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Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch

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.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN points to it as the standard explanation of why perfect pitch is a childhood window, in threads about absolute pitch training.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Rick Beato
Topic
perfect pitch
Format
explainer
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
4
HN mentions in dataset
10
Recommendation years in dataset
2017–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • 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 …

    lj3 on Hacker News · 2017-11
    In How I learned to write music in real time

  • This video convinced me that adults cannot develop or train perfect pitch. "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch" by Rick Beato [VIDEO]

    rendall on Hacker News · 2023-04
    In Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch

  • 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 …

    hashmap on Hacker News · 2023-04
    In Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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