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TracingWoodgrains  10mo ago (furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com)   1613 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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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.

I do feel "that's nice, dear" when people talk about teaching their children to read below the age of four or so. What do three year olds even want to read on their own? My three year old just wants to follow me around all day and climb on me all the time, like those nature videos of the mother and baby dolphin or whale swimming under and over and on the side. They can learn to read by themselves when they're willing to be by themselves.

On the other hand, absolute pitch may have a much shorter acquisition window than reading, so perhaps it makes more sense to really work at it. Also, I'm not a good judge, since I'm personally musically illiterate. I'm good at drawing, which I learned in one semester when I was 16, and seems to generally be a very different developmental process to being good at music.

Is there a reading acquisition window?

I don't think so? A surface level web search suggests that there are different opinions on the matter, they're mostly highly motivated, but that while adults can learn to read, it's more of a slog than for children. I don't see any sources on whether that's because it's actually harder, or because practicing enough to read fluidly and silently is very time intensive.

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