One note of caution here is that with my older son we did this for a few years and it hasn't really worked as expected. He can identify all the chords perfectly every time, but when we started testing single notes, he was worse than chance at it. In fact, when I activated the secret Easter egg "red only" mode, he was worse than me at choosing between C E and G (though with practice he can now do it perfectly).
I'm working on a version where you can identify single notes instead of just chords.
Also, I gave a talk about this a few years ago and the talk is on YT if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/l2Z6uEsx9lE
A decent chunk of my PyCon 2025 talk is also about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbq-o5HODY
1. Did it (the chord trainer app) help my son when he was studying music? Not as far as I can tell. He has also been taking piano lessons and sometimes it helps a little with music theory to tie it back to the chords, but I don't think there's much transfer learning going on. He seems to have a good ear, but my other son is not picking up chords nearly as quickly, and I know a bunch of other kids have bounced off this app, so my older son may just already naturally have a good ear.
2. Did it (studying music) help my son (with identifying chords)? I don't think so. He made pretty steady progress in the chords before he started piano, and after he started piano it didn't get any easier. He also mentions things like, "The chords sound different on the piano", which makes me think I need to have more varied samples (even though the book says that consistency is key and you should practice on the same piano holding the chords for the same duration every time).
I'm asking because my sons started picking up piano lessons. I think the way their piano is taught relies to much on their eye. They are looking at music much more than listening to it. So am curious if there are ways to trigger their interest in hearing.
Again thanks for your reply!
I was surprised when I learned about the Eguchi method recommending chords, as I assumed training single notes would be easier. A single note mode sounds like a great idea, I'll put it on the list to add to Bsharp as well. I was also thinking of adding Guitar sounds if I can find or create some good samples.
Maybe also an "identify the root of the chord" mode could be helpful to bridge from the chord sounds to single notes?
They have guitar samples as well, but it was a bit more complicated because with a piano you have one key per note, there's exactly one way to play C4♯ or whatever, but with a guitar the notes are overlapping, so C4♯ might be played on the B string or up on the G string, and I didn't really know how to choose samples for interpolation.
> Maybe also an "identify the root of the chord" mode could be helpful to bridge from the chord sounds to single notes?
There is already a mode (it might turn on automatically for "white" chords after you reach black chords, I forget) that follows on to identifying one of the three notes, chosen at random, from the chord you just heard. That is what I'm doing with my son now and it seems to be bridging the gap, but I think a direct "which note is this" thing might work better for him.
That said, we're pretty far afield of the original Eguchi method at this point. According to the book, kids are supposed to just naturally understand the nature of notes as you improve. The book also mentions that the advanced students are doing stuff like listening to arbitrary combinations of up to 6 notes (not chords, just random combinations), but they don't really explain how that works. There's a decent amount more to do, but given that I'm not 100% convinced that it even works, I'm not sure how much it's worth it to do it.
Relative pitch is very important for musicians, but absolute pitch is mostly useless. The only use I can think of is singing songs with a cappella intros, so you're in tune with the instruments that come in later, but even this is of very limited value. In a casual setting you can just play a note on an instrument before you start, and for a professional performance you're going to have IEMs that can play the reference note for you.
Pitch and speed are inherently linked when you are dealing with physical vinyl, but time-stretching in software isn't too complicated.
Modern software does, but there's always the risk of introducing artifacts, and I like older music that's usually mixed with pitch shifting.
I found some papers suggesting it is possible for adults, but more difficult.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...
well that's the whole question isn't it? If you know how an open string is supposed to have, that's what people call absolute pitch?
I know the Super Mario Bros. theme starts on an E, so I can identify an unknown pitch by recalling that theme and comparing using relative pitch. But that's quite a slow and unintuitive process, and it's easy to make a mistake. People with absolute pitch just hear the pitch without having to "recall" a reference note to compare to like that.
So I have the latter, but not the former (i.e., no perfect pitch). The difference is, I can choose not to observe it. It reminds me of how I've studied Japanese for 15 years, but I can still sometimes choose not to read certain kanji if I glance at a legible word — the same is not true for English, if I see something even for a split second I've already read it.
If anything I think this reinforces what I'm alluding to.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-stu...
