Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

github.com

217 pointspaytonjjones146 comments

So I built the original web app for this (it's not stolen, it's open source and I told OP they could fork it). I've been glad to see it getting more attention over the years.

One note of caution here is that with my older son we did this for a few years and it hasn't really worked as expected. He can identify all the chords perfectly every time, but when we started testing single notes, he was worse than chance at it. In fact, when I activated the secret Easter egg "red only" mode, he was worse than me at choosing between C E and G (though with practice he can now do it perfectly).

I'm working on a version where you can identify single notes instead of just chords.

Also, I gave a talk about this a few years ago and the talk is on YT if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE

A decent chunk of my PyCon 2025 talk is also about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY

Did it help your son to study music?

I'm not sure I understand the question, but I can answer both interpretations:

1. Did it (the chord trainer app) help my son when he was studying music? Not as far as I can tell. He has also been taking piano lessons and sometimes it helps a little with music theory to tie it back to the chords, but I don't think there's much transfer learning going on. He seems to have a good ear, but my other son is not picking up chords nearly as quickly, and I know a bunch of other kids have bounced off this app, so my older son may just already naturally have a good ear.

2. Did it (studying music) help my son (with identifying chords)? I don't think so. He made pretty steady progress in the chords before he started piano, and after he started piano it didn't get any easier. He also mentions things like, "The chords sound different on the piano", which makes me think I need to have more varied samples (even though the book says that consistency is key and you should practice on the same piano holding the chords for the same duration every time).

Hey thanks for taking the time to respond, appreciate it! I left the comment in a whim. I meant to ask 1. Do your son find it easier to identify chord because of the app? Do they, when hearing a passage of music, or a chord, say something like "oh this is a minor chord"? I know this is hard to isolate as there are so many confounding factors.

I'm asking because my sons started picking up piano lessons. I think the way their piano is taught relies to much on their eye. They are looking at music much more than listening to it. So am curious if there are ways to trigger their interest in hearing.

Again thanks for your reply!

Thanks for commenting and for doing all the hard work here! (For reference, the story here is that I was using pganssle's web app as a PWA, but encountered some snags on mobile that led me to make a PR, which eventually turned into a fork / TypeScript rewrite at pganssle's suggestion)

I was surprised when I learned about the Eguchi method recommending chords, as I assumed training single notes would be easier. A single note mode sounds like a great idea, I'll put it on the list to add to Bsharp as well. I was also thinking of adding Guitar sounds if I can find or create some good samples.

Maybe also an "identify the root of the chord" mode could be helpful to bridge from the chord sounds to single notes?

I can't believe I didn't put this in the original repo, but this is where I got the piano samples from: https://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/mis.html

They have guitar samples as well, but it was a bit more complicated because with a piano you have one key per note, there's exactly one way to play C4♯ or whatever, but with a guitar the notes are overlapping, so C4♯ might be played on the B string or up on the G string, and I didn't really know how to choose samples for interpolation.

> Maybe also an "identify the root of the chord" mode could be helpful to bridge from the chord sounds to single notes?

There is already a mode (it might turn on automatically for "white" chords after you reach black chords, I forget) that follows on to identifying one of the three notes, chosen at random, from the chord you just heard. That is what I'm doing with my son now and it seems to be bridging the gap, but I think a direct "which note is this" thing might work better for him.

That said, we're pretty far afield of the original Eguchi method at this point. According to the book, kids are supposed to just naturally understand the nature of notes as you improve. The book also mentions that the advanced students are doing stuff like listening to arbitrary combinations of up to 6 notes (not chords, just random combinations), but they don't really explain how that works. There's a decent amount more to do, but given that I'm not 100% convinced that it even works, I'm not sure how much it's worth it to do it.

As somebody who enjoys listening to beatmatched DJ mixes, I'm glad I don't have "perfect" pitch. I'd hate to have vast amounts of music sound "wrong" just because the speed and pitch was changed slightly to synchronize it with other tracks.

Relative pitch is very important for musicians, but absolute pitch is mostly useless. The only use I can think of is singing songs with a cappella intros, so you're in tune with the instruments that come in later, but even this is of very limited value. In a casual setting you can just play a note on an instrument before you start, and for a professional performance you're going to have IEMs that can play the reference note for you.

Doesn't most DJing software support constant-pitch speed adjustment?

Pitch and speed are inherently linked when you are dealing with physical vinyl, but time-stretching in software isn't too complicated.

