Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
by djtango on Sunday August 03, 2025 @08:14PM
(#44780986)
As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory? I think I saw on HN that they no longer think perfect pitch is something you're born with and is essentially based on what I think you are saying. You have a few rock solid internal pitches and then you can do very fast recall. Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
by Tade0 on Monday August 04, 2025 @06:55AM
(#44784136)
> As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory?
Yes, exactly. If I try to sing a melody I'll be off by a few semitones, because well, no real musical training whatsoever, but I'll fall within the usual frequency buckets. Singing in a choir I always needed to rely on others to start, which is not ideal.
> Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
That sounds like hell.
The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years to have some frequencies baked in.