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Many of you are familiar with some of my writing on early childhood education. Here, someone I’ve chatted with explains at some length her process for helping her children acquire absolute pitch. This is something possible for almost everyone during a narrow window of time; it and similar time-sensitive skills are worth serious consideration if you are a parent of a young child.
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My reaction to this is "that's nice, dear" but I honestly don't see the applicability, unless it's meant to be "growth mindset! grit! you can if you think you can!" notion of "mould your kids early into the genius, athletic, attractive, popular kids you want".
What's the purpose of acquiring absolute pitch? One kid seems to be talented for music, at least at this early stage, but he could still have been musically talented without absolute pitch. I found it to be a humblebrag: "oh yes, my trilingual kids learning Mandarin and composing their own music because of absolute pitch which I taught them to acquire".
Well that's nice dear, now are you going to tell us next about how they're whole-food organic vegan eco-warriors inventing the next AI advance to save the planet from climate change, all before the age of twelve?
EDIT: I realise the above sounds churlish, and I'm delighted that children get the chance to be exposed to an entire range of non-conventional educational attainments, but at the same time that piece does veer too near, for my comfort, to the "you can make your baby genius success for life" notion of what kids are for. Tiger moms are not the kind of role model I think we need.
"Oh, so you taught your child to read. That's nice, dear, but I honestly don't see the applicability of something like literacy. Sounds like a humble brag to me."
The above is approximately how your comment sounds to me. A kid might be talented at something even if he remains illiterate his whole life, but there are most likely multiple things related to the talent that become easier, quicker or even possible in the first place through learning to read and write.
You can probably do most of what people with absolute pitch do by learning to identify pitches relatively, but for some reason it seems that developing this so called "relative pitch" takes a lot of effort, but absolute pitch kind of builds momentum and just grows on its own once you get it started.
I think there might be some kind of fear of inequality behind a lot of the dismissals of absolute pitch, such as there were on hacker news commenting this same blog post. I think the idea of some people being in a completely different category and having an advantage due to it is terrifying to many people, and a way to cope with the terror is to dismiss the existence of such advantage.
Relative pitch is just knowing what the interval between tones are. This doesn't require some grand effort to learn. Sight-reading/sight-singing isn't some rare skill.
What you said about absolute pitch might as well apply to relative pitch.
Sure, for some definition of "knowing the interval between tones" this is certainly a true statement. But unfortunately until we shine more light on that definition the statement is almost meaningless.
But it does not seem to. In the blog post the writers son has "stunning effortlessness when it comes to his music lessons", "finds it easy to [...] improvise in any key", "never struggles with memorizing the music he is assigned", but the writer in the past had to drop out of music school because learning "just the interval between tones" proved to be too grand of an effort.
This describes most people with some of musical talent.
One has to wonder how she ever got in.. this is a very base line ability.
Not being able to read the post I'm going to assume that she is an (musically) untalented child from a music family whose son merely regressed to their baseline.
Again, sure, for some definition of "some musical talent" this statement is definitely true. And, again, without learning more about said definition the statement remains almost meaningless.
One has to wonder why the school was so unable to teach this ability, if it is taught with some frequency and requires no "grand effort".
The post itself is available here: https://archive.is/ru6sw
So she didn't go to music school, she took some music classes and was so bad she had the drop out.
She has no musical ability, so is unable to evaluate the ability of her children.
There are musically talented people in both her and her husband's family and one person with absolute pitch.
...
Ask people at any music school, everyone learns either relative pitch or absolute pitch. Most people in your average amateur choir has decent relative pitch. This isn't a hard to acquire skill!
I know a bunch of people with AP and they aren't any better at music than those without, at least not in the way she describes.
It is possible that absolute pitch can be taught, and it is possible that it helps musical ability but that has certainly not been shown here and nothing from my extensive experience with music and musically talented people suggests this. This reads as an untalented parent being amazed by and overestimating the abilities of her kids, it's a tale as old as time.
So it seems her mother, who knows nothing of music, claims that some great uncle "may have had absolute pitch".
Yes, for some definition of "decent relative pitch", I am sure this statement is true. Yet, like before, the statement remains somewhat vague.
Or they are at the same level as others around them, but have spent an order of magnitude less effort to get there.
The claim that absolute pitch is a significant advantage is in no way reliant on this one blog post. Here is a study describing how people with AP are better at a dictation task: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2010_128_890-893.pdf
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