>Doesn't most DJing software support constant-pitch speed adjustment?

Modern software does, but there's always the risk of introducing artifacts, and I like older music that's usually mixed with pitch shifting.

A little niche, but that would be handy while directing an a capella choir. Giving starting pitches without a pitch pipe or tuning fork would be useful.

people with perfect pitch can recognize when pitch has been shifted, but it's not like they perceive it (necessarily) as wrong or annoying - it's a matter of taste. most of them can still enjoy microtones, detuned tracks, and beatmatched dj mixes just like everybody else.

If you compose, i can see it being a nice speed up on your process

> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6.

I found some papers suggesting it is possible for adults, but more difficult.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...

You will probably claim it's not "real" perfect pitch, but many people use their tinnitus to help them. They identified their ring as having, for example, F#, and suddenly their relative pitch became absolute.

Now there's a hack in the most delightful sense of the word

I've seen nothing to convince me that "absolute pitch" is anything other than relative pitch with excellent recall or persistent observation of pitch.

I agree. I can tune a guitar to within a half a semitone of accuracy without reference just from knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound after 20 years of playing.

> knowing how the open strings are supposed to sound

well that's the whole question isn't it? If you know how an open string is supposed to have, that's what people call absolute pitch?

Most people without absolute pitch have some level of "pitch memory", but it's not comprehensive or reliable. For instance, if you ask people to sing a pop song, they're significantly more likely than chance to sing it in the original key.

I know the Super Mario Bros. theme starts on an E, so I can identify an unknown pitch by recalling that theme and comparing using relative pitch. But that's quite a slow and unintuitive process, and it's easy to make a mistake. People with absolute pitch just hear the pitch without having to "recall" a reference note to compare to like that.

I don't have perfect pitch (never trained in it) but I've played violin a lot (started in college) and I can hear the G-ness, D-ness, A-ness, or E-ness of a note. I do have to be actually trying to listen though, except for if they are G3, D4, A4, or E5.

So I have the latter, but not the former (i.e., no perfect pitch). The difference is, I can choose not to observe it. It reminds me of how I've studied Japanese for 15 years, but I can still sometimes choose not to read certain kanji if I glance at a legible word — the same is not true for English, if I see something even for a split second I've already read it.

You don't really have relative perfect pitch because as you say, you can recognise the G-ness of a note I assume without reference.

If anything I think this reinforces what I'm alluding to.

Also your teeth don't change too much in adulthood save for cavities and the like, so if you hum, they'll resonate in a rather stable frequency.

It’s not “real” perfect pitch. It’s more like training and memorizing. It doesn’t come as naturally as it does for kids.

isn't perfect pitch for kids also training and memorizing? the learning method from the original post surely suggests so

It's just like how foreigners will never truly learn a language; racist BS. Plenty of tonedef adults get into Julliard and can play circles around people with perfect pitch no matter how much they practice music.

There was an interesting study that I attempted to enroll in (but unfortunately was screened out by both age and childhood instrument learning) that was looking at psilocybin potentially giving adults the ability to acquire perfect pitch:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-stu...

Yeah, the stuff on the repo is bullshit because it's ai slop.

I learned perfect pitch well after six. I know others who have too.

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.

I feel like the pianist trained you rather than you achieving it like a little kid does. That happens sometimes if you put in the effort (learning/memorizing/training). While I am not old enough to know how it changes, could it be perhaps that what you had learned when you were 16 was in your mind a certain pitch and as ears change (a 16 year old can hear higher pitch than 30 year old), you don’t relearn it, therefore it’s shifted? Please correct me (pretty sure I’m wrong)

I have it from early age, and it also shifts now that I'm almost 40. I think the more constantly I use it though, the more it seems to settle back into accuracy.

Thank you! That's really interesting. So it's like a muscle I guess. More you use it = better.

That's not true for everyone. Some extraordinary musicians with perfect pitch also reported that it starts drifting for them as they age (I remember Oscar Peterson and Jacob Collier telling this)

The loss with age is super commin, and all in the same direction (people hear more flat but guess more sharp).

Out of curiosity, did it shift up or down for you? I've had perfect putch from a young age, but now at 30 I hear everything a semiton higher (so e.g. a B sounds like a C to me, and I have to manually subtract the semitone to infer the real pitch and hope that I am not overcorrecting)

Pitch perception shifts with age?

