Really cool story, I enjoyed it very much. Go to the link for photos and you can see the board with the moves animated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/c...s-carlsen-1510866214

A Chess Novice Challenged Magnus Carlsen. He Had One Month to Train.
Speed learner Max Deutsch is testing the limits of self-improvement. Next up: the world’s greatest chess player

HAMBURG, Germany— Max Deutsch went through a month of training before he traveled across the ocean, sat down in a regal hotel suite at the appointed hour and waited for the arrival of the world’s greatest chess player.

Max was not very good at chess himself. He’s a 24-year-old entrepreneur who lives in San Francisco and plays the sport occasionally to amuse himself. He was a prototypical amateur. Now he was preparing himself for a match against chess royalty. And he believed he could win.

The unlikely series of events that brought him to this stage began last year, when Max challenged himself to a series of monthly tasks that were ambitious bordering on absurd. He memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards. He sketched an eerily accurate self-portrait. He solved a Rubik’s Cube in 17 seconds. He developed perfect musical pitch and landed a standing back-flip. He studied enough Hebrew to discuss the future of technology for a half-hour.

Max, a self-diagnosed obsessive learner, wanted his goals to be so lofty that he would fail to reach some. At that, he failed. Max was 11-for-11.

He knew from the beginning of his peculiar year that the hardest challenge would come in October: defeating Magnus Carlsen in a game of chess.

Magnus Carlsen is a 26-year-old world champion from Norway who has become a global celebrity because of chess. He belongs alongside Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer in any conversation about the most talented players ever.

Max’s original idea had been to beat a computerized simulation of Magnus. But when The Wall Street Journal stumbled across his “Month to Master” project while reporting another story, it offered to put him in touch with the real-life version. Max was game.

So was Magnus. It was undeniably a stunt, but it was also about something bigger, a grand experiment in human performance. Max’s adventure had implications for children and parents, workers in any industry and really anyone interested in self-improvement. At the heart of their chess match was a question about success: Can we hack our brains in a way that radically accelerates the traditional learning curve?

“Huh,” Magnus said. “Why not?”

To understand how Max Deutsch found himself sitting across the chessboard staring at Magnus Carlsen, there are worse places to start than a Brown University dormitory.

Max heard music coming from a room down the hall one night and walked outside to investigate with his friend Cliff Weitzman. They found three people on the floor playing the sitar. Max sat down with them. Weitzman chatted with his hall mates.

“But 15 minutes later, I stopped the conversation and started listening to Max,” he said. “He had taught himself sitar in 15 minutes sitting on the floor.”

The most surprising thing about the night was that Weitzman wasn’t surprised.

“Max learns faster than anybody I’ve ever met in my entire life,” he said.

Max has been that way longer than he can remember. His parents say he crawled before his twin sister. Max grew up in the Westchester County, N.Y., suburbs—his father ran a lighting company and his mother was a theater actress before staying home to care for her kids—and he was an inquisitive child with a voracious appetite for learning.

Now he optimizes his days around that interest. He takes a one-hour walk every afternoon to clear his head. He writes out goals for the next day before he goes to bed. And then he sleeps for eight hours. A friend once asked Max what he meant when he claimed that eight hours of sleep was nonnegotiable.

“Do you have a sister?” Max said.

“Yes.”

“Would you ever kiss her?”

“No!”

“Exactly,” Max said.

His first job after school, after writing an employment guide that went viral on Brown’s campus and recording an online lecture about how to negotiate a higher salary after graduating college, was as a product manager for a financial software company in Silicon Valley. It wasn’t long before his personal aspirations got the better of him.

He’d always dreamed of completing a bucket list of seemingly impossible tasks—crazy ideas that would stretch the boundaries of his own performance—and realized last year he didn’t have to wait any longer. So he didn’t. Max came up with a list of goals he believed he could achieve within a month. The only thing they had in common was the underlying motivation.

“To take basic skills,” Max said, “and very rapidly push them to the extreme.”

He told Weitzman about his plan. “Well, this sounds very much like you,” he said. And then he showed Weitzman the list.

“Max, this is absurd,” he said. “You can’t learn things this fast.”

