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Comment by heynk | Hacker News Reader

> absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only 0.01% of people end up learning it in time!

I find it dubious that you can only learn this by age 7 - although I'm sure it's easier if you're younger. Is there science behind this claim?

I am not a musician, but I have recently started learning to play piano, and training my ear is something I'd really like to learn. I've used some apps to practice ear training, and I'm able to discern intervals decently, but I can't recognize and identify a single note on its own. I do hope I can get there with more deliberate practice.

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> I find it dubious that you can only learn this by age 7 - although I'm sure it's easier if you're younger. Is there science behind this claim?

A better way to put this would be "difficulty goes up exponentially, much in the same way as learning a new language".

> I am not a musician, but I have recently started learning to play piano, and training my ear is something I'd really like to learn. I've used some apps to practice ear training, and I'm able to discern intervals decently, but I can't recognize and identify a single note on its own. I do hope I can get there with more deliberate practice.

As a professional musician, absolute pitch is very helpful but definitely not necessary. Being able to hear intervals and the contours of a melody well enough to pick it out quickly (this also goes for recognizing what kind of modes scales are being used, i.e. major, minor, penatonic, mixolydian) is so helpful that I might actually call it necessary, depending on what you plan to do with your music.

> the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician

It can also be a curse. I've known a number of people with perfect pitch. Those who were pianists typically insisted on playing only electric pianos, because a typical mechanical piano that's not in a performance hall is probably not tuned until "regular" listeners can tell it is out, but it could be out enough to make it unplayable to a performer with perfect pitch.

Another thing I noticed which I thought was surprising - they weren't notably better composers despite their "better understanding" of pitch.

I'm probably one of those people that can identify specific notes, but probably only if they're played on a piano. I play an electronic piano and what I find amusing/frustrating is if I use the 'transpose' function. So when I play for example in C but it is D that comes from the speakers, I will often find my fingers migrating to 'correct' the pitch. And if you wonder why I'd transpose, it's because - to my ears - a piece of music can sound noticeably different shifted just half a tone.

It's been conjectured (with some evidence) that it's actually relative pitch that is learned, and absolute pitch forgotten, early in childhood. It's useful to be able to recognize a word as the same object regardless of whether a low or high voice is speaking it. This would also help explain why absolute pitch seems to be more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages, where absolute pitch content carries more semantic information.

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