It's well known people with perfect pitch always lose it in middle age, the reason is unknown, but it's always extremely upsetting when it happens, and since perfect pitch isn't very useful to begin with, it's actually a curse.

Does that imply that people with age actually interpret pitches differently? The pitch reading would be correct "locally", within your brain.

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".

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.

Somehow this makes me think of the differences between tonal and inflective languages. Learning a tonal language can be brutal for a person who's used to expressing emotion/inflections through tone, and there is nothing more frustrating than trying to speak to somebody when saying a word phonetically correct but in a slightly wrong tune and, to them, what you're saying is completely incoherent.

The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.

I guess you can get a bit of an idea of what this is like by listening to French people speak English. French doesn’t have phonemic syllable stress like English does and so French people often make mistakes with this. For a native English speaker the syllable stress is an integral part of the word and being phonemic it actually distinguishes between two words that otherwise sound the same. The commonest category of this would be words that change between verb and noun depending on the stress, like “reject”, “protest”, “transfer” etc. And there are other minimal pairs like “insight” vs “incite”.

The native English (many other Indo-European languages also have similar systems) speaker is very unlikely to make a pronunciation mistake in this manner but even very accomplished francophone speakers of English struggle with it even after being corrected.

For example here’s French cabinet minister Bruno Le Maire pronouncing “damages” as “daMAges” https://youtu.be/qKWFsg5uHKo

I think one difference is that to a native speaker daMages still sounds like damages. But in a language where 'ma' not only has a ton of different homophones, but entirely different sets of meaning based upon the tone, things get out of hand quickly. For instance in Chinese, "mother scolds a horse" = "ma ma ma ma" with the entire meaning determined by tones alone.

> in any key

I learned this is especially valuable when switching between instruments with different constrained ranges (you can just adapt), as well as your voice changing over time.

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.

>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...

In reality, you put your fingers in the position for a C on that specific instrument and you get a C. The name "transposing instrument" is misleading; the instrument itself does not transpose. It's purely a notation convention, intended to give you a consistent mapping between notation and fingering so it's easier to switch between instruments. If you only play one instrument there's no need for it. And even if you do, it's not strictly necessary, e.g. recorders are commonly available in both C and F and are conventionally not notated transposed. Professional players routinely switch between them for different pieces.

I expect it would be possible to train an image-processing LLM to OCR sheet music so it can be automatically transposed and re-engraved for compatibility with absolute pitch.

> In reality, you put your fingers in the position for a C on that specific instrument and you get a C.

OK, my fault for poor communication. Let me try strongly typing this.

Clarinet: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-Bb. Flute: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-C. And finger-C is polymorphic on the instrument, or something.

Aside from that, I don't disagree with you.

One consideration is that with most instruments, being keyed the way they are, if you immediately transpose via LLM some of those instruments will have almost all their notes in unexpected ledger lines.

Which could have (en)grave implications.

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.

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.

Nice Quebec rock finding its way in the world!

> OTOH, absolute pitch means that learning a fiddle tune by ear takes only a couple of choruses

That doesn't require perfect pitch. Most of the YouTube musicians noted for making videos of going on sites like Omegle and its successors and taking requests which they the then play perfectly after a short listen to the original if they don't know the song do not have perfect pitch for instance. Examples include The Dooo (guitar and piano), Frank Tedesco (piano), and Rob Scallon (violin).

You do not need perfect pitch to quickly learn fiddle tunes by ear (source: I play fiddle, can quickly learn by ear, do not have perfect pitch). You learn tunes primarily by relative pitch, which most people can develop.

There's also an element of violin-specific pitch detection; if you play violin for long enough, you can recognize the specific timbre of different notes on a violin (particularly easy for open strings) which helps ground you while listening to a tune.

I don't have perfect pitch—I can't name notes and chords instantly out of thin air—but I'm a musician and can immediately sense if the tuning is nonstandard. It can be trippy. I think that, yeah, it's basically a matter of personality whether it annoys you or intrigues you, perfect pitch or no...

I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).

Baroque was 415Hz. I'm not aware of 436Hz having been a thing but 432Hz used to be standard before 440Hz came along. And nowadays, 442Hz is getting pretty common.

Afaik there wasn't a single widely accepted standard in the Baroque era, but rather different places had different tunings, with the "normal A" varying roughly between 400 and 500 Hz.

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.