But he could. And he did. Max began every month by considering the process that would lead to his desired result. He concocted an elaborate plan to crack the Rubik’s Cube, for example, that involved memorizing patterns and ordering lubricant to cut seconds off his solving time. He tracked his progress through daily blog posts and video evidence.

He had some familiarity with his tasks. Max had been playing chess since he was young and still messes around on a board with life-size pieces outside Weitzman’s apartment. He’d played Magnus on his Play Magnus app, which is powered by an engine that simulates the Norwegian’s skill and style at different ages from the time he was five years old. But he didn’t expect to play Magnus in person. Not even Max imagined that Magnus would agree to play a novice he’d never met.

Magnus Carlsen has always been a bit of a showman.

It might seem beneath the best player on the planet to entertain the whims of a random amateur for no good reason. But he’s done it before. He seems to enjoy the spectacle.

Magnus agreed to play Bill Gates and limit himself to a severe time handicap. He crushed the billionaire in nine moves. He visited Harvard University to play 10 lawyers at the same time while blindfolded. He beat them anyway. It wasn’t because he felt a duty to evangelize chess or because of any commercial obligations that Magnus Carlsen thought it might be fun to play Max Deutsch.

“It’s just out of genuine curiosity,” he said.

He wanted to know whether someone could become good enough in one month to beat him—in part because Magnus knew better than anyone how difficult that would be.

It was obvious from the time he was a young boy that Magnus possessed the mental aptitude for chess. The first sign of his exceptional recall was that he could memorize world capitals and obscure facts about Norwegian municipalities. He liked puzzles and Legos in the same way that Max liked building houses with cards. But it wasn’t until he was eight years old, which is late for someone of his unique ability, that he showed the requisite interest in chess. And then he became very good very quickly.

Magnus often gets compared to chess greats, but the better analog may be someone in his other favorite sport: basketball. Magnus Carlsen is similar to LeBron James. They were both recognized as prodigies who came of age in an era of unprecedented public scrutiny. They both exceeded the hype.

Magnus became the sport’s youngest grandmaster in 2004 at 13 years old. He ascended to No. 1 in 2010. He won his first world championship in 2013. And he achieved the highest rating in the history of chess in 2014.

Magnus is now an international star and such a Norwegian hero that nearly half the population stayed up past midnight to watch last year’s world championship. What makes him a truly modern champion is not his collection of endorsement deals or his Netflix documentary. It is the way he plays chess.

His style is unpredictable, which makes opponents uncomfortable. He’s less mechanical than previous world champions and far more creative. To play Magnus is a cruel form of chess torture.

“Most schools of chess put a lot of emphasis on the openings to get an edge before the actual fight begins,” said Susan Polgar, the oldest of three renowned chess-playing sisters. “He puts the least emphasis on that. He puts a lot more emphasis on the psychological aspect of the game.”

There is so much chess information available online that anyone can study openings and endgames—even Max Deutsch. Magnus Carlsen’s genius reveals itself with everything that happens in between. It isn’t only innate talent that carried him to unprecedented heights. It’s also thousands of practice hours. Magnus is constantly thinking about chess. He is playing games in his head even when he appears engaged otherwise.

Magnus can look at the pieces of a chessboard and immediately recall what match it was, who was playing, when and where it took place and why it was worth his attention. It’s difficult to appreciate how amazing this is without seeing it for yourself.

“I know how to play chess,” he said. “I don’t know much else.”

The author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that world-class success can be earned through a certain amount of serious practice, which became known as the 10,000-hours rule. There has been a contentious debate over how widely it should be applied, since it was based in large part around a study of elite youth violinists by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson.

In chess, there’s a consensus that expertise comes from years of serious practice. One famous scholarly paper in 1973 concluded: “There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters.” The academics behind the original research guessed that it would require somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 hours.

“You can go pretty far in something like a Rubik’s Cube with not a lot of knowledge,” said Florida State University psychologist Neil Charness, who has studied chess for more than four decades. “But with something like chess, when you’re a human being, you cannot get very far unless you have a lot of knowledge.”