I learned perfect pitch well after six. I know others who have too.
Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.
I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).
That doesn't require perfect pitch. Most of the YouTube musicians noted for making videos of going on sites like Omegle and its successors and taking requests which they the then play perfectly after a short listen to the original if they don't know the song do not have perfect pitch for instance. Examples include The Dooo (guitar and piano), Frank Tedesco (piano), and Rob Scallon (violin).
There's also an element of violin-specific pitch detection; if you play violin for long enough, you can recognize the specific timbre of different notes on a violin (particularly easy for open strings) which helps ground you while listening to a tune.
Because most people don't have perfect pitch, (Western) music is built on the relationships between pitches rather than the absolute pitches. So with absolute pitch, you can play something by ear; with relative pitch, you can play something by ear in any key.
Learning to think of the notes you're playing relatively instead of absolutely is already a difficult leap for most musicians, and my understanding (though I don't have absolute pitch so I can't compare from experience) is that absolute pitch makes this skill significantly harder to acquire, since you have to retrain your ear in addition to your hands.
If I were offered a choice to trade my sense of relative pitch for absolute pitch, I most certainly would not take it. I know well the feeling of incongruity when my muscle memory is stuck in the wrong key, and absolute pitch would mean I'm stuck there all the time instead of being just able to shake my head, focus on the new key, and clear my mind of the old.
The tonal speaker hears a much wider and more precise range of tones, but that precision also kind of hinders them in a way because they can't not hear it. On the other hand speak with a tonal native speaker who's also learned a non-tonal language and they can understand your mistakes (in their native tongue) perfectly, because they essentially have already untrained the tonal instinct. But I'm sure hearing those tonal mistakes feels quite jarring to them nonetheless, like when you're listening to a musician who gets a chord wrong - it just hurts.
The native English (many other Indo-European languages also have similar systems) speaker is very unlikely to make a pronunciation mistake in this manner but even very accomplished francophone speakers of English struggle with it even after being corrected.
For example here’s French cabinet minister Bruno Le Maire pronouncing “damages” as “daMAges” https://youtu.be/qKWFsg5uHKo
I learned this is especially valuable when switching between instruments with different constrained ranges (you can just adapt), as well as your voice changing over time.
Like motion sickness with musical tones - you see one thing on the page, you have a sense for what "note" you're playing, but out comes something else.
I have perfect pitch but it's not really useful, except for noticing that my instrument is getting sharper. But that doesn't matter since you have to be in tune with the rest of the band/orchestra.
In reality, you put your fingers in the position for a C on that specific instrument and you get a C. The name "transposing instrument" is misleading; the instrument itself does not transpose. It's purely a notation convention, intended to give you a consistent mapping between notation and fingering so it's easier to switch between instruments. If you only play one instrument there's no need for it. And even if you do, it's not strictly necessary, e.g. recorders are commonly available in both C and F and are conventionally not notated transposed. Professional players routinely switch between them for different pieces.
I expect it would be possible to train an image-processing LLM to OCR sheet music so it can be automatically transposed and re-engraved for compatibility with absolute pitch.
OK, my fault for poor communication. Let me try strongly typing this.
Clarinet: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-Bb. Flute: you play a finger-C, out comes a soundwave-C. And finger-C is polymorphic on the instrument, or something.
Aside from that, I don't disagree with you.
One consideration is that with most instruments, being keyed the way they are, if you immediately transpose via LLM some of those instruments will have almost all their notes in unexpected ledger lines.
Which could have (en)grave implications.
Keyboard instruments in other temperaments (for example some Baroque tunings) may split the black keys (for example) into separate sharp and notes; sharps are used for sharp keys and flats for flat keys.
Choirs and instrumentalists who can dynamically adjust the pitch of individual notes will often do so for better tuning. (Some software instruments can also adjust tuning dynamically as you play.)
Many (if not most) pieces of music (perhaps most famously Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier) were composed with a particular temperament in mind.
A just intoned major third is about 14 cents flatter than a major third played on a 12 tone equal temperament tuned instrument (e.g., piano).
I'm not sure how much this matters in terms of having or not having perfect pitch though. Some people with perfect pitch can hear the difference between JI and 12TET and correctly their singing accordingly.
