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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.
It has a shorter acquisition window but it's of dubious value as well. If you want your kid to be successful at music the best advice is to listen to a wide variety of music in the home, and sign them up for music lessons and make sure they practice every day. If you have good relative pitch (which can be learned and is taught at the college level) then absolute pitch is pretty superfluous. I still write music occasionally and having absolute pitch might occasionally save me a few seconds of figuring out intervals, and that's only because I'm usually out of practice. Other than that it's mostly a party trick, and completely useless if your kid doesn't end up becoming a professional musician.
Thanks for the perspective!
I tried to take a chanting class from an Egyptian chanter, and also from a (country of) Georgian teacher, and was very, very lost.
The Arab chant would designate a tone, then write out a sequence of up here, down two steps there, up with a trill, and so on, but no other reference point, and no instruments. Sometimes they would use a tuning fork for a moment at the beginning of a piece, or the lead chanter would hum -- I suppose that wouldn't be necessary for someone with perfect pitch? Someone once mistook me for a potential chanter, and gave me a tuning fork as a gift, but I never figured out what to do with it. They talked about taking pitch cues from the priest, and would sometimes complain he was intoning too high or low and making it hard to sing their part.
The Georgians sung three part polyphony, and it seemed extremely interesting, but too far from my skill level to sing a different part than the others.
It would be really cool if my kids could sing polyphonic pieces someday, they sound so beautiful, but I seem to be missing some core ability not to get immediately confused.
While it's great that you're trying interesting things, if you have no prior musical experience this isn't the place to start, unless you're part of the culture in question and already have a deep personal connection to the music. You have to be especially careful with non-Western music (and Georgian definitely counts as non-Western in this context) because they often use alternate tuning systems that don't follow the system of Western harmony that 95% of music does. The best way to get started in music is, of course, the most boring way—get a beginner etude book for the instrument you want to play and start off with very basic stuff meant to familiarize you with the notes and rudimentary music theory before progressing to simple songs of the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" variety. Guitarists try to cheat and play pop songs from TAB right off the bat but they usually just end up being the kind of people whose guitar skills consist solely of strumming the chords in root position, about which this video is the last word: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BEWQNKbXHQk. There are no shortcuts; learning music is hard work, but it's certainly rewarding.
This actually seems backwards. You should start with something that is simple and very familiar, such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb". It should be simple so that it is easy to execute, and familiar so that you can easily tell when you make a mistake when it doesn't sound like you expect it to sound. Then later you might want to look into etudes if you want to work on some technical aspects of playing your instrument.
If the music is already familiar to you then things might be easier, but most likely you will be lost and confused in the beginning, no matter what, and what you really need is the ability to tolerate that. Then you can try out different things and see what happens and little by little the confusion evaporates.
That video seems pretty mistaken overall. He first gives two examples of people playing these so called "zombie chords", then starts going on about how they sound bad because the chords are in root position, when actually in the two examples the C and D chords are not in root position, the C major has a G in the bass and the D major has A in the bass. They would probably sound better if they actually were in root position.
I should clarify that when I said etudes I meant the kind of stuff you assign someone with no prior experience the first couple weeks they have their instrument. The goal at that point is simply to get sound out of it (if it's a wind instrument), familiarize them with where the notes are (and you aren't going to start with more than about five), and learn how to read music. These etudes are basically just lines of whole notes or quarter notes or whatever with some rests mixed in. By the third week, though, most beginning books will shift over to simple, familiar tunes and stay there for a while. For old times sake I pulled out my old method books and my first assignment was on 11/30/94, and I was assigned Mary Had a Little Lamb on 12/8/1994. I finished that book in a little over 2 months and moved on to playing books that were mostly etudes.
The problem isn't so much with root position chords in and of themselves, it's with the "Play the Piano Overnight" style of teaching that has people convinced they can play an instrument because they can play a few basic chords behind a melody, abetted by the fact that when you look up music for a lot of these songs on the internet or elsewhere you get basic chord strumming rather than the original part, which actually takes a decent amount of skill to play in many cases. When I was in college you could take music lessons for credit and covered by tuition. I took trumpet which wasn't a problem but they had strict criteria for who could take guitar because a lot of people would sign up thinking free guitar lessons and then wash out when they found out they actually had to read music and play real stuff and not just strum chords or play basic riffs. Becoming proficient at an instrument takes years of hard work and practice, and there's something kind of cheap about strumming a few basic chords that I can tell you the fingerings for (and I don't even own a guitar let alone claim to be able to play one), and while the effect is democratizing to an extent one can't help but wonder if these people are shortchanging themselves.
A man once wanted to learn to play the bass, so he went to a teacher. First lesson they learned to play the open E string, just plucking the string, nothing else. Second lesson they learned to play the open A string, again just plucking the string, nothing else. The third lesson they were supposed to learn the D string in a similar manner, but the student never showed up again.
The teacher bumped into the man on the street one day by chance and asked him: "Why don't you want to learn the bass any more? Was it not a suitable instrument for you?". The student replied: "No, it's nothing like that. I just haven't had time to come to lessons because I have so many paying gigs now."
Now that is a joke, but it can show a different perspective on things.
You can spend six months learning basic chords on the guitar and afterwards you can sing simple songs and accompany yourself on the guitar. At that point other people might want to listen to you, and there is a small chance you might even get paid doing it. Alternatively you can spend six months learning some kinds of finger exercises, but at that point nobody will want to listen to you, and you have to wonder if you wasted your time. So maybe it makes sense to build the minimum viable product first and then add the bells and whistles later, if you think you need them.
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It wouldnt be necessary for anyone with even rudimentary choir experience. This is very very basic stuff.
Just sign them up for a choir, almost everyone can sing polyphonically. Choir singing is really wonderful, I highly recommend it and I'm sure @Obsidian who started singing recently would agree.
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