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  • 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.
    by dieselgate
  • 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?
    by mystifyingpoi
  • 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.

    by dolia
  • 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.

    by paytonjjones
  • 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

    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.

    by sowbug
  • 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.

    by anon291
  • 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.

    by SeanLuke
  • In indian music, swaras only ever exist as relative pitch markers and as such even if you do have perfect pitch it doesn't impede anything. It just comes in the back of your mind as a separate thing like oh, this is 5, this is 1.5, etc, since they are different markers from the Sa..Pa..Sa...
    by porridgeraisin
  • This is super interesting, thanks for commenting. You've listed a lot of negatives of absolute pitch, and they all make a lot of sense.

    But you also said you wouldn't trade it away. Why not? What are the positives that outweigh the negatives?

    by paytonjjones
  • 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?
    by utopiah
  • wat? what is yello, red or blue?
    by est
  • aurora store isan option.
    by gunalx
  • 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?

    by jstanley
  • It looks like it is based on this https://github.com/pganssle/cim, which I think is this web app
    by a1o
  • I would take a look at https://github.com/pganssle/cim , which this is very closely based on!

    My brief story: I was using that as a PWA, but encountered some snags when using it on mobile.

    I cloned it and fixed those, which required switching to Android WebView instead of a PWA. I opened a PR but Paul said he preferred that I make my own fork with a new name. At that point I decided to do a full rewrite instead of just a fork (from Jekyll to TypeScript), and that's the version I posted here.

    Edit: you can also clone and build the apk if you'd like, there are instructions at the bottom of the README

    by paytonjjones
  • 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.
    by throwawayk7h
  • 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.

    by dolia
  • 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.

    by aboardRat4
  • I think Duolingo has a music course. No idea how good it is though or how deep it goes into theory.
    by freetime2
  • If you want to learn the mumbo-jumbo other commenters are using freely in their comments: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons

    If you want to learn why your flute's FFT visualization has multiple bumps, get a copy of Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial from the local library

    If you want to learn to play an instrument, hire a teacher!

    by FelipeCortez
  • > 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.

    What a wonderful experiment! You've uncovered "harmonics": your recorder (or any instrument) sounds a complex mixture of frequencies, even when you play just a single note. The different mix of frequencies from one instrument to another is what gives each a unique sound, called the "timbre". The harmonics of wind instruments like your recorder are particularly complex! Try the same experiment with a stringed instrument, which will make something closer to a pure sine wave. Try it with anything that will make noise!

    But I'd recommend not using Audacity to learn to play an instrument. You need your ears for this, so it may as much effort developing listening as developing playing technique. But in the end, don't worry too much about that, just have fun making music!

    by couchand
  • 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".
    by gcanyon
  • Proper harmony requires playing out of pitch.
    by slashdave
  • I have it, it wanders a bit, but I don't know what you mean by "out of key". If it wanders, everything would relatively wander with it. I've never found it to be a curse in any case.
    by dbalatero
  • The problem with absolute pitch is that a choir without accompaniment will often drift a semitone or so over the duration of a song. Then if there are people with absolute pitch in the audience this can be cringy.
    by amelius
  • I've heard of musicians with very strong senses of perfect pitch flocking to flute or oboe, because anything not keyed in C (perfect pitch equiv) results in too much cognitive dissonance. Clarinets are keyed in Bb (you play a C, out comes a Bb), horns in F (you play a C, out comes an F), trumpets in Eb (this should be clear), and so on...

    Like motion sickness with musical tones - you see one thing on the page, you have a sense for what "note" you're playing, but out comes something else.

    I have perfect pitch but it's not really useful, except for noticing that my instrument is getting sharper. But that doesn't matter since you have to be in tune with the rest of the band/orchestra.

    by eventualcomp
  • 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.

    by NobodyNada
  • My kiddo has perfect pitch, and for them listening to a baroque period organ is kind of trippy because back in those days A was more like 436 Hz than 440. OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses. These days, they are grooving on Angine de Poitrine, so somehow they are OK with microtonal scales. It probably varies from person to person, but I can see where perfect pitch could give you another way to be annoyed by the world.
    by dbcurtis
  • Approximately two billion people who speak tonal languages demonstrate that it's really not, I think, given that e.g. native cantonese speakers reproduce to within a quarter semitone across a lifetime barring something like neurological or significant hearing issues. They don't all have perfect pitch, that seems to be related more to music training early in life, but something like 60% of Mandarin speakers who were trained musically before age 6 have perfect pitch. In those cultures, not having at least relative pitch is a learning disability similar (or perhaps even more problematic) than dyslexia is in e.g. english speaking populations.
    by jaggederest
  • 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.

    by frafart