Chess experts found themselves in rare agreement: One month of training wouldn’t cut it. Polgar was flabbergasted that Max was even trying.

“What?!” she said. “Will that person have any aid? Like, a computer?”

Nope.

“You mean just his own skill?”

That’s right.

“And no prior tournament experience?”

Correct.

“Well,” she said, “it sounds quite unrealistic.”

Charness was equally blunt about Max’s chances. “If there are still bets available,” he said, “I would like to make a very large bet on Magnus.”

In fact there were bets available. Wynn Las Vegas oddsmaker Johnny Avello said the probability of an upset was 100,000 to 1. No betting house would ever offer those odds. The line that betting house Pinnacle posted, at the Journal’s request, was the most lopsided one that internal regulators would allow.

A $100 wager on Max paid $50,000. A $100 wager on Magnus paid 10 cents.

“I’ve consulted with some of our chess experts,” said Pinnacle sports manager Jelger Wiegersma, “and they all pretty much guaranteed me that Max will have no shot.”

Even those assessments may have been generous. There are calculators that can take the ratings of any players and compute their likelihood of winning any match down to nine decimal points. That number for Max was precisely 0.000000000%.

It was the reigning world champion’s right to set the rules of the match. His camp decided it would be rapid-format chess in which each player had 20 minutes to make all his moves. The date was set for Nov. 9 in Hamburg, where Magnus was already scheduled to host a promotional event.

Max’s year of monthly challenges had already been more successful than he could have imagined. He’d been contacted by students in a Belgian school who started their own projects after discovering his blog. Max, too, had been inspired by “Month to Master.” He left his job in August, raised money and started a company, Openmind, to guide people through the learning process.

Max hadn’t started thinking about chess at the end of September. He was still learning how to freestyle rap. “I don’t have a plan until the month begins,” he said. It was fairly conventional at first. He played Magni of different ages on the Play Magnus app.

He also played real people online, but only after lying about his meager chess rating to make himself appear better than he really was. Max figured he could only improve by playing better competition—that he would have to lose as much as possible to learn as much as possible.

He took advantage when Magnus offered access to his own youth coach, Norwegian grandmaster Torbjørn Ringdal Hansen, and they discussed chess principles before settling on two potential styles of play: conservative or aggressive. “Both are low-probability, but I think I’m going with the second option,” he said. “There’s no reason to play this safe.”

He was in New York visiting family one day midway through October when he agreed to take on the chess regulars who congregate every afternoon in Bryant Park. On the way there, Max passed a kiosk with other board games.

“If I could play Magnus in Boggle,” he said, “he would get wrecked.”

Max played three matches that day. He lost all three. The only sign his month of preparation might not be an epic waste of time was that one of his opponents happened to be wearing jeans made by G-Star—the same G-Star that once sponsored Magnus Carlsen.

Max realized that he would have to be more inventive in his approach to learning chess.

“If I can’t play like a human,” he said, “then how can I play?”

Max figured he would have to play like a computer.

He thought about memorizing every configuration of the chessboard. But he calculated that would take approximately one trillion trillion trillion years. Max didn’t have that kind of time.

He went hunting for shortcuts that would allow him to automate Magnus’s intuition. Max guessed that Magnus would play a certain opening, and he downloaded thousands of games with that opening to build a computer model that would distinguish good moves from bad moves. He would use techniques of machine learning to identify patterns—the patterns that Magnus has internalized—and devise an algorithm that computed whether a move was good or bad.

His formula would assign a value to every piece and every square, and Max would do the math in his head by deploying tricks he’d acquired through previous challenges to memorize about 30,000 numbers. If a move was good, he would play it. If a move was bad, he would try again.

His technology was less sophisticated than something like IBM’s chess-playing computer Deep Blue, he acknowledged, but it had to be to have any hope of making it work. He was relying on his own brain to process the information. The goal was to absorb enough of the computer’s objective analysis beforehand to compensate for his lack of intuition.

Max wasn’t delusional. “At least I don’t think I’m delusional,” he said.

