I can look at the letters I’m typing right now and recognize that they are black. I can also notice that my bedroom walls are my favorite shade of light blue, and I can peer out of the window and register the vibrant green hue of the oak tree in my front yard. You could hand me any object in the world and count on my ability to name its color. So, why is it that if I listen to my favorite Taylor Swift song (which is Mirrorball, in case you were wondering), I wouldn’t be able to name its first note…much less the second or third? Light and sound both propagate as waves, possessing distinctive attributes that allow us to recognize and categorize them upon their arrival at our eyes and ears. While most people can readily label colors by discerning their precise frequencies and wavelengths of light, only a minority can do the same for musical notes.
The ability to successfully do so is called ‘perfect pitch’ or ‘absolute pitch.’ Researchers from the University of Chicago remark that “the presumed rarity of absolute pitch should be striking, as it is comparable to only being able to classify colors by their relationship to other colors and not with consistent labels such as ‘blue’” (Scientific Reports, 2021). Indeed, what is different about those with perfect pitch? Is it a specialized aspect of their neuroanatomy? Their musical training? Their intelligence? Pure luck?
Fascinated by the relationship between perfect pitch and cognition, researchers from the University of Chicago designed a study in which subjects – 16 individuals with perfect pitch and 15 proficient musicians without perfect pitch – were tasked with naming both piano notes and computer-generated sine tones. The researchers used electrodes to monitor the participants’ “frequency follow response” (FFR), a measurement of how the brain and nervous system react to different sounds. The participants' accuracy levels were then documented, along with information about their musical backgrounds.
One fascinating finding was the difference in the participants’ ability to name notes played on the piano as opposed to notes generated by a computer. Individuals with perfect pitch averaged 98% accuracy for piano notes and 77% for sine tones, while those without averaged 29% accuracy for piano notes and 25% for sine tones. This discrepancy suggests that timbre – the unique tone and color that make instruments unique from one another – also plays a crucial role in pitch recognition.
Most notably, the researchers found that FFR predicts pitch identification performance more accurately than any metric usually associated with perfect pitch, such as musical training or neuroanatomy. Doctoral student Katherine Reise explains, “This suggests there’s a really low-level difference (in terms of the nervous system’s response) in how absolute pitch possessors encode sounds in the brain.” Even though neurobiological differences have been observed between the brains of people with and without perfect pitch, FFR is not a fixed trait. Thus, perfect pitch exists along a continuous spectrum and can be improved upon over time, which is encouraging for those who want to improve their skill in pitch identification. In this sense, practice really does make (pitch) perfect.
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