sort of is a "super power". As you say, it won't teach you technique or musical taste, but it is a great help for improvisational music and composing.
I have played music for quite some time and have worked on my relative pitch a fair bit, and I still struggle to improvise what I think in my head, whereas a person with perfect pitch would do it effortlessly and perfectly every time.
The main benefit is the automatic connection between note names and sounds. You can easily learn written music if you can just read the note and know how it sounds in your mind.
The more fluent Asian students are in a tonal language, the more likely they are to have AP. And if they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than Caucasian students.
So the complement of Asian is ... Caucasian? Seriously, I would expect a self-described furious shape rotator to know better.
Could have been phrased better, but I think both points emphasize that it's the mastery of tonal language, not student's race, that seems to be making the difference.
Hmm -- it definitely strikes me as not just poorly phrased, but quite weird that they brought up racial groupings at all. Otherwise they could have just said:
If they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than students who grew up speaking non-tonal languages.
The racial grouping is brought up because it's a common claim that Asians (the children are half Asian if it's not clear enough from the text) have (or are born with) AP more often than other races. The author counters that while it's statistically true it might be not because of race but exposure to a tonal language (% wise more Asians speak a tonal language than Caucasians and those are the two that are relevant here).
I don't think the article in any way suggested that non-Asian = Caucasian, merely that "Caucasian" was the group whose reference point they compared it to.
Perfect pitch is actually kind of a curse in many, many contexts. I’d be very hesitant to experiment on my kids this way without their understanding of the consequences.
Quite a bit of negativity on the comments. I hope that's not the reason the article was taken down. I personally loved reading it, and for sure these kids benefited from this training. Makes you think what else we could be learning from 2 to 6.
I read that as "How My Chicken" and honestly as much as I'm sure the process for children is interesting, I'd be lying if I said I don't find it more fascinating to get chicken to have absolute pitch instead :-)
I have absolute pitch for select instruments only. For string instruments (especially for the violin which I play) you can ask me what note was played in the middle of the night and I’ll tell you exactly what it is. I can even most likely tell you which string and which position was used to play that note. But for other instruments like the piano, I can get close, but many times I’m within one or two notes. Surprisingly for wind instruments like the trumpet I also have almost as good accuracy as for the violin. Not sure why because I hardly ever heard a trumpet growing up.
A piano (usually) has three strings per note, all slightly detuned. Perhaps that throws you off. You could try to see if your pitch perception is affected when someone plays three identical notes on a violin (although I imagine that's rather difficult, so perhaps a small ensemble is better).
The fact that these kids can also improvise and compose makes me wonder if they were born with a lot of innate musical talent beyond pitch recognition. Of course that's the kind of "old thinking" the author doesn't want us to believe.
I do believe AP can be taught to some degree. My pitch recognition isn't that great in general but when I play my instruments I can immediately tell if something is off so the super-strong feedback loop you gain from learning an instrument, especially something that can go off-pitch, is a strong driver.
Anyone who spends a little time around children will quickly see that some have better hand eye coordination and are good at catching balls, some have an excellent sense of smell, some do very well with numbers, some can draw people's faces with little training, etc.
Here is a list of things you can objectively measure to determine which children have innate musical talent.
And it doesn't matter a great deal either. Innate talent plus no work will get you nowhere. No talent and work will get you somewhere although maybe not to the top.
That is clearly not what I said. You can be born stronger, faster, healthier, more intelligent, etc., all of which can help you become better more easily in various fields, but it doesn’t mean you’re born as a better football player.
I've read of older musicians with perfect pitch saying that when they get up near their 50s their perfect pitch drifts. They start hearing things as being higher or lower than they really are. For some that drift can be up to two semitones. This can make it very annoying to listen to music--it all sounds off.
For everything you need as a musician relative pitch is fine, and won't go out of whack when you get older possibly ruining your ability to enjoy music.
Funny enough i just watched a documentary (in german) about child prodigies (musical ones) and david garrett said: there are no child prodigies, every note is trained hard.
the gist was that a child prodigy is defined as a child who can play at 10 what professional can play but the kids need a few 'talents': 1. stamina and a lot of it 2. motivation/fun for playing music and 3. a ton of exercise.
And this blog article sounds definitly much more involved while trying to give of the vibe of 'look i have prodigy kids' and 'i only do a little bit of excercising with them and its just 5 minutes a day or so'.
Nonetheless, 30 minutes a day on avg is still so much more than a lot of other kids do and as others said, the bragging is annoying.
My child studied the Yamaha music program which starts at age 4 or 5 and emphasizes singing everything using fixed do solfege similar to Suzuki but with group classes
They developed white key absolute pitch meaning they can recognize any natural tone by ear and can sing any pitch from memory.
Many of the students developed some form of absolute pitch.
However, I am not sure the utility of the skill. I am into jazz and tried to teach them some improvisation and they never showed a great aptitude or interest for it and they also struggle with relative pitch tasks, essentially converting the notes they recognize into the interval.
In short, I came to the conclusion that absolute pitch recognition by itself won't make you a great musician.
not sure if I agree that having AP ensures that learning music will be easy. at least for contemporary western music, identifying and producing a pitch is a nearly useless skill compared to identifying and producing intervals (relative pitch)
Not easy, but less difficult. Not at all useless. When I've forgotten how to play a melody and don't have the sheet music I ask my wife which notes are wrong and in a matter of seconds she has me back on track. This is something that might take me so long I just give up and practice a different song. She can also listen to any song and instantly transcribe chords and melody for me. That's a huge time saver in learning a song. One which I don't lean on very often because I want to develop my own skills. But her ear enables her to learn and play songs far more quickly than me.
I've heard that all people with absolute pitch will lose it once they get older into their 40s or 50s, as their sense of pitch drifts away from reality and everything will sound slightly out of pitch to them from then on.
Perfect pitch is the monad in musical training. Everyone not having it thought they want to get it. Those who gets it would know it really isn't helping that much. Disclaimer, I don't get neither
One of the challenges of being a piano player - youtube search for a new piece you're interested in and there will be a video of a 4-5 year old playing it on a baby grand somewhere :-)
Absolute pitch is always held up as some kind of magical ideal but really this just gets in the way. I wish there was more information on training your relative pitch as a useful musical skill. After training I was able to do basic pitch related take like distinguish between major or minor and recognize the notes in a scale with fair accuracy. These skills are way more useful than plucking a Bb out of mid air
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.)