Rick Beato
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2017–2025
16:26 · 1.8M views · May 26, 2017
Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.
HN points to it as the standard explanation of why perfect pitch is a childhood window, in threads about absolute pitch training.
10 comments from Hacker News
Perfect Pitch is 30% more likely in societies with tonal language. Kids who are exposed to complicated music at an early age also have a higher chance of having perfect pitch. Here's the best video[0] on Perfect Pitch I've seen. It starts at 4:25 because he spends the first four minutes responding to indignant youtube commenters. Then he digs into the science. [0]: this video
This video convinced me that adults cannot develop or train perfect pitch. "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch" by Rick Beato this video
This isn't quite right; the University of Chicago study replicates what has already been known for a long time - that musicians can develop their pitch memory around the timbral context clues of a particular instrument. However, this learned pitch does not generalize to other instruments and/or common everyday sounds (train horns, washing machine vibrations) in the way that people with absolute pitch can instantly identify. An analogy to this might be that a colorblind person if shown enough fabric and told what the colors were can eventually associate the texture of the fabric with a given color and can learn to do this translating in their head, but they will not be able to train their eyes to see color no matter how much practice takes place. Rick Beato covers the subject rather well in his video "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch" this video If it were the case that such a substantial number of amateur test subjects could develop absolute pitch from doing a few exercises, we would expect to see commensurate numbers of musicians who spend thousands of hours playing music to also develop this skill, but this is not and has never been the case.
Rick Beato made several videos about perfect pitch, also featuring his kid who has PP and can identify entire chords. Apparently his opinion is that the key was listening to atonal music at an early age, like you say. Here's one of the more interesting videos: this video
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. this video 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). [LINK]