Proper harmony requires playing out of pitch.

Can you explain?

I'm guessing that what they meant by "proper harmony" is just intonation: where thirds and fifths are expressed by small, integer ratios of frequencies (e.g., a fifth is 3:2 and a major third is 5:4).

A just intoned major third is about 14 cents flatter than a major third played on a 12 tone equal temperament tuned instrument (e.g., piano).

I'm not sure how much this matters in terms of having or not having perfect pitch though. Some people with perfect pitch can hear the difference between JI and 12TET and correctly their singing accordingly.

More impressive are the people who can count cycles, adjust between A440 and A400, etc.

> adjust between A440 and A400

Someone shared this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s I struggle to conceive being able to hear the difference, but _singing_ it entirely blows my mind

Ah yes, Jacob Collier. What I like is that he suggests an exercise that he used to practice microtonal singing: see how many intermediate pitches you can sing between two notes (could be a half step apart or you could start with a wider interval) and try to increase that number.

Of course if you sing Indian classical music (or several other non-Western musical traditions) then you will learn to sing quarter tones.

Modern 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise where every non-octave interval is slightly out of tune(as the 12th root of 2 is irrational) in order to facilitate modulation and playing in any key. Integer ratios (or closer to integer ratios) may sound more in tune, but they are mostly impossible in this temperament.

Keyboard instruments in other temperaments (for example some Baroque tunings) may split the black keys (for example) into separate sharp and notes; sharps are used for sharp keys and flats for flat keys.

Choirs and instrumentalists who can dynamically adjust the pitch of individual notes will often do so for better tuning. (Some software instruments can also adjust tuning dynamically as you play.)

Many (if not most) pieces of music (perhaps most famously Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier) were composed with a particular temperament in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament

Yes. It is why perfect pitch is not the solution to playing in a group.

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.

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.

I think Duolingo has a music course. No idea how good it is though or how deep it goes into theory.

Duolingo is garbage based on dry cramming.

For music it is pretty useless

It’s a reasonable course for helping yiu identify a single line of notes across the two staves. Or maybe just the “right hand” upper/trebble clef stave (the bormal one for most instruments).

It does teach a little anout scales. It wont teach chords. It doesn’t go very far into time signatures. It only has you play a virtual keyboard so it’s useless for learning how to feel your instrument.

It’s quite fun. My kid plays it every day and it’s helped get them feeling more confident to sit at our piano and noodle around. As a noodler myself, this seems valid.

It wont get you good enough to play pieces with other musicians, or to compose with weatern harmony. You’ll need extea tutorials for those.

> 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!

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!

>https://www.musictheory.net/lessons

Nice website! I will have a look. Unfortunately, their mobile version is for iOS only ;-(

>why your flute's FFT visualization has multiple bumps

I am not surprised it has multiple bumps, I am surprised that its dominant frequency is not at the expected note. I suspect that it's just because I am holding my fingers in a wrong way, but I don't know how to tell.

>get a copy of Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial

Thank you!

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.

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.

> there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west

Not even close to being true!

- There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times. - 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s - 440Hz is the "official" standard since then - Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays

So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.

TIL, thanks.

The 2nd point stands though. A person with good or perfect pitch will quickly tune to another frequency.

>415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times

415Hz is one modern semitone below the standard 440Hz. Many (but not all) baroque instruments were tuned slightly lower than modern ones, and 415Hz is the most convenient slightly lower tuning that retains compatibility with modern instruments by transposing down a semitone.

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?

wat? what is yello, red or blue?

If you click "Show Options" it'll show colors of the chords in order: red is C-major for example

Click "Show Options", then:

- Check "Show chords on piano?"

- Check "Play chord sounds"

- Uncheck "Play feedback sounds"

For the "Chords", start with just Red and Blue. Then add Yellow.

I don't have perfect pitch, and I could not distinguish between Red and Blue, when Yellow was in the mix and the feedback sounds interrupted the trials.

Black and Green were much easier for me to differentiate, but Red / Blue is really difficult.

Red and Blue were so hard for me!

aurora store isan option.

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?

It looks like it is based on this https://github.com/pganssle/cim, which I think is this web app

Thanks! OP please consider linking their repo to "open-source CIM Trainer by Paul Ganssle" in your readme.

Done! It was linked under Attribution but it doesn't hurt to add a second link.

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

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.

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?

