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for an unusually long critical period might have a genetic basis, though other predisposing factors could also be responsible.
Evidence that an innate predisposition may be involved
in the acquisition of absolute pitch by people in our culture
comes from findings that Western musicians with absolute
pitch tend to exhibit an unusual brain asymmetry. The
planum temporale—a brain region that is important to
speech processing—is larger on the left than on the right in
most people. The degree of this asymmetry has been found,
on a statistical basis, to be larger among musicians with
absolute pitch than among those who did not possess this
Summary and conclusions
Viewed simply as a musical ability, absolute pitch pres- ents us with an enigma. What would be the adaptive signifi- cance of a rare musical ability that is subject to a critical peri- od with a time course very similar to that of speech? And why should most people have an implicit form of absolute pitch, yet be unable to perform the simple task of naming notes that are presented in isolation? On the other hand, if we assume that early in human history absolute pitch was packaged with other features of speech, and that the circuitry responsible for its processing can also be applied to musical tones, we have a viable framework for understanding absolute pitch and its characteristics, particularly its rarity in our linguistic culture.
At a more general level, there is currently much debate
concerning the relationships between the brain structures
underlying speech on the one hand and music on the
37
References for further reading:
1 E. O. Deutsch, Mozart: A documentary biography, 3rd ed. (Simon and Schuster, London, 1990).
2 J. Profita and T. G. Bidder, “Perfect pitch,” Am. J. Med. Gen. 29, 763–771 (1988).
3 N. Geschwind and M. Fusillo, “Color-naming defects in associ- ation with alexia,” Arch. Neurol. 15, 137–146 (1966).
4 G. R. Lockhead and R. Byrd, “Practically perfect pitch,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 70, 387–389 (1981).
5 E. M. Burns and S. L. Campbell, “Frequency and frequency-ratio resolution by possessors of absolute and relative pitch: Examples of categorical perception?,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 2704–2719 (1994).
6 K. Miyazaki, “Perception of musical intervals by absolute pitch possessors,” Music Percept., 9, 413–426 (1992).
36
ent unknown.
ability.
However, the reason for this association is at pres-
The evidence and arguments presented in this paper are consistent with the view that while certain aspects of speech and music are subserved by separate brain mecha- nisms, other aspects of these two forms of communication are subserved by common neural circuitry.AT
other.
7 A. Rakowski and M. Morawska-Büngeler, “In search of the cri- teria for absolute pitch,” Arch. Acoust. 12, 75–87 (1987).
8 D. Deutsch, “Paradoxes of musical pitch,” Sci. Am., 267, 88–95 (1992).
9 D. Deutsch, “Some new sound paradoxes and their implica- tions,” In Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds; Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 336, 391–397 (1992).
10 R. N. Shepard, “Circularity in judgments of relative pitch,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 2346–2353 (1964).
11 D. Deutsch, “The tritone paradox: An influence of language on music perception,” Music Percept. 8, 335–347 (1991).
12 D. Deutsch, T. Henthorn, and M. Dolson, “Speech patterns heard early in life influence later perception of the tritone para- dox,” Music Percept. 21, 357–372 (2004).
13 D. Deutsch, T. North, and L. Ray, “The tritone paradox: Correlate with the listener's vocal range for speech,” Music Percept. 7, 371–384 (1990).
14 D. Deutsch, T. Henthorn, and M. Dolson, “Absolute pitch, speech, and tone language: Some experiments and a proposed framework,” Music Percept. 21, 339–356 (2004).
15 M. Dolson, “The pitch of speech as a function of linguistic com- munity,” Mus. Percept. 11, 321–331 (1994).
16 E. Terhardt and M. Seewann, “Aural key identification and its relationship to absolute pitch,” Mus. Percept. 1, 63–83 (1983).
17 A. R. Halpern, “Memory for the absolute pitch of familiar songs,” Memory and Cognit. 17, 572–581 (1989).
18 D. J. Levitin, “Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence for the production of learned melodies,” Percept. and Psychophys. 56, 414–423 (1994).
19 W. D. Ward, “Absolute pitch,” The Psychology of Music, 2nd Edition edited by D. Deutsch, (Academic Press, San Diego, 1999) p. 265–298.
20 S. Baharloo, P. A. Johnston, S. K. Service, J. Gitschier, and N. B. Freimer, “Absolute pitch: An approach for identification of genetic and nongenetic components,” Am. J. Hum. Gen. 62, 224–231 (1998).
21 A. H. Takeuchi and S. H. Hulse, “Absolute pitch,” Psychol. Bull. 113, 345–361 (1993).
22 P. T. Brady, “Fixed scale mechanism of absolute pitch,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 48, 883-887 (1970).
23 E. H. Lennenberg, Biological Foundations of Language (Wiley, New York, 1967).
24 S. Curtiss, Genie: A psycholinguistic study of a modern day ‘wild child’ (Academic Press, New York, 1977).
25 E. Bates, “Language development,” Curr. Op. Neurobiol. 2, 180–185 (1992).
18 Acoustics Today, October 2006