Suzanne - Chapter 2, Exercise 10

Mini-research project: Is there a critical period for developing “perfect pitch”

Perfect pitch (a.k.a. absolute pitch) is the ability to name or produce a note of particular pitch in the absence of a reference note. It is a mysterious and extraordinary gift possessed by such musical geniuses as Mozart and Beethoven. Generally, perfect pitch implies some or all of the following abilities:

• Identify and name individual pitches played on various instruments
  
• Name the key of a given piece of tonal music
  
• Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass
  
• Sing a given pitch without an external reference
  
• Name the pitches of common everyday occurrences such as car horns

There is a good deal of evidence that perfect pitch is acquired during the first year of life, part of the critical period in which infants acquire other features of speech. Studies indicate that musicians who started taking music lessons before the age of four were more likely to have perfect pitch than musicians who started musical training after the age of nine. According to researchers, the involvement of a critical period, however, may only be part of the picture. Musicians with absolute pitch tend to have greater asymmetry in an area of the brain that is critical to speech processing than among other individuals. This asymmetry emerges before birth, which shows that there is a genetic predisposition to perfect pitch.

In one study I found, researchers surveyed more than 600 musicians in music conservatories, training programs, and orchestras, to dissect the influences of early musical training and genetics on the development of this ability. Their results showed that early musical training appeared to be necessary but not sufficient for the development of perfect pitch. Forty percent of musicians who had begun training at or before 4 years of age reported having perfect pitch, whereas only 3% of those who had initiated training at or before 9 years of age did so. Self-reported perfect pitch possessors were four times more likely to report another perfect-pitch possessor in their families than were non-perfect-pitch possessors. These data suggest that both early (during the “critical period”) musical training and genetic predisposition are needed for the development of perfect pitch.

Here is an article I found about the part of the brain that is responsible for perfect pitch.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s593744.htm