Well, I'll tell you one fun item. My teenage kids are practicing the piano downstairs. I hear a very wrong note being played over and over. I yell down to them what note they're playing wrong and what the correct note likely is. My kids take this in stride -- it's just the thing that their Dad does -- ugh, it's Dad again. Then they occasionally get reminded by their music teacher that it's not normal for a dad to do that. :-)

Though I really am terrible at the Theremin, perfect pitch helps a lot there too. I can walk up to a Theremin and pretty much nail the note despite its current settings.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me its always difficult to judge if one should train such things with their children. Same goes with instruments. You need to train every other day and keep it up for a long time, which I never liked as a kid.

Unfortunately, the only way to be a top notch expert, with mastery over the art or sports, is to start young and with disciplined practice. Does it mean necessarily sacrificing childhood? I am unsure. Michael Jackson comes to mind as he has publicly commented that he didn't have a normal childhood. Jackie Chan also had a hard life as a child, training from a young age but he doesn't seem to resent it as much. However, he doesn't have a good relationship with his kids perhaps because he expected them to go through the same kind of hardship he did (it was normalised for him?)? Russian gymnasts and ballet dancers also train at a very young age.

I guess it's a question many parents struggle with a lot - how much should you push your kids because sometimes it seems kids do waste a lot of time.

Phew .... I saw the title and thought this was some horrid LinkedIn post from a "Founder" dad about teaching his kids how to pitch their startup to investors ...

Luckily it's not about that!

me too! :-))

An interesting anecdote: I was a big trumpet player in high school, and developed perfect pitch but mainly only for trumpet sounds.

A440 is higher than earlier tunings. Baroque is often A415 and A392 can be used for French harpsichord music.

Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major.

Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.

I did some baroque harpsichord tuning in my past. Nobody I knew in the field of baroque keyboard tuning had absolute pitch, because it would drive you crazy if you did with all the wandering A's. When you want to flex between A=440, A=430, and A=415 (392 is a lot less common) regularly and your ear is tuned to a 440 A, I hear it gets really annoying because everything seems flat. In comparison, a huge number of piano tuners and organ tuners have absolute pitch.

I’m just being jealous, but isn’t absolute pitch relative to the current tuning standard? What happens with orchestras tuned at 442 Hz? Reading comments from people with absolute pitch, it can be more an annoyance than a blessing.

Reading the CLAUDE.md, it looks like this is a rewrite from

https://github.com/pganssle/cim

That's called out in the README under Attribution too, hopefully it didn't seem like I was trying to bury that!

> Derived from [pganssle/cim](https://github.com/pganssle/cim) by Paul Ganssle. Rebuilt as a separate tool with a distinct name at his request.

Don't think this was ever proven?

Many thousands of kids go into music at a very young age every year, very few come out with absolute pitch.

As someone who is pitch-challenged, thank you

Perfect pitch is a party trick with extremely limited utility. Actual musicians use relative pitch.

"When you a realize a guitar cannot, in fact, be perfectly tuned, you are beginning to get somewhere with the guitar".

Paraphrasing and I don't remember the author, unfortunately.

Too bad you can't use the app if you don't have a google account.

Is there any advantage to having perfect pitch apart from parent's bragging rights? It seems silly to waste the child's time on this. Let them learn music. If perfect pitch happens, it happens, but don't treat it as a singular goal.

Don’t teach you kids perfect pitch. Introduce them to the wide variety of music from punk to jazz to classical and let them play with sounds. If they get into it, ask if they want a teacher in instrument of their liking.

Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.

I 100% agree that perfect pitch is less important than these other things. The only reason I think perfect pitch is worth prioritizing early is because of the developmental gate.

Is there a good way to teach kids relative pitch (beyond exposing them to a broad range of music etc.)? I struggle with this and have tried multiple times to learn different instruments from different musical traditions and instructors and have mostly failed over the years.

Everyone can learn good relative pitch with practice. Music schools do this regularly, and it's just a skill you can pick up. Start by identifying intervals, then learn chords, and then learn to write down music you hear, and so on. It just takes work.

I wonder if there's a bit of survivorship bias with this one. I've never been able to learn relative pitch after trying quite a lot of different methods, ear training app and playing a couple of musical instruments. If you're in a music school then perhaps your baseline musical ability is already relatively high?

