The Harding University A Cappella Chorus, when I sang with it, seldom relied on pitch pipe or tuning fork to pitch songs. Instead, we relied on Eve, who hummed pitches as needed–ask her for an A or a C-sharp, and she could produce it, accurately, out of thin air.
Eve was one of the estimated one in 10,000 adults in the Western world who have perfect pitch. Most musicians get by with good relative pitch– given a particular starting note, they can then reproduce a melody, accurately judging the intervals between pitches. But people with perfect pitch know what pitch birds sing at and what pitch the wind hums as it blows through the rigging of a sailboat. (I once heard Eve identify the separate pitches contained in the discordant whistle of a freight train.)
Mozart is said to have noted, at the age of seven, that a violin he was tuned “half a quarter of a tone” higher than the violin of his father’s friend Schachtner, which he had played some time before. Schachtner’s violin was brought in; Mozart was right.
But is perfect pitch is learned or inherited? According to recent studies, genetics plays an important role in both perfect pitch and “tune deafness.” But there is also evidence that almost everyone is born with perfect pitch–most people just lose it as they grow older.
Jenny Saffran, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, played tapes of bell-like musical tones in repeating patterns for eight-month-old babies and a control group of adults. Both groups were then replayed small segments of the tape, once in the same key and once transposed into a different key.
Adults instantly recognized the transposed segments as patterns they’d heard before, whereas babies heard the transposed notes as a completely new pattern. This indicates that babies’ brains respond to the frequency or pitch of individual notes, a characteristic of perfect pitch, rather than to how the pitches correspond to each other.
Saffran believes perfect pitch fades as people grow up because recognizing intervals and tunes is a simpler way of remembering notes than remembering individual pitches. This idea is supported by the fact that people who learn instruments at a young age are more likely to have perfect pitch.
So are people who speak languages in which pitch changes meaning, such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese. Trevor Henthorn of the Department of Psychology at the University of California San Diego and Mark Dolson of E-mu/Creative Technology Center had native speakers of each of those languages record a series of words at high speed, which they analyzed for pitch at five millisecond intervals. The next day they had the subjects record the words again. Half of the subjects averaged pitch differences of less than half a semitone, and one third averaged pitch differences of less than a quarter of a semitone, indicating they drew on an innate sense of pitch.
For English-speakers, hanging on to perfect pitch seems to be a matter of genetics. Dr. Peter Gregersen of North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, studied 600 people who claimed to have perfect pitch. (He confirmed their abilities by having them listen to 96 recorded tones, and identify the pitch of each tone within three seconds of hearing it.) About one quarter of those with perfect pitch shared the trait with a sibling.
However, people who can’t tell one tune from another can also blame their genes. Tim Spector of St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, England, studied 136 pairs of identical twins and 148 pairs of fraternal twins. He had the twins individually take a musical test featuring 26 popular tunes, including Silent Night and The Star-Spangled Banner. Nine were played correctly, but the rest contained several bad notes. The twins were asked to judge whether each melody was in tune or not.
About one in 20 turned out to be “tune deaf”–or, as Spector put it, “You can’t believe that some people don’t know Yankee Doodle Dandy is being played so badly.”
Identical twins were much more likely than non-identical twins to have very similar scores. The research team’s conclusion was that pitch recognition is roughly 80 percent hereditary. And that means that all the music lessons in the world may not be able to turn a tone-deaf child into a musician.
Of course, based on that research into babies, maybe you just have to start sooner.
Mandarin lessons, anyone?