He began to doubt himself two weeks before the match. He didn’t have the algorithm even after buying extra computing power to expedite the number-crunching. And he admitted he wasn’t sure he could pull off the mental gymnastics in 20 minutes. By the time he made it to Hamburg, the algorithm was churning away on his laptop, but it wasn’t ready. There were no numbers to memorize and no time even if there were.

His attempt to build himself into a computer had failed. Max Deutsch would have to beat Magnus Carlsen as a human being.

Max was anxious. He tried to relax by listening to funk music and fiddling with his Rubik’s Cube, but the setting wasn’t ideal. The room on the ground floor of the Hotel Atlantic Kempinski was so chilly Max had to wear a fleece North Face jacket he nearly forgot to pack. He was more tired than he would’ve preferred. The jet lag of flying to Europe from California had cut into his precious eight hours of sleep.

Magnus commanded attention from the second he sat down. He looked slick in a tailored suit, and he maintained a steely demeanor behind thick-rimmed glasses. He was taking the match seriously enough that he barely exchanged pleasantries beforehand. He didn’t try to make small talk, either. Max looked intimidated.

Magnus wasn’t invincible. His peak rating is higher than that of anyone else who has ever played chess, but his career winning percentage in competition is only 62.5%. He lost several days earlier to someone online whose name he couldn’t recall. Magnus didn’t want to lose again, and he didn’t think he would.

“But I’ve been surprised before,” he said.

Max moved his white pawn to e4. Magnus moved his black pawn to e5. And they were off.

Max had been right about the opening. If his algorithm had worked, he would’ve been in a solid position. But he was anyway. After eight moves, using his own limited chess ability, the unthinkable was occurring: Max was winning.

His skill wasn’t lost on Play Magnus’s chief executive officer, Kate Murphy, and head of communications Arne Horvei as they watched silently from a distance. “It’s lasting much longer than I expected,” Horvei whispered.

Magnus had reason to believe his opponent was better than he actually was. He was aware of Max’s algorithm, but Max hadn’t informed the enemy it wasn’t done. Max had his full attention because Magnus didn’t know he was bluffing. At one point, Magnus’s hands were shaking, not unlike his first world championship, when he was so nervous that he dropped his pencil.

“This is not going to be easy,” Magnus thought.

Max knew the probability of him winning. But even while being highly rational, he’d allowed himself some irrational thoughts. A small part of him believed he could win. He’d fantasized about how it would happen.

It was on the ninth move—the same point in the game that Magnus checkmated Bill Gates—that Max showed vulnerability. Every move he’d made until then had been the right one. And yet he knew immediately that he’d done something wrong, even if he didn’t know what it was. He could see it on Magnus’s face.

“You twitched,” Max said afterward.

Max dragged his knight to the middle of the board. It wasn’t technically a mistake. It was more a waste of a move that didn’t advance a larger strategy. If he were playing Weitzman back home, he might have recovered. But he couldn’t against Magnus. It was the myopia of an amateur—someone who wasn’t seeing the game several moves in advance. It also was an opportunity for Magnus to attack.

“Having the world champion attacking you can be a bit uncomfortable,” said Hansen, his youth coach.

They remained statistically tied until Max picked up his queen and jumped her two spots diagonally to the right for his 12th move. He could’ve kept his slight edge for at least another four turns by repositioning a pawn instead. But he didn’t have Magnus’s experience to foresee he was leaving his knight exposed, and he didn’t have his proprietary algorithm to let him know that moving his queen was foolish.

“This is a typical mistake for an amateur,” Polgar said, “not recognizing the potential threat.”

“It takes years,” Magnus said.

Max was in trouble. It only got worse from there. Two moves later, instead of taking Magnus’s knight with his pawn, Max used his queen. It was a horrible mistake. Magnus made him pay.

“When you moved your queen over here,” Magnus said as he remade the board from memory, “what was the idea?”

Max didn’t have a convincing explanation. There was none. It was the type of error his opponent had methodically drilled himself to avoid, and Magnus pounced once he identified the precise moment that probability had swung decisively in his favor. He knew he was not going to lose from that point on. He was right.

