Page 17 - Fall 2006

qualitatively and quantitatively.
These findings indicate that speakers of Vietnamese and
Mandarin possess a remarkably precise form of absolute pitch for the tones of their language, which was here reflect- ed in their enunciation of words. Only one of the 22 tone lan- guage speakers in the study had received any significant musical training. We can therefore hypothesize that this abil- ity resulted from their early acquisition of tone language, so that they had learned to associate pitches with meaningful words in infancy.
So far, we have been arguing for the conjecture that absolute pitch, which has traditionally been viewed as a musical faculty, originally evolved to subserve speech. This leads to the further conjecture that when infants acquire absolute pitch as a feature of the tones of their language, and they later reach the age at which they can begin taking music lessons, they can then acquire absolute pitch for musical tones in the same way as they would acquire the tones of a second tone language. In contrast, children who instead have acquired an intonation language such as English would need to learn the pitches of musical tones as though they were the tones of a first language. So, given the findings showing the extreme difficulty in acquiring a first language beyond early childhood,24,30 speakers of an intonation language should be at a serious disadvantage in acquiring absolute pitch for musi- cal tones.
This line of reasoning in turn leads to the conjecture that
the prevalence of absolute pitch should be much higher among tone language speakers than among speakers of into- nation languages such as English. To explore this, my col- leagues and I examined the prevalence of absolute pitch in
33
jects from within either group.
Our test for absolute pitch consisted of the 36 notes that
spanned the three-octave range from the C below Middle C (f0 =131 Hz) to the B almost three octaves above (f0 = 988 Hz). To minimize the use of relative pitch as a cue, all inter- vals between successive notes were larger than an octave. The notes were piano samples that were generated on a Kurzweil synthesizer and recorded on CD. The subjects listened to the CD, and identified each note in writing.
We divided each group into subgroups by age of onset of musical training, and to make meaningful comparisons we considered only those subgroups that contained at least nine subjects. Figure 3 shows, for each of the subgroups, the per- centages of subjects who obtained a score of at least 85% on
The first group consist- ed of 88 first year students who were enrolled in a required course at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. These subjects all spoke Mandarin. The second group con- sisted of 115 first year students who were enrolled in a required course at Eastman School of Music. These were all nontone language speakers, and both their parents were non- tone language speakers. All students who were invited to take the test agreed to do so, so there was no self-selection of sub-
two large groups of music students.
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Enigma of Absolute Pitch 15