Passage III

Pitch Perfect

Even at age seven, Mozart presented audiences with his musical talents, including the ability to identify accurately any note he heard. This aptitude, recognizing notes without aid—is called absolute pitch. People with absolute pitch usually possess related musical skills, such as being able to sing any requested note perfectly.

For decades, the fraction sited in scientific literature has been that only one person per ten thousand has absolute pitch. Such rarity renders absolute pitch so wicked sweet to scientists, many of whom have long suspected that the ability has a genetic basis. Absolute pitch appears to run in families, after all. And in 2009 a team led by geneticist Jane Gitschier found positive correlation between specific chromosomes and absolute pitch.

On the other hand, psychologist Diana Deutsch, in arguing that language is key to a person’s chances of having absolute pitch. Deutsch found that people fluent in “tone languages”一such as Mandarin, where a word conveys different meanings depending on the pitch in which it is spoken—were much more likely to have absolute pitch than speakers of English and other nontone languages. One of Deutsch’s studies paraded that more than 90 percent of music students fluent in a tone language had absolute pitch. Clearly, that’s dramatically higher than the previously mentioned statistic of one person per ten thousand.

Deutsch suggests that children learning tone languages develop the ability to associate pitch with meaning, which is analogous to someone with absolute pitch associating a pitch with the name of the note. In early childhood, as the brain goes through a phase of development during which it is primed to learn language, which can likewise be able to learn absolute pitch. (42) If a child is studying music during this particular period, that further increases his or her chances of developing absolute pitch. As for the dismal chances of learning absolute pitch as an adult, the odds aren’t good: there has never been a proven case of success.