Magnus’s body language shifted. He barely thought about his moves anymore. Max deliberated for minutes; Magnus swiped his pieces in seconds. He felt the board shrinking. Max was beginning to see he couldn’t escape. The situation was as unpleasant as the chess intelligentsia had cautioned. At one point, Max accidentally toppled his king. Not long afterward, he was officially checkmated. The match had lasted 39 moves each over 22 minutes and 21 seconds. Magnus stuck out his hand. Max shook it. Only then did Magnus finally unfurl a smile.

Max’s year of monthly challenges was over. But he refused to take his loss as anything but a victory. He’d wanted his ambitions to be ambitious enough that he fell short. He said in a postgame interview that attempting to beat the most unbeatable chess player had introduced him to new lines of thinking. He was smarter about machine learning. There was also nothing stopping him memorizing those tens of thousands of numbers when his algorithm was finished. Maybe there would be a rematch.

“Till next time,” Magnus wrote on the board.

And then something funny happened. It became clear Magnus wasn’t ready to leave. His previously blank face brightened. Now he was ebullient. He zipped pieces around the board and mumbled how he would’ve handled certain situations if he were Max. He recalled the exact chronological order of all 39 moves and scribbled them in a notebook. He looked disappointed when Max revealed that his original plan to write an algorithm had been foiled.

That encouraged Max to keep trying. Less than a week later, when he’d returned home and his algorithm was nearly done, Max tested its accuracy by checking how it would have played Magnus. He plugged in the queen move that Magnus had exploited. “Bad move,” the model said.

Max was delighted. This was proof his algorithm could have worked. Right after the match, Max hadn’t been sure. He figured he might as well ask the expert across from him for advice.

“If you had a month starting from scratch with chess and you had to get as good as possible,” Max said, “how would you think about it?”

“It’s very hard for me to answer that question,” Magnus said. “I haven’t been doing much else but chess for 20 years.”

His handlers looked at their watches. Magnus was late. They had panicked earlier that afternoon when he was one minute behind schedule, because Magnus always has somewhere else to be. In a few weeks he’ll fly to London for the final stage of the Grand Chess Tour as the heavy favorite to win the sport’s prestigious annual circuit, and he will almost certainly end this year the same way he’s ended the last six years: as the No. 1-ranked chess player.

So why was he still lingering with this stranger? It turned out that Magnus Carlsen was envious of Max Deutsch. He still had the whole game ahead of him.

“I hope you at least keep an interest in the game, because it’s very interesting,” Magnus said. “I wish I could learn it new.”

Good story. There’s a wonderful documentary on Netflix titled appropriately, Magnus. I have news for Max: the 5-time world champion (Vichay) whom Magnus beat to take his first title, trained constantly with several masters developing algos and basically recited, computational approaches to the game. Magnus’ creativity during chess allows him to defeat such strategies, particularly when he’s relaxed. Magnus can make a couple of irrational moves, protect himself for a while and then he’s off to the races as no algo can predict the billions of positions that are possible after a set # of moves.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dakor,

Great story.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
Great story.

I agree.

I was deep into chess in my puberty. Had a family friend drive me to different clubs and tournaments. I gobbled up chess books and memorized whole games. Last book I bought was My Way by Nimzovitch. I think I got up to 1600. I often got to see some Grandmaster at the time who had a chess puzzle in the daily newspaper: Koltanowsky.

It stopped whem my mother said she was going to boil the chess pieces and feed it to me. Oh well. It's been so long ago, I don't even know about Magnus.

Chess and me are like:

I was hoping he'd win or Magnus would offer a rematch. Still cool story either way.

Good story bama, thanks for sharing!

The chess story was cool, but I also thought the other monthly challenges were pretty good. A back flip? Learning Hebrew in 30 days? Memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards? Yikes!

quote:

The unlikely series of events that brought him to this stage began last year, when Max challenged himself to a series of monthly tasks that were ambitious bordering on absurd. He memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards. He sketched an eerily accurate self-portrait. He solved a Rubik’s Cube in 17 seconds. He developed perfect musical pitch and landed a standing back-flip. He studied enough Hebrew to discuss the future of technology for a half-hour.

Great story. Thanks, Bama.

