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Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

I learned I was tone deaf when playing the game Myst in 1993 when I was eight years old. There was a puzzle[1] in which you had to listen to a tone, cross a room and move a slider until you heard the same tone. I knew exactly what had to be done, but I could not match the tones even after many attempts. Finally, I had to ask for my mom's help.

I carried the belief that I was tone-deaf with me for a decade or more until I happened to replay the game and found that as an adult, I had no difficulty completing the puzzle whatsoever. Apparently in my case, tone-deafness was a temporary condition of childhood. I wonder how many people have a childhood memory of not being able to sing in tune or complete a musical puzzle and believe they are tone-deaf for the rest of their lives.

1. https://youtu.be/qP6GU710jV4?t=141

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Music is like anything else in that it requires practice. At 8 years old, there's really not much learned practice in music really occurring unless you're in family like the Von Trapps. Even listening to kids sing Happy Birthday or The Wheels On The Bus can be quite interesting in how far off the "notes" are. Kids are just mimicking the words. Even the tempo is not of concern. Unless you get some sort of musical training through choir or band or something, you might not ever learn about flat/sharp and how to correct to match the person next to you or more likely the radio.

Completely tone-deaf person would not be able to recognize voices, e.g. tell male voice from female, father's voice from mother's. Obviously there are cases like this, but I believe very few.

On the other hand reproducing the tone requires practice, and mostly practice with your vocal instrument.

I would imagine that kids who grow up in families where e.g. mother sings while cooking, don't even notice how they practice at the age of 2 or so. But what is important, they train their voice, not only hearing.

It is like with colors. A person can see colors perfectly, but if you asked to mix acrylic paint to get chartreuse? Most of the population would struggle I would believe. We wouldn't call these people color-blind.

However with music I feel we somehow mix tone-deafness and ability to sing/reproduce tone.

> Completely tone-deaf person would not be able to recognize voices, e.g. tell male voice from female, father's voice from mother's.

I find this hard to believe. Human voice has a lot of timbral characteristics that show up on a spectrogram view. It would also imply that a person would be unable to tell the difference between a piano, a guitar and a trombone. This would also make understanding speech very difficult. Do people (with otherwise normal hearing) like this exist?

This is pretty different from not being able to distinguish musical pitch, say tell C# from Bb, or be able to tell which one of the pitches is higher.

> However with music I feel we somehow mix tone-deafness and ability to sing/reproduce tone.

Mind-bogglingly one can apparently be tone-deaf and still be able to sing in tune.

I would doubt that?

On the other hand a person lacking ability to tell green from red can still paint quite good landscapes?

This makes sense, but in my experience the other kids seemed to somehow gain this knowledge at a young age.

It's no surprise that I didn't make any real progress, since I wasn't learning an instrument and my school teachers made us sing but didn't bother trying to teach us to sing -- but by late primary school I was a notably bad singer relative to (almost literally) everyone else in my class. My home was by no means full of music, but we did have a record player and my sister liked to sing with my mother sometimes. And although it took me a while to get interested in pop music, by late primary school I had a CD player and some bands that I liked.

So I doubt the difference in ability was solely environmental rather than innate; surely the other kids hadn't all been taught how to sing, or grown up in very musical households. (I'm still very weak musically, and still can't sing, but I'm not literally tone deaf.)

Imo, person you are responding to just dont know what 8 years old are capable and is having those videos with cute 3-4 years old singing badly in mind.

Just to add to the anecdata, I taught myself guitar by copying what I heard on the radio. I was ten years old at the time.

Singing correct tune and being able to distinguish it are two much different things. In any case, 8 years old absolutely not just mimicking words. Even musically untrained 8 years old are diffentiating tunes and trying to hit it.

I think it also depends on what kind of music you listen to. Music that is very "busy" with bass and percussion is more difficult for young kids to pick up, in my experience. Also the more difficult the vocal performance, the harder it will be to follow.

My wife and I listen to a lot of classical and hymns with simple 4-part harmonies. We have 7 kids, most of whom could match the songs pretty well at surprisingly young ages (2 or 3 years old).

> Von Trapps

What makes you think that’s not nurturing?

I only meant that they were a family unit that made the choice to train their young children to be able to sing and perform. I chose the Von Trapps as I assumed that it was a reference pretty much anyone would have at least heard of and might recognize. Never in my wildest did I think someone would misconstrue that.

In my reading nurturing is exactly what dylan604 implied with the von Trapps.

It is possible to solve that puzzle even if you are deaf, by counting the number of notches the slider has moved, which corresponds to the position of the key on the keyboard.

I've always had a sharp sense for relative tones - whether two notes are the same, or I can even tell specifically what interval they are, usually - but despite having played organized music for eight years of my life I'm hopeless at telling you what note a tone or chord actually is (or what key something is in). Zero indication whatsoever.

I do have a friend who can do that, though. You press the Bb key on a piano and he'll tell you it's a Bb and that it's slightly out of tune on the sharp end. It's amazing.

Absolute pitch like your friend has is hard to learn and relatively uncorrelated to musical ability. Musical training largely works your relative pitch muscle.

I was pretty tone deaf as a child too.

After I took up singing (briefly) I definitely got better at matching and distinguishing tones once I started paying attention to the actual melodies in music. Even then, it was and still is incredibly difficult for me. I sometimes wonder if pitch perception is analogous to learning a language; totally learn-able as an adult, but never will be as natural as if you learned it when you were a child.

This rings true to my experiences with High School Choir. Tone matching was a skill that everyone was able to improve in, with just two notable exceptions.

There was one girl who was truly tone-deaf, and as a result could not tell that she was only ever singing one monotone note.

And then there was the teacher's son, who would run sound during our productions and claimed to have perfect pitch. He certainly could pick up on things much quicker than anyone else running the boards.

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