I really doubt it, and I am not surprised that apps didn't work. I also don't think playing a musical instrument actually gives as much insight here as you want - it's a very indirect transfer if you're learning via classical methods or if you are learning purely by reading. Jazz and contemporary methods involve a lot more "listen, then play back" rather than reading. If you want to work on ear training and theory, cross-training with some jazz or contemporary helps a lot.

The way music schools teach this is relatively brutal and annoying, with a _lot_ of repetition and testing (eg "sing a major second above this note" and "identify the interval" questions), but I am not sure any other method works. At the same time, everyone going through an ear training curriculum does pick up decent relative pitch. This can take a year or two for college music majors, so it's not exactly a casual exercise. However, I assume the major barrier to entry is not musical aptitude but willingness to put up with bullshit, because it feels like bullshit when you are doing it.

That sounds like a the ear training I have done but even after a couple of decades I don't have any real ability to tell the difference between intervals. For example, I listen to a musical interval and try singing up the major scale to match it but everything matches a fifth (in my internal melody). More recently I found the Sonofield app an interesting idea for learning the intervals but wasn't able to gain any consistency.

I remember many years ago in my music lessons being shocked that some people can hear multiple notes played simultaneously. I've never found much material on learning this skill.

Learning intervals by quotation can work. "Comet, it makes your teeth turn green" starts with a descending third and is a very memorable song.

Yes. Focus a few weeks on just learning the sound of a particular degree of the scale. Like you are just trying to teach what the dominant sounds like ('Ruffles and Flourishes' is appropriate for this, as an example). After it's correctly learned you go to a different one. After awhile you've taught them all.

"Sight singing" is the classic exercise to develop strong relative pitch. There are lots of resources on this — there was even a sight singing class at my college. It might be a little too challenging (and boring) for a young kid though.

If you're willing to give the app a try, I bet it could actually be a pretty solid way to learn relative as well as absolute pitch. Just manually play "Red" before you start to anchor yourself. I've noticed some improvement in my relative pitch just by practicing it with my daughter. I'd be interested to know if anyone ends up using it explicitly for that purpose.

This is a general tip that goes beyond pitch and intervals: Learn to sing things that you play and hear. This is good for a lot of things. It's a way of developing your ear without the mechanics of your instrument getting in the way when you're starting out. You can "practice" when you don't have access to your instrument, even listening to the radio in your car. It will develop recognition of familiar musical patterns.

You can practice singing the intervals. What's a fifth sound like? You should be able to sing it. Or play it on your instrument and then sing it.

Are these mutually exclusive?

As someone who enjoys music, from punk to jazz, I wish I could identify a C from a G as easily as I can identify blue from green.

We’re taught to use our eyes to identify colors, why not teach children to use their ears to identify notes?

Colors are useful. Perfect pitch is pretty much useless. The exception being a composer or school conductor (you really gotta scold those children, haha). While it is a fun trick to have, the practicality of it is very different from knowing what different colors are. The most useful application of perfect pitch I’ve seen is my high school orchestra teacher honing our intonation.

Do you have it? I've gotten a lot of use out of it, and I find there's a lot of people without it that love to dismiss it in these kinds of threads as useless. It helps me improvise with others, learn things quickly, play in tune on my fretless instrument, to name a few.

I’ll admit, I don’t have perfect pitch. I do however have 2 friends with perfect pitch and a teacher with it. One of my friends says it is useless (they also play an instrument). The other 2 find that they are the exception to the “useless” rule. The other friend is training to be a composer and the teacher teaches students relative pitch with it. I’m sure if you used it properly it would indeed help with improv and learning. However, I don’t understand how it would help you play in tune. I feel like that’s more of relative pitch (which is what most professional musicians use). I also play a fretless instrument and I feel like playing in tune is more of muscle memory and subtly adjusting your fingers by the millimeter, and less about having perfect pitch. The areas between using perfect and relative pitch blurs a little though (which I think you might be confusing(?)).

For example, you can go like: Wham! “Oh that’s a little too high” and adjust (relative pitch)

Rather then: Wham! “Hmmmmmmm, that’s an an E not an F” (perfect pitch)

Fun fact: Itzhak Perlman promotes relative pitch and knowing the distance between notes rather than perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is an impediment for most music because kids get stuck only wanting particular pitches instead of proper intervals.

