FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
81% Positive
Analyzed from 1100 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#pitch#perfect#absolute#relative#music#play#more#age#throw#don

Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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?
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.
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_...
Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.
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.
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.
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.
“Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”
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)