Perfect pitch is environmental
saw this at gnxp. some studies had shown that asians had perfect pitch much more often than other races. a new study shows that this is related to tonal language rather than genes.
“Perfect pitch for years seemed like a beautiful gift – given only to a few genetically endowed people. But our research suggests that it might be available to virtually everybody,” Deutsch said.
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In 2004, she found that students at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, were almost nine times more likely to have perfect pitch than students at the Eastman School of Music in New York. That last study, however, left open the question of whether perfect pitch might be a genetic trait – since all the Mandarin speakers were East Asian.
The present study looked at 203 students at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, all of whom agreed to take the test in class (so there was no self-selection in the sample). The students listened to the 36 notes that haphazardly spanned three octaves. They attempted to identify the notes, and they self-reported their musical, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds – including whether they were very fluent in an East Asian tone language, fairly fluent or not at all fluent. Deutsch and her colleagues found that students who spoke an East Asian tone language very fluently scored nearly 100 percent on the test, and that students who were only fairly fluent in a tone language scored lower overall. Those students – either Caucasian or East Asian – who were not at all fluent in speaking a tone language scored the worst on average.
time to invest in companies that teach mandarin, no? anyways, if u’re interested to know whether u have perfect pitch, go here and find out. i most definitely don’t have perfect pitch.
