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.

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dang an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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jpease 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

	▲	sudo_cowsay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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rao-v 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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icepush 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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pclmulqdq 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	laurieg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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?

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paytonjjones 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"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.

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paytonjjones 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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adamdennis an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This. Slanted