When I was in Nepal in 89-90, I had a driver named Govinda who introduced me to the game "Tigers and Goats," pretty much the national game of Nepal. ("Bagh-Chal" in Nepali.) It's simple, consisting of a grid on which you place little brass tigers that try to "eat" the little brass goats. The goats try to trap the tigers.

I played a lot of chess in those days and considered myself pretty good at board games. One afternoon we sat at the circular game board and played. He beat me game after game. I would make a move that seemed to be a good move, anticipating future possibilities as best I could. He'd look up and say, softly, "Bad move, sa'ab." (The algorithm's comment on Max's queen move reminded me of this story.)

Finally, I said, "You are awfully good at this game, Govinda."

"Thank you, sa'ab. I have a cup."

"You have a cup?"

"Big cup."

"Big cup?"

It turned out that he was the Nepali National Champion!

Max ought to set himself the goal of proving, or disproving, the hypothesis that all of the nontrivial roots of the complex zeta function are on the line x = 1/2. Mathematicians believe that's true, but it's never been proven.

A couple of the most interesting, most successful folks I know challenge themselves similarly, regularly, and for those with high drive and discipline it can work very well.

I'm not lazy, nor lacking in curiosity, but I like the things I like enough and spend enough of my time doing them that I rarely have that sort of time to constantly learn new things.

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:
The chess story was cool, but I also thought the other monthly challenges were pretty good. A back flip? Learning Hebrew in 30 days? Memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards? Yikes!

quote:

The unlikely series of events that brought him to this stage began last year, when Max challenged himself to a series of monthly tasks that were ambitious bordering on absurd. He memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards. He sketched an eerily accurate self-portrait. He solved a Rubik’s Cube in 17 seconds. He developed perfect musical pitch and landed a standing back-flip. He studied enough Hebrew to discuss the future of technology for a half-hour.

I’m not sure that perfect musical pitch is a state that can be developed. My impression is that it is one that either you are born with, or not.

Less than perfect pitch might be improved upon, perhaps.

I’m also not sure it is one you would want. There was a woman in Longhorn Band in my day who had it and it was more a curse than a benefit. Wrong or slightly out of tune notes played in her near vicinity might cause her to faint.

My wife has taken piano lessons from two women who have perfect pitch, both Julliard grads, extraordinarily gifted pianists who don’t seem that troubled, but they haven’t marched close to college clarinet players, AFAIK.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: JALLEN,

Nice story!

Humans can't beat computers any longer. Engines are routinely rated at over 3300. If I recall Carlsen's rating is about 2800+. The computer progam Komodo gave Nakamura pawn and move and still the machine beat him.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:
The chess story was cool, but I also thought the other monthly challenges were pretty good. A back flip? Learning Hebrew in 30 days? Memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards? Yikes!

quote:

The unlikely series of events that brought him to this stage began last year, when Max challenged himself to a series of monthly tasks that were ambitious bordering on absurd. He memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards. He sketched an eerily accurate self-portrait. He solved a Rubik’s Cube in 17 seconds. He developed perfect musical pitch and landed a standing back-flip. He studied enough Hebrew to discuss the future of technology for a half-hour.

I’m not sure that perfect musical pitch is a state that can be developed. My impression is that it is one that either you are born with, or not.

Less than perfect pitch might be improved upon, perhaps.

I’m also not sure it is one you would want. There was a woman in Longhorn Band in my day who had it and it was more a curse than a benefit. Wrong or slightly out of tune notes played in her near vicinity might cause her to faint.

My wife has taken piano lessons from two women who have perfect pitch, both Julliard grads, extraordinarily gifted pianists who don’t seem that troubled, but they haven’t marched close to college clarinet players, AFAIK.

My understanding is that perfect pitch can be developed, but not easily. It has something to do the the timbre of the notes. F# is an easily identified pitch, something to do with it's vibrational qualities. Relative pitch on the other hand, is fairly easy to attain with regular practice and some musical knowledge.

quote:

Originally posted by justjoe:
Finally, I said, "You are awfully good at this game, Govinda."

"Thank you, sa'ab. I have a cup."

"You have a cup?"

"Big cup."

"Big cup?"

It turned out that he was the Nepali National Champion!

