Perfect pitch genetic, not learned
By Frank D. Roylance
The Baltimore Sun
Samantha Foggle was 3 years old when her parents took in a relative's old piano. Her mother managed to pick out a scale one day, naming the notes for the girl, and then sang her the "Do-Re-Mi" song from "The Sound of Music."
"Three days later she was sitting in the kitchen," recalled Lili Foggle of Madison, Conn. "She said, 'F ... The oven is an F.'
"I said, 'What do you mean, the oven is an F?' " Eventually, it dawned on Foggle. She went to the piano, plunked an F, "and sure enough, it was the (humming) sound the microwave made when it was cooking."
Samantha has "perfect pitch." Sometimes called "absolute pitch," it is the ability to recognize and name a musical tone without reference to any other note. Musicians and scientists have long debated whether this mysterious talent is inborn or a result of early musical training.
Now, a team of scientists led by a Yale researcher claims to have settled the argument, using the first test ever devised to identify people with perfect pitch even if they have never laid eyes on a page of music or played a note.
"We clearly have data that says true absolute pitch is independent of someone's musical training. These people are born with this skill," says David Ross, an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate at Yale's medical school. His findings are to be presented today in Nashville, Tenn., at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
Those who don't have it, he said, might develop good "relative pitch" or "heightened tonal memory," becoming skilled at identifying and remembering tones by their relationship to other notes or from other cues. "But it's not the same if you look deeper at the actual perceptual process that's taking place," Ross said. For example, his test shows their tonal accuracy is fragile, easily erased by musical "interference."
Studies suggest that as few as one person in 10,000 has perfect pitch, perhaps one in 10 in the best music schools. Those who have it liken it to recognizing colors. When most people see blue, they recognize it immediately as blue. When people with perfect pitch hear a note, it automatically gets a label. It doesn't require any thought, they say.
Although sometimes the envy of their relative-pitch peers, people with perfect pitch say it's not always an advantage.
"I've known some wonderful musicians who do not have perfect pitch, and some horrible musicians who do have it," said Clinton Adams, who teaches at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore.
"We're fortunate to have it, but sometimes I wish I didn't. I think it's actually harder," said Chris Kovalchick, 19, of Princeton, N.J., a perfect-pitch violin student in Adams' class. When an ensemble tuned to a slightly sharped (too-high) A, he said, "I felt like I was playing everything out of tune."
Performers with perfect pitch say being even a quarter-tone off key can stump them in figuring out the right notes to play, as if they're trying to read a sentence in which every letter has been replaced by the next one in the alphabet.
Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven and Rimsky-Korsakov are just a few of the composers who had perfect pitch. Studies show it tends to run in families, suggesting a genetic component.
Among his Peabody students at least, Adams said, perfect pitch seems to occur most often among those who played a well-tuned instrument from an early age.
Ross said previous studies have found the same pattern, and researchers concluded the ability was the result of early training.
But "there's a problem with that argument," Ross said. "The way they test for perfect pitch is by asking people to name musical notes. If you're not a musician, you can't name a musical note. We've never had a test for perfect pitch (for) non-musicians."
So, Ross and his colleagues devised one.
To someone with perfect pitch, he reasoned, a C has a "salience," or identity, all its own. That should make it possible to form a long-term memory of it.
To test the idea, Ross had 65 test subjects listen to a wide range of pure tones produced by a machine. After silent intervals, the subjects were asked to match the original tone by turning a knob on the machine.
"Everybody should be able to do that task, regardless of musical ability, or whether they have perfect pitch," he said. And they did well — both those identified as having perfect pitch and those with good relative pitch memory.
But Ross then replaced the silent interval with "interfering tones" — a series of as many as 71 tones of various pitches. Prior studies showed they would obliterate the subject's short-term memory of the first tone. The results were striking.
The people with perfect pitch were "phenomenally accurate," he said. As a group, they came within a half-tone of the original note 95 percent of the time.
Those without perfect pitch — including 45 expert musicians at the Yale School of Music, each with 10 or 20 years of musical experience — might as well have guessed at the notes.
Their responses were "indistinguishable from chance," Ross said. |
