And that may be why babies exposed to English may quickly learn to ignore absolute pitch and instead focus on pitches' relationships, says Saffran. A rising tone at the end of a sentence, for example, can turn a statement into a question. In the English language, relative pitch plays a much more important role than absolute pitch, she says. 'Somewhere along the line, we stop paying attention to absolute pitch,' says Saffran. Therefore, the study suggests that infants recall the absolute pitch of notes and notice when they are transposed, she says.Īdults in a similar experiment, however, did not distinguish between the two groups of notes-they recalled the notes' relationship to each other, but not their pitches, Saffran adds. The infants who heard excerpts from the note stream transposed to a different key paid attention to the recording about one second longer than the infants who heard the exact same pitches as before.īabies pay more attention to novel sounds than ones they've recently heard, Saffran says. That is, the notes' relationship to each other did not change, but their absolute pitches did. The other group of infants listened to a set of notes that were the same tune as the original note stream, just transposed to a different key. Immediately afterward, half of the babies listened to a set of notes taken from the previously heard stream. Saffran and her colleagues reached this conclusion by playing a random sequence of notes for 20 8-month-olds. This finding suggests that at some point babies stop noticing absolute pitches because, at least for English-speakers, they offer little useful information, says study author Jenny Saffran, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 1), finds that 8-month-olds recognize and remember absolute pitch, while English-speaking adults attend only to notes' relationship to each other. One such study, published in Developmental Psychology (Vol. New research on infant pitch recognition lends support to Deutsch's hypothesis.

Early experience playing on a piano with labeled keys or listening to adults match tones with words might allow any child younger than six to develop perfect pitch, she says. However, those parents who want to hedge their bets may be able to increase their children's chances of gaining the skill, Deutsch says. Halpern, PhD, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania's Bucknell University who studies pitch perception. 'Perfect pitch is interesting, but not having it says nothing about whether you are a good musician or not,' says Andrea R. Others, though, view perfect pitch as less important. Those with perfect pitch may hold advantages in musical tasks-such as singing in tune or composing music-as well, Deutsch notes. Though experts disagree on the potential benefits of perfect pitch, Deutsch believes it could help people learn a tone language like Chinese later in life, as those with perfect pitch already can connect tones with words. 'That we recognize pitch in music is a side effect.' 'We're finding evidence of an absolute pitch module in everyone's brain, and I suspect it developed for speech,' says Deutsch. And early exposure to pitches and their labels could make absolute pitch accessible to nearly anyone, says study author Diana Deutsch, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego. However, the study, coupled with research on infant pitch perception, suggests that absolute pitch-instead of being a rare, nearly magical ability-may be tied to early language development. Popularly known as perfect pitch, absolute pitch is the ability to identify the letter-name of a sounded note-something only one in 10,000 Americans can do. And because children speaking these languages learn to associate words with pitches, they may be up to nine times more likely to develop a rare musical ability known as absolute pitch, according a new study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Vol. For example, in the Chinese dialect of Mandarin, the word 'ma' when spoken in a high pitch means mother, while 'ma' in a lower tone means hemp. This is because Chinese-speakers-along with half of the world-use pitch to convey words' meanings. A monotone speech might put an English-speaking audience to sleep, but to a Chinese crowd, it would be completely incomprehensible.

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