Ha! Great story!

quote:

Originally posted by Ogie:


My understanding is that perfect pitch can be developed, but not easily. It has something to do the the timbre of the notes. F# is an easily identified pitch, something to do with it's vibrational qualities. Relative pitch on the other hand, is fairly easy to attain with regular practice and some musical knowledge.

That’s Real Good Pitch. The folks who claim that perfect pitch can be learned seem to be mostly those who are selling the technique they believe works.

I am reminded of the man who pestered Mozart to teach him how to write symphonies. “How hard can it be?” the man insisted. “After all, you were writing them when you were only 8 years old.”

“Yes, but I didn’t need someone to show me how,” Mozart replied.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by Ogie:


My understanding is that perfect pitch can be developed, but not easily. It has something to do the the timbre of the notes. F# is an easily identified pitch, something to do with it's vibrational qualities. Relative pitch on the other hand, is fairly easy to attain with regular practice and some musical knowledge.

That’s Real Good Pitch. The folks who claim that perfect pitch can be learned seem to be mostly those who are selling the technique they believe works.

I am reminded of the man who pestered Mozart to teach him how to write symphonies. “How hard can it be?” the man insisted. “After all, you were writing them when you were only 8 years old.”

“Yes, but I didn’t need someone to show me how,” Mozart replied.

I have zero musical knowledge or ability, but was curious how he went about doing this and what his definition of success would be.

I found his website online where he wrote about each of the challenges and how he approached and tackled them:
https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch...-months-9843700c741f

Here is the month on developing perfect pitch:

https://medium.com/the-mission...ars-old-7e2e78b8c26b

How he defined success:

quote:

According to Wikipedia, perfect pitch is a “rare auditory phenomenon characterized by the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone”.

In other words, if someone went to a piano and played a randomly selected note, someone else with perfect pitch, whose back is turned to the piano, could instantly and correctly identify the note being played (using the 12-note musical alphabet: A, Bb, B, C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, Gb, G, Ab).

My goal this month is to acquire this ability. In particular, I’m challenging myself to correctly identify 20 consecutive, randomly-generated musical notes without a reference tone.

The details on this challenge and the others was pretty interesting.

His (Wikipedia's) definition of Perfect Pitch is dumbed down, and his skill here is more parlor trickish / memorization tricks than any real sense of actually having Perfect Pitch.

A standard Piano (88keys) covers 7 octaves, so there isn't just one A/etc, there are 7 of each, all of which are a distinct frequency, all of which can (depending upon how in tune or not the Piano is) be Sharp or Flat x-Cents.

He wasn't distinguishing between octaves (just A vs C, not which A or which C), he probably can't tell whether it's tuned to A-440Hz or A-442Hz, and he probably can't tell whether or not a given note, say Ab4, is out of tune by 5cents in one direction or the other, much less how much.

I do not have Perfect Pitch, but I have solid Relative Pitch and a decent memory.

My Engineering Mentor has the closest to Perfect Pitch I've witnessed, with a Grammy on his shelf and boatloads of other impressive entries on his resume, and he can tell you whether the whole song (which may be in tune with itself may also be 5cents Sharp of A-440 or whether C7 is in tune with C2, and so on.

What this guy has done here is more like someone who can memorize multiplication tables but doesn't know shit about mathematics. It's an impressive trick/memorization skill, but not really the same as Perfect Pitch in any real sense, as far as I see so far.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
His (Wikipedia's) definition of Perfect Pitch is dumbed down, and his skill here is more parlor trickish / memorization tricks than any real sense of actually having Perfect Pitch.

A standard Piano (88keys) covers 7 octaves, so there isn't just one A/etc, there are 7 of each, all of which are a distinct frequency, all of which can (depending upon how in tune or not the Piano is) be Sharp or Flat x-Cents.

He wasn't distinguishing between octaves (just A vs C, not which A or which C), he probably can't tell whether it's tuned to A-440Hz or A-442Hz, and he probably can't tell whether or not a given note, say Ab4, is out of tune by 5cents in one direction or the other, much less how much.

The woman I described earlier played glockenspiels when marching. She was constantly filing trying to make them “perfect.” I would think each metal piece would vary with temperature and humidity among others.