This. Slanted

Nothing in the OP implies that kids shouldn't learn other things as well. I'm sure you meant your post in a good way, but this probably falls into the category of shallow dismissal (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

It's all too easy for the top comment on a Show HN post to end up being a dismissal of the entire project - this is more the fault of upvoters than commenters, because the meaning gets subtly (or not so subtly) a lot more dismissive when it's stuck at the top of a thread. But we really want to avoid that on HN, especially when people are sharing their work.

I think your pushback is reasonable, but I want to speak up in defense of delis-thumbs-7e's comment, which I don't read as dismissive in a negative way.

In fact, I'd like to suggest that he's championing free range childhood by not making decisions for young people who might very realistically resent it as adults.

I know three people with perfect pitch. One of them thinks it's great (and is kind of annoying about it). The other two are constantly telling people that perfect pitch just means you're always exercising patience when your friends are singing, counting down the moments until they stop.

That sounds like a version of hell to me.

I agree with you about the bits I know anything about, and the rest sounds likely.

It just makes a significant difference when the context is a Show HN and the critical comment is at the top. If it is comment (say) #13 in a varied conversation, that comes across differently. This is more the fault of upvotes, as I mentioned, but it's hard to address those directly.

I am not really saying that. Relative pitch and perfect pitch are mutually exclusive, while both taking quite much to learn, depending on individual. There’s also a multitude of people who have a perfect pitch and who are second rate musicians at best, so it is not a magical path to musical talent people often think it is. You could actually hamper your child’s musical progress with trying to teach them perfect pitch specifically. As with any arts, best thing you can do to your child (or to yourself, if you want to learn) is to find them a good teacher. It really is not a job for an app. Music is a socio-cultural phenomenon that we learn through play and social interaction, not just pitch and rhythm. It is not a programming language you just need to learn the syntax and basic algorithms for to become proficient.

If you want your kids to learn music, you should sing to them, dance with them, play music to them and just have instruments around at home they can play with. It same with language, reading, mathematics, anything really. So the imperative form in the title really irked me.

Saying that, I acknowledge this is Show HN and I am not speaking about the project per se (as in how it has been technically implemented), more about the general attitude the title and arguably the projects presents, where we think we can replace things we find challenging in life, arts or culture by shoving some code and a language model into it, but I too much answered as it were and argument someone making in more general post. I try to keep that in mind in the future.

Thank you for such a fine response - I really appreciate it.

> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6.

What?

That doesn’t sound true at all.

Jude Kofie started the piano at the age of 8. But music prodigy apart, I defintely don’t have perfect pitch right now, but I am very confident that I could with some training.

Like, when I sing a song without music, I usually am very close to the right tone. Mostly because I intuitively know how my voice is supposed to feel (the vocal chords move differently based on the tone).

And I can clearly ear the different “colors” between different scales.

And when I play the guitar a lot, after a month or so I start to be able to know where a note I hear is on the guitar.

As a banjo player, I have heard perfect pitch defined this way:

“Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”

Funniest thing I’ve read in days. I’d say bravo, but yeehaw would be more appropriate.

Can someone explain this? I don't get it.

Certainly, as jokes are by far best when they are explained.

In this context the overall discussion is about pitch in the context of music.

Here the jokester takes advantage of pitch having more than one meaning in English. One of the alternate meanings is to throw.

Next the joke selects a banjo and an accordion, two instruments that are less popular and thus more likely to be understood by the general populace as being disparaged, which is a critical component for the audience to correctly infer the alternate meaning of pitch.

You put it all together and we have this hilarious joke:

A perfect throw is when a banjo is tossed into the garbage and it finds its perfect companion in an accordion that has similarly been discarded to the same trash receptacle.

(Edit: stupid auto-correct)

Pitch is another word for throw. The joke is that a perfect throw is one where a banjo Is thrown into the trash (this is already funny if you consider how careful musicians are with their instruments), and what makes it a perfect throw is that it lands on an accordion (the fact that the accordion is already in the trash is also funny) and the fact that one shitty instrument landing exactly on another shitty instrument would be an athletic achievement that is given the name of a desirable musical ability “perfect pitch”, is excellent.

Ahh thanks, I didn't consider that pitch is a synonym for throw.

Yeah. I'm British and didn't get it either. Never heard anyone say "pitch" to mean "throw". I've heard it used in baseball but thought it was a technical term like "bowling" in cricket rather than a general word for throw.

Yeah, exactly the same for me. Or I've heard it as "pitch a tent", where I assume it's used as "set the tent up", not "throw the tent".

not sure this can be taught

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