Someone shared this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwRSS7jeo5s I struggle to conceive being able to hear the difference, but _singing_ it entirely blows my mind
Of course if you sing Indian classical music (or several other non-Western musical traditions) then you will learn to sing quarter tones.
My understanding of music is quite basic, I know what the 12 notes are and that the "zero" of the frequencies starts at 440 Hz (but since everything is relative, it doesn't really matter that it's 440, it could be anything, but if you choose the zero to be too high or too low, your intervals risk getting out of the perceptible wavelengths), but I don't know what "chords" are and how "intervals" are expected to be played.
I tried learning to play a recorder (flute) using some internet howtos as a guide, but got stuck at the first lesson, when the sound produced by the flute didn't match what the Fourier analyser in audacity measured.
That is, I tried to play a C, but the Fourier transform resulted in a bimodal distribution, and none of the bumps was near the expected C frequency.
> That is, I tried to play a C, but the Fourier transform resulted in a bimodal distribution, and none of the bumps was near the expected C frequency.
What a wonderful experiment! You've uncovered "harmonics": your recorder (or any instrument) sounds a complex mixture of frequencies, even when you play just a single note. The different mix of frequencies from one instrument to another is what gives each a unique sound, called the "timbre". The harmonics of wind instruments like your recorder are particularly complex! Try the same experiment with a stringed instrument, which will make something closer to a pure sine wave. Try it with anything that will make noise!
But I'd recommend not using Audacity to learn to play an instrument. You need your ears for this, so it may as much effort developing listening as developing playing technique. But in the end, don't worry too much about that, just have fun making music!
If you want to learn why your flute's FFT visualization has multiple bumps, get a copy of Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial from the local library
If you want to learn to play an instrument, hire a teacher!
Nice website! I will have a look. Unfortunately, their mobile version is for iOS only ;-(
>why your flute's FFT visualization has multiple bumps
I am not surprised it has multiple bumps, I am surprised that its dominant frequency is not at the expected note. I suspect that it's just because I am holding my fingers in a wrong way, but I don't know how to tell.
>get a copy of Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial
Thank you!
It does teach a little anout scales. It wont teach chords. It doesn’t go very far into time signatures. It only has you play a virtual keyboard so it’s useless for learning how to feel your instrument.
It’s quite fun. My kid plays it every day and it’s helped get them feeling more confident to sit at our piano and noodle around. As a noodler myself, this seems valid.
It wont get you good enough to play pieces with other musicians, or to compose with weatern harmony. You’ll need extea tutorials for those.
"I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys." - problem that never occurred to anyone with a perfect or just good pitch.
Not even close to being true!
- There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times. - 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s - 440Hz is the "official" standard since then - Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays
So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.
415Hz is one modern semitone below the standard 440Hz. Many (but not all) baroque instruments were tuned slightly lower than modern ones, and 415Hz is the most convenient slightly lower tuning that retains compatibility with modern instruments by transposing down a semitone.
The 2nd point stands though. A person with good or perfect pitch will quickly tune to another frequency.
It makes a noise and then has buttons labelled red, blue, and yellow. How am I supposed to know what colour that sound was? Do sounds naturally have associated colours? Is this even the question I'm being asked? It doesn't say what to do or how I am meant to choose the colour.
EDIT: From some trial and error, I still don't get it. It seemed to me that blue was the low tone and red was the high tone but then I got a tone that was definitely lower than a previous yellow tone and it was supposedly blue. Potentially a bug?
My brief story: I was using that as a PWA, but encountered some snags when using it on mobile.
I cloned it and fixed those, which required switching to Android WebView instead of a PWA. I opened a PR but Paul said he preferred that I make my own fork with a new name. At that point I decided to do a full rewrite instead of just a fork (from Jekyll to TypeScript), and that's the version I posted here.
Edit: you can also clone and build the apk if you'd like, there are instructions at the bottom of the README
- Check "Show chords on piano?"
- Check "Play chord sounds"
- Uncheck "Play feedback sounds"
For the "Chords", start with just Red and Blue. Then add Yellow.
I don't have perfect pitch, and I could not distinguish between Red and Blue, when Yellow was in the mix and the feedback sounds interrupted the trials.