We have a piano tuner over several times a year to tune the grand piano. He replaces a fellow who did that for us in Coronado. Neither has perfect pitch, which you would think would be an ideal trait in that work, but apparently not. Neither has it and they seem to feel it would be a burden, not an asset.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
His (Wikipedia's) definition of Perfect Pitch is dumbed down, and his skill here is more parlor trickish / memorization tricks than any real sense of actually having Perfect Pitch.

I think he was pretty honest about that in his description of what he was trying to accomplish. I think his summary was very good (again, I know nothing about music, and the only pitch I am familiar with is either the kind you start fires with or perform on a baseball field):

Do I have perfect pitch?

Yesterday, I officially completed this month’s perfect pitch challenge: I successfully identified 20 consecutive, randomly-generated musical notes, without any reference, three times on video.
Even though I completed the challenge, as I defined it, I’m still not sure if I’m comfortable saying that I have perfect pitch.

Firstly, I’m still not “perfect”. I’ve become much more consistent, but I still make mistakes occasionally.

Also, I don’t recognize all notes immediately, especially if there aren’t any pauses between the notes. In other words, I still find that my interpretation of one note can be influenced by the note I hear before it.

Yet, there are also some indicators that suggest I’m actually closer to having genuine perfect pitch than I think…

Perhaps, most importantly, I always correctly identify the first note of every session. In other words, when there are no other musical sounds or reference points to confuse me, I identify notes with 100% accuracy and immediacy.

I definitely couldn’t do this if I didn’t have some form of perfect pitch.

The problem is that this “pitch identification in a vacuum” skill becomes less relevant and harder to maintain the deeper I work into a sequence of notes.

Over time, as I progress through a series of notes, my brain shifts from ‘perfect pitch’-style identification (of just plucking the note out of the air) to ‘relative pitch’-style identification (of comparing the note back to a mental reference tone).

In other words, I actually think I have perfect pitch, but the ability isn’t as dominant in my brain as my relative pitch abilities (which have been trained and synaptically hardened over the past 15 years of musical training). As a result, my relative pitch overpowers my perfect pitch abilities, confusing my brain and messing me up.

Occasionally, in the middle of a session, once my brain is already in relative pitch mode, a note will cut through and I will immediately hear it for what it is. The note bypasses my relative pitch default and finds it’s way to the perfect pitch part of my brain.

I suspect that if I continue to practice and strengthen my perfect pitch abilities, I could eventually overpower my brain’s relative pitch default and maintain genuine perfect pitch deep into a sequence of notes.

This month, because I had the 30-day deadline, I probably relied a little too heavily on my brain’s relative pitch skills to succeed. Thus, if I actually wanted to make my perfect pitch abilities dominant, I’d need to rethink my training and try to isolate just the perfect pitch components of the exercise.

Anyway, perhaps I do have perfect pitch, but it’s still only a quiet signal in my brain, getting suffocated by many stronger, more deeply engrained signals.

I’m not sure if this counts, but I’d like to think it does. And if not, at least my progress suggests that an adult could feasibly acquire genuine perfect pitch.

Semantics aside, I’ve clearly changed the way my brain perceives pitch, which is pretty cool.

The Insane outer limits of perfect pitch

This month, I acquired some lightweight form of perfect pitch, but have only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible.

In fact, there’s a whole range of skills that fall under the perfect pitch umbrella that I didn’t touch at all: Identifying two notes at a time, three notes at a time, ten notes at a time, etc.; singing notes on command; instantly identifying the key of a song; and so on.

My favorite demonstrations of these kinds of perfect pitch skills are performed by 9-year-old Dylan Biato, who has been trained by musician dad Rick Biato since birth.

Here’s just one of his many perfect pitch videos…


Clearly, I have a long way to go to be at Dylan’s level, but I’m certainly motivated by his abilities. After all, like Dylan (and everyone else), I also have a human brain (which can’t be that different to Dylan’s).

In other words, when I see someone like Dylan who is masterful at his/her craft, it isn’t a reminder of my deficiencies, but a reminder of my potential.