Comment by delis-thumbs-7e

Colors are useful. Perfect pitch is pretty much useless. The exception being a composer or school conductor (you really gotta scold those children, haha). While it is a fun trick to have, the practicality of it is very different from knowing what different colors are. The most useful application of perfect pitch I’ve seen is my high school orchestra teacher honing our intonation.

Perfect pitch is an impediment for most music because kids get stuck only wanting particular pitches instead of proper intervals.

I am not really saying that. Relative pitch and perfect pitch are mutually exclusive, while both taking quite much to learn, depending on individual. There’s also a multitude of people who have a perfect pitch and who are second rate musicians at best, so it is not a magical path to musical talent people often think it is. You could actually hamper your child’s musical progress with trying to teach them perfect pitch specifically. As with any arts, best thing you can do to your child (or to yourself, if you want to learn) is to find them a good teacher. It really is not a job for an app. Music is a socio-cultural phenomenon that we learn through play and social interaction, not just pitch and rhythm. It is not a programming language you just need to learn the syntax and basic algorithms for to become proficient.

If you want your kids to learn music, you should sing to them, dance with them, play music to them and just have instruments around at home they can play with. It same with language, reading, mathematics, anything really. So the imperative form in the title really irked me.

Saying that, I acknowledge this is Show HN and I am not speaking about the project per se (as in how it has been technically implemented), more about the general attitude the title and arguably the projects presents, where we think we can replace things we find challenging in life, arts or culture by shoving some code and a language model into it, but I too much answered as it were and argument someone making in more general post. I try to keep that in mind in the future.

I think your pushback is reasonable, but I want to speak up in defense of delis-thumbs-7e's comment, which I don't read as dismissive in a negative way.

In fact, I'd like to suggest that he's championing free range childhood by not making decisions for young people who might very realistically resent it as adults.

I know three people with perfect pitch. One of them thinks it's great (and is kind of annoying about it). The other two are constantly telling people that perfect pitch just means you're always exercising patience when your friends are singing, counting down the moments until they stop.

That sounds like a version of hell to me.

This is a general tip that goes beyond pitch and intervals: Learn to sing things that you play and hear. This is good for a lot of things. It's a way of developing your ear without the mechanics of your instrument getting in the way when you're starting out. You can "practice" when you don't have access to your instrument, even listening to the radio in your car. It will develop recognition of familiar musical patterns.

You can practice singing the intervals. What's a fifth sound like? You should be able to sing it. Or play it on your instrument and then sing it.

Everyone can learn good relative pitch with practice. Music schools do this regularly, and it's just a skill you can pick up. Start by identifying intervals, then learn chords, and then learn to write down music you hear, and so on. It just takes work.

Yes. Focus a few weeks on just learning the sound of a particular degree of the scale. Like you are just trying to teach what the dominant sounds like ('Ruffles and Flourishes' is appropriate for this, as an example). After it's correctly learned you go to a different one. After awhile you've taught them all.

"Sight singing" is the classic exercise to develop strong relative pitch. There are lots of resources on this — there was even a sight singing class at my college. It might be a little too challenging (and boring) for a young kid though.

If you're willing to give the app a try, I bet it could actually be a pretty solid way to learn relative as well as absolute pitch. Just manually play "Red" before you start to anchor yourself. I've noticed some improvement in my relative pitch just by practicing it with my daughter. I'd be interested to know if anyone ends up using it explicitly for that purpose.