Posted by paytonjjones 3 days ago
Paraphrasing and I don't remember the author, unfortunately.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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)