The thing is this doesn't mean you no longer have absolute pitch. You can still identify the pitches but they feel different, which can affect the enjoyment of music. All the sensations you get from familiar music are now permanently altered, which can take a lot of getting used to.

I added this to a short list of reasons I tend to be rather glad I don't have absolute pitch.

This affects me—probably from wearing loud headphones too long and too loud. Absolute pitch, except I now interpret everything one semitone sharp. (Opposite direction of your acquaintance, assuming neither of us got things backwards).

AP helps improvisation (mostly keyboard and strings, less so brass, and even less so woodwinds, I can explain later). Also, ease/speed of composition, allowing you to focus on the creative aspect of composing, or just simply composing more.

You can become a great improviser with relative pitch, but it is much harder, as you have to calculate the intervals between notes in real time, whereas AP spits out the exact note automatically for you.

Playing a single note confers no meaning. It's only when subsequent notes are played that a context emerges, and music gains its emotional qualities.

I would say it makes sense - perfect pitch or not - every key has a different relationship to your own voice, which makes it feel different.

In most jazz music you will have the lead sheet so you don't really need to know anyway. Besides that, you don't really need to calculate anything if you have relative pitch. If you practice enough it's instant. If I hear a note or chord followed by another note or chord I can tell you their relationship in real time. Anyone who has done enough ear training can. In fact, it's one of those things where you either know instantly or you haven't practiced enough. I was never really in an in between state.

I've never experienced any correlation between pitch sensitivity and improvisation skill in groups of trained musicians.

I play a lot of improv and normally it takes no more than 2 notes playing along to determine the key of the piece and relative pitches are very learnable.

Losing some high pitch hearing is bad enough.

Not necessarily the intervals between any two notes, but the note of interest in relation to the tonic. But still may require the relative position to be mapped (offset) to a specific note.

Not at all. You just hear interval.

I met a Chinese couple last week coaching their young daughter in the pool. She's doing 2km daily, and is shaping up to be a pretty good swimmer. The article indulges more in this 5 minutes of tone practice than they ever have.

Asian families (at least the ones who immigrate) tend to have 1 or 2 kids, and focus hard on them achieving material success in a safe profession. They also tend to micromanage to reach that goal.

It's not a new stereotype, and it's not incorrect. I'm really sick of people thinking mentioning race or personal attributes is offensive. To me, real racism is about people not being welcome or safe. I don't know how that extended to "You have to pretend everyone is a soul without a body".

This article was a fascinatingly uneducated take on what it means to learn music mixed in with a classic dose of American "my child is better than you." Like many piano students who started early, I too played some easy Chopin music at ~6, and I bet most later starters also play some Chopin within 1-2 years of starting (in fact, I bet they reach the Chopin sooner).

Perfect pitch is very much not required to be a professional musician, and seems to help only in a few areas, and only by accelerating your musical education a bit. I'm sure it makes things like the Suzuki method easier for young children, but you arguably shouldn't use the Suzuki method to teach music to your kids anyway since it tends to guide them to a local maximum by emphasizing ear training over reading. Learning pieces by listening rather than reading works for easy pieces, but I bet nobody has learned the Hammerklavier Sonata or a Paganini Caprice by ear.

I really wish the idea of "racing" through your musical education with hacks like this would stop - the only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. My friends who went to international competitions at 18-20 were all practicing 5+ hours a day by age 12, and several of them actually started their music education at age 7-9 rather than obscenely early like this.

That, and actually digging music through forces coming out of your own soul (and not for the sake of meeting your parent's expectations ... or worse, serving as fodder for their half-baked education experiments) might have something to do with it.

Don't see why your comment should be downvoted, BTW.

Agree. Art is art, and why do we make art? Well...?

Technical skill helps with the nuance of the creation, but not with the "why."

I think graduating from endless analysis and “lots of notes” playing is a part of the journey.

Isn't it (like with most things) to get laid?

I disagree. I did 10 years of Suzuki as a kid, then switched to an intermediate/advanced teacher for another 10 years. I had to shore up a bit of reading for, let's say 9 months, but I read at a professional level and played a big chunk of the cello repertoire. My mom teaches Suzuki and many of her students followed the same teacher path as I did and excelled.

Imo Suzuki is very suited for kids, and anyone with that skill foundation can backfill things like reading skills relatively easy. I don't see a local maximum here.

It's certainly hard to see how it's useful in musical performance.

Hand - eye coordination, hand dexterity and to a lesser degree span, which btw up to an extent are as genetic as AP is -no matter how many grifters occasionally come up with Get AP as an adult with only 10 courses! scams, are going to be much valuable traits to possess when it comes to playing the piano.

I am not a professional musician but this feels a bit reductionist to me, in that it assumes the goal of any musical endeavor is to faithfully reproduce the music that was written down hundreds of years ago.

Some of the most celebrated musicians could not read music -- indeed some were blind -- but I would challenge you to find any musician who created anything worthwhile without having a trained ear.

It seems backwards to me to focus on the skill of reading over listening for what is fundamentally an auditory art form.

I will also point out that the best baroque violinist I know is blind, and there's a braille system of music notation that blind musicians work with.

At the same time, exclusive use of reading is a problem too. I believe having both skills is best.

Also, there are degrees of reading skill, and a need for maintenance. I'm an amateur jazz bassist, but started on classical music and then maintained my reading chops by gravitating to gigs that require it, including the large ensemble that I've played with for 14 years. At this point, I'm a better reader than some of the degreed professional bassists who are better musicians overall but have let their reading chops atrophy. I get calls for gigs because of it.

Being a better reader can involve being quicker at it, dealing with more complex material, or letting it occupy less of your attention so you can focus on other aspects of musicianship.

Off topic, but to me (an asian) this is an asian stereotype.