Black and Green were much easier for me to differentiate, but Red / Blue is really difficult.
I guess it's a question many parents struggle with a lot - how much should you push your kids because sometimes it seems kids do waste a lot of time.
Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch.
For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch.
This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing.
When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over.
Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C.
It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.
But you also said you wouldn't trade it away. Why not? What are the positives that outweigh the negatives?
Luckily it's not about that!
I'm not a musician, but I'm told the kid's way of naming the chords is particularly adept from a musician's point of view, and that's because the dad (a very accomplished musician) helped teach the kid. I am sure Rick has made more videos about what he did.
Eventually, you would want to teach them to map the color to the chord name and recognize the root of the chord. But that can be learned any time.
Also keep in mind that if a kid learns all the colors, you'll want to continue practicing to "bridge" over the age where they would lose the ability to recognize perfect pitch. If they mastered this at age 4, they could still potentially lose the ability if they don't practice during that period.
Besides being a neat party trick, it gives more possibilities and makes things easier if a person wants to work with music professionally, especially with academical (aka "classical") music.
Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major.
Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.
> Derived from [pganssle/cim](https://github.com/pganssle/cim) by Paul Ganssle. Rebuilt as a separate tool with a distinct name at his request.
Paraphrasing and I don't remember the author, unfortunately.
Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.
As someone who enjoys music, from punk to jazz, I wish I could identify a C from a G as easily as I can identify blue from green.
We’re taught to use our eyes to identify colors, why not teach children to use their ears to identify notes?
For example, you can go like: Wham! “Oh that’s a little too high” and adjust (relative pitch)
Rather then: Wham! “Hmmmmmmm, that’s an an E not an F” (perfect pitch)
Fun fact: Itzhak Perlman promotes relative pitch and knowing the distance between notes rather than perfect pitch.
It's all too easy for the top comment on a Show HN post to end up being a dismissal of the entire project - this is more the fault of upvoters than commenters, because the meaning gets subtly (or not so subtly) a lot more dismissive when it's stuck at the top of a thread. But we really want to avoid that on HN, especially when people are sharing their work.
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.
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.
It just makes a significant difference when the context is a Show HN and the critical comment is at the top. If it is comment (say) #13 in a varied conversation, that comes across differently. This is more the fault of upvotes, as I mentioned, but it's hard to address those directly.
The way music schools teach this is relatively brutal and annoying, with a _lot_ of repetition and testing (eg "sing a major second above this note" and "identify the interval" questions), but I am not sure any other method works. At the same time, everyone going through an ear training curriculum does pick up decent relative pitch. This can take a year or two for college music majors, so it's not exactly a casual exercise. However, I assume the major barrier to entry is not musical aptitude but willingness to put up with bullshit, because it feels like bullshit when you are doing it.
I remember many years ago in my music lessons being shocked that some people can hear multiple notes played simultaneously. I've never found much material on learning this skill.
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.
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.
I dunno I have relative pitch but extremely good and can play basically anything from ear. And in a bunch of different keys because I'm not impeded by perfect pitch sensitivity.
Many thousands of kids go into music at a very young age every year, very few come out with absolute pitch.
What?
That doesn’t sound true at all.
Jude Kofie started the piano at the age of 8. But music prodigy apart, I defintely don’t have perfect pitch right now, but I am very confident that I could with some training.
Like, when I sing a song without music, I usually am very close to the right tone. Mostly because I intuitively know how my voice is supposed to feel (the vocal chords move differently based on the tone).
And I can clearly ear the different “colors” between different scales.
And when I play the guitar a lot, after a month or so I start to be able to know where a note I hear is on the guitar.
“Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”
In this context the overall discussion is about pitch in the context of music.
Here the jokester takes advantage of pitch having more than one meaning in English. One of the alternate meanings is to throw.
Next the joke selects a banjo and an accordion, two instruments that are less popular and thus more likely to be understood by the general populace as being disparaged, which is a critical component for the audience to correctly infer the alternate meaning of pitch.
You put it all together and we have this hilarious joke:
A perfect throw is when a banjo is tossed into the garbage and it finds its perfect companion in an accordion that has similarly been discarded to the same trash receptacle.
(Edit: stupid auto-correct)