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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

Wow, a lot of slighted pro or semi-pro musicians in the comments, not a lot of hacker spirit. I didn't sense any competitiveness in this article at all, and author clearly described her embarrassment at being completely non-musical, and the desire for her kids to be at least not shut off completely from the musical world skill-wise. And she did it after being prompted by a very interesting question--why is "perfect pitch" considered so difficult for the human brain compared to distinguishing any color out of millions (well, we probably only have common words for a couple hundred), which is considered trivial? I thought that was a very cool way of putting it.

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I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's a skill with limited usefulness that has real drawbacks. The comments seem well aware of that.

What are the drawbacks? Seems like a skill with very opportunity cost. She even drew a decision matrix in the post to illustrate her reasoning around it (whether or not you think that's accurate). The "downside" of attempting this was spending more time playing with her kids.

The slighted musicians, as you put it, have made plenty of experience-based comments on what the drawbacks are, and why the decision matrix is wrong. They accord with my own (admittedly amateur) experiences. I think it is disingenuous to dismiss their comments with a casual "whether or not you think that's accurate" - that's exactly what their comments are, they're disagreeing with the decision matrix and giving their reasons why.

See especially the comments made by professional tuners (which matches what my own piano tuner tells me).

Maybe bring up the specific drawbacks you agree with, because many of the drawbacks mentioned seem really slight. One was that the musician was annoyed when an orchestra played in a slightly different pitch than what they preferred or what they were used to. Seems more like an OCD thing than something that actually impeded their musicianship.

The people in this thread are nuts. I play music at a very high amateur level and know a lot of people with both absolute and perfect pitch. They all enjoy showing it off and are great sight-readers. It's a little more annoying for them to hear music at a less-than-professional level, but no more so than anyone who develops their ear to distinguish between subtleties in other parts of playing like phrasing or rhythm.

(Maybe that's less true for true perfect pitch, though.)

Relative pitched people will be able to easily match what the next pitch ought to be if you play the beginning of a song they know in a new key. Absolutely pitched people (in my experience, unless they've been trained) find this difficult.

Imagine if, someone showed you a two and you just saw in your head what 2 + 1, 2+2, 2+3, 2+4 were intuitively. This would give you a leg up in elementary math (And beyond). This is similar to what relative pitched people experience. An absolute pitched person often just sees the two and if they see a three, the relationship between the two has to be learned.

Yeah, the same way there are real drawbacks of being a really good programmer. You are slightly annoyed (or worse!) when you see slightly out of tune code!

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