14 DAY TRIAL // The ability to identify a musical note all in itself, without any other reference point, is one of the most rare traits of a musician. Over the course of history, only a handful of people have demonstrated this ability, including classic music composers Mozart and Tchaikovsky, and famous guitar player Jimi Hendrix. For a long time, researchers have believed that this “gift” was innate, and that people who exhibited it got it from their parents. But a new research, led by experts at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), shows that the skill may actually be a byproduct of nurture and the environment the children grow up in, rather than hereditary and genetic factors.
According to official statistics, about 1 in 10,000 people is thought to be born with perfect pitch, but most of those who do have the gift don't even know it, and so they waste it, by doing other boring jobs for the rest of their lives. The UCSD experts, led by researcher Diana Deutsch, say that people who speak an East Asian tone language fluently are more likely to develop perfect pitch as a direct result than other population groups in the world. The finds were published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and will be presented tomorrow (May 21st) at ASA's annual meeting, to be held in Portland.
The researchers argue in their paper that people used to speaking tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese, where the meaning of the phrase depends on the tone with which it's said – as in the height of the pitch –, are more likely to learn perfect pitch than, for instance, English speakers, because learning to accurately distinguish one tone from another one without a reference point is like learning a second language for these people. Over the course of her studies, which have expanded from 1999 to the present day, Deutsch has learned that Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers use a form of perfect pitch when speaking, which means that the ability is not a musical one in itself.
“It also raises the interesting question: What other exceptional abilities might be latent in an infant that we could bring out if we only knew what 'buttons' to push?” she asked. The researchers urge parents to expose their children to various types of tones when they grow up, alongside records of live sessions of speaking. The child will then unknowingly learn to associate the perfect tones with certain voice intonations, and may develop perfect speech later on in life, e! Science News reports.