Seems like it's actually a stereotype for everyone. I wonder if people from an european country think "my child is better than you" is their stereotype too.

That said, I would acknowledge this dynamic does fit into particular other stereotypes of Asian (and Jewish) subcultures within the broader American context. You aren’t wrong that that could be in play. I’m just saying it’s not a “dog whistle” of Asian stereotyping without some additional Asian-signaling context. At least in my view/world.

I completely disagree. Firstly, the entire value system of believing that one ought to play the Hammerklavier sonata exactly as played before is questionable.

I was trained to read music (and very little ear training) and honestly made to feel pretty terrible as a piano student due to my inability to do so without fidgeting and being a general 'problem' student. Funnily enough, for the ear training we were made to do, I was even 'ranked' bottom of the barrel. My brother was ranked high in all the categories

Except... here's the thing. Throughout my experience, I have been able to basically play anything by ear. In fact I can pretty much hear a song and play it on the piano (of course the classical training helps in terms of technique). I also produce tunes on the fly, and generally am entertaining. My brother (by his own admission) does not. He is a very good player for sure, but he has no interest in music. Yet, our 'classical' musical education ranked him higher. Thus, I really question the entire value system of forcing kids to 'read' music and only judging them on their ability to replicate, which seems to me to be the bulk of music education.

We must ask ourselves... what is the goal of musical education? To produce automatons that can replicate any musical piece written or to create a musician?

Playing pieces from sheet music has nothing to do with "exact" replication. It has to do with understanding a work and faithfully interpreting it in your own style. New interpretations of the Hammerklavier and the Paganini caprices come out rather frequently.

Once a piece gets to a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do that without musical notation. Picking up each note by listening to the piece over and over just becomes intractable.

It also has nothing to do with how old a piece is - modern composers also use written notation as the primary communication medium of their musical intent (new music often comes with a MIDI mockup which is a poor replacement for a past recording).

Finally, I would suggest that the point of music education is to give you the tools to express your musical ideas. Some people want to play Liszt and Paganini - those pieces are really fun.

I really have no idea where the ideas about "what to mean to learn music" or racing through it came about.

>>I really wish the idea of "racing" through your musical education with hacks like this would stop - the only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. My friends who went to international competitions at 18-20 were all practicing 5+ hours a day by age 12, and several of them actually started their music education at age 7-9 rather than obscenely early like this.

So instead of playing with your children for a few minutes a day when they are very young, singing to them and naming sounds it's better to go about it in a proper way: wait till they are 7, be careful not to expose them to music too much as you can spoil the whole thing should they attain a perfect pitch. Then make them really practice a few hours a day once they are old enough. Only this way you avoid racing through your musical education!

>>Just maybe don't be so proud of your kids for their achievements at age 6?

Interesting advice. I certainly wish my parents were proud of things I've learnt at the age of 6 or even earlier!

>>Life is long and even if you do treat it as a race, your "head start" means nothing in this area, except maybe as a party trick.

Sure but idk how you came to the conclusion the author has a different view on it. She wanted to expose her children to sounds and music early to increase their chance of not being tone deaf and missing out on music because of it (her own experience). This worked, kids had fun, one of them practice for "max 30 minutes", the other doesn't as he doesn't feel like it. How is it race, fighting for headstart or anything like that?

> Sure but idk how you came to the conclusion the author has a different view on it. She wanted to expose her children to sounds and music early to increase their chance of not being tone deaf and missing out on music because of it (her own experience). This worked, kids had fun, one of them practice for "max 30 minutes", the other doesn't as he doesn't feel like it. How is it race, fighting for headstart or anything like that?

There is a particular subtext in this piece that I'm pretty sure you haven't picked up on. I suggest re-reading it. I am certainly not the one who introduced the notion of giving kids a "leg up" at learning music.

> Interesting advice. I certainly wish my parents were proud of things I've learnt at the age of 6 or even earlier!

Sounds great, but if they want to brag publicly about it, it had better be actually impressive.

I certainly wish my parents cared even a little bit for music and sounds. I didn't encounter the idea that sounds have names or distances between them make melodies until primary school. Music wasn't playing in my home and no one sang to me. As you can imagine I am hopeless when it comes to music. I can't even sing a sound I've just heard. Not even close. Her children definitely have leg up in comparison to me.

If I wanted kids I would be happy to encounter the article. Maybe I could save my children from the fate of musical tone deafness.

Kogan learned the Waxman Carmen Fantasy by ear, off a vinyl record smuggled into the USSR due to not having the sheet music available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK51Awg9jR0

This is at Paganini level for sure.

What the post you're replying to is alluding to is all the ways that pitch is simply not absolute. That can be for boring reasons: you're playing with an organ, or some other instrument with fixed or temperature dependent pitch, or in a different city with different conventions; but also for the interesting reason that the "correct" pitch of a C, say, is the result of a mostly-unconscious negotiation that considers ones' place within a chord that's sounding and the melody you're playing. Even equal-tempered tuned keyboard instruments involves compromise wrt placement of the octaves, etc.

There’s a reason I specifically noted scoring high on subsets/subtests, Raven Progressive Matrices being the most popularized form online, of full IQ tests (latest WAIS revision). So no neither here, nor in the previous comment was there any dismissal of the existence of intelligence or its means of estimation.

Many like to brag about getting high on this subtype and therefore believe they’re on the far-right end of the distribution, however to get an accurate estimate of your position there, you need all the additional tests that measure processing speed, verbal reasoning, short-term memory, maybe other types of non-geometric abstract reasoning tests.

As I said I’m not a big fan of the way Americans obsess over the reliability of RPMs for an accurate score estimation, but I’d wager a test with the types of questions found on the SATs/GREs would help form a very robust intelligence population distribution.