How Children Develop Perfect Pitch
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to in threads on training absolute pitch in children as a practitioner's account.
What it is
Rick Beato discusses a theory of why some children develop perfect pitch, based on early exposure to music. He draws on his experience with his own children.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends mantesso · 2019-12 · on “Ask HN: Playlists for teaching perfect pitch to toddlers?”
Rick Beato has some videos about how he trained his kids: [this video] I never tried anything similar nor have a music background but found it fascniting to watch it
Recommends lylejantzi3rd · 2025-05 · on “Infants and Babies can become pitch-perfect with early exposure to certain music”
Rick Beato has done a lot of videos on perfect pitch. His son has perfect pitch, but he does not. How Children Develop Perfect Pitch - [this video] Perfect Pitch vs Relative Pitch: Which Is More Important? - [LINK] Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch - [LINK]
Cites avodonosov · 2023-04 · on “Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch”
In another video Rick Beato said he facilitated development of his son's perfect pitch by exposing him to a lot of complex music in early age. [LINK] His hypothesis, based on some studies, is that children in ealy age have ability for perfect pitch but later loose it, if it's not utilized. The same way as young children are able to percieve any phoneme of any language, but later loose this ability and only recognise phonemes of the language spoken in the family (that's a known scientific fact). [this video]