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TracingWoodgrains  10mo ago (furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com)   1752 thread views

How One Woman’s Children (n=2) Acquired Absolute Pitch

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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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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.

Relative pitch is just knowing what the interval between tones are. This doesn't require some grand effort to learn.

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.

What you said about absolute pitch might as well apply to relative pitch.

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.

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",

This describes most people with some of musical talent.

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.

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.

This describes most people with some of musical talent.

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 how she ever got in.. this is a very base line ability.

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.

There are musically talented people in both her and her husband's family and one person with absolute pitch.

So it seems her mother, who knows nothing of music, claims that some great uncle "may have had absolute pitch".

Most people in your average amateur choir has decent relative pitch. This isn't a hard to acquire skill!

Yes, for some definition of "decent relative pitch", I am sure this statement is true. Yet, like before, the statement remains somewhat vague.

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.

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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