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Comment by kashunstva | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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> 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.

> digging music through forces coming out of your own soul

Agree. Art is art, and why do we make art? Well...?

Technical skill helps with the nuance of the creation, but not with the "why."

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.

Playing more the strings of soul instead and less the strings of the brain?

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.

> why?

Isn't it (like with most things) to get laid?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Is it fundamentally auditory? Is that all that's going on? You're forgetting that music has a text. It is a text.

Especially, of course, music that involves voices. (Or at least most of it.) Reading a language and a musical text is a very big part of all this.

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.

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.

> 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.

Euro-nope, never came across it apart from 'rich people', - and several Americans I know (true to that particular stereotype).

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

This is at Paganini level for sure.

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).

Quite likely I got it backwards. I couldn't remember the direction for sure and pretty much guessed.

It seems more cognitive than due to physical effects in the ear. Adam Neely had a good YouTube video on it https://youtu.be/QRaACa1Mrd4

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.

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.

Wonder if folks with absolute pitch form emotional associations with different keys.

Collier gives his answer to that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyXCWYqpId4&t=836s and it seems to be yes for him, without giving any details why(!)

I would say it makes sense - perfect pitch or not - every key has a different relationship to your own voice, which makes it feel different.

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'm keeping "you either know instantly or you haven't practiced enough". Thanks!

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.

Losing some high pitch hearing is bad enough.

> [...] 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.

> but it is much harder, as you have to calculate the intervals between notes in real time

Not at all. You just hear the interval.

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.

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.

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.

Why did you feel it necessary to include the family's race?

It's very relevant.

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".

My son had one use for it: He could be employed to tune the cellos in the orchestra , and didn't have to use an instrument.

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!

Seems more fashionable to deny that general intelligence is real or that IQ tests can measure it with a fair degree of accuracy nowadays.

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?

How do things change if every single person in the musical ensemble had absolute pitch? How would it be better, and how would it be worse?

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.

Would equate it to math where you can do certain large arithmetic in your head.

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