We'll kick off the chase with Diana Deutsch, a professor specializing in
the Psychology of Music, who could extract song out even the most
monotonous of drones. (Think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller. Bueller.)
For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch
has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your
language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and
Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns
out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have
absolute (AKA 'perfect') pitch. And, nope, English isn't one of them.
What
is perfect pitch anyway? And who cares? Deutsch, along with Jad and
Robert, will duke it out over the merits of perfect pitch. A sign of
genius, a nuisance, or an evolutionary superpower? You decide. (We
can't).
Source.
No comments:
Post a Comment