IF YOU want your child to have perfect pitch like musical maestros Mozart and Chopin, then start them early on Mandarin or Vietnamese lessons. The likelihood of developing perfect pitch seems to be strongly linked to the language people speak, confirming that children can pick up the ability when they are very young.
Estimates suggest that perfect pitch is very rare in the US and Europe, with only about 1 in 10,000 people being able to hear a single tone and identify it as middle C, for instance. But it is slightly more common in people who start musical training under five.
Also, a by psychologist of the University of California, San Diego, showed that perfect pitch is common in Chinese music students who speak Mandarin. Mandarin, like Cantonese and Vietnamese, is a tonal language in which the pitch of a spoken word is essential to its meaning. 鈥淚n my experience, musicians in China don鈥檛 regard perfect pitch as anything remarkable because it鈥檚 very common,鈥� says Deutsch.
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To find out if Chinese people have a genetic advantage, Deutsch鈥檚 team tested 203 music students for perfect pitch 鈥� they had to identify all 36 notes from three octaves played in haphazard order. Those tested included 27 ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese students who had different levels of fluency in the tonal language learned from their parents.
It turned out that the Asian students scored no better than white students if they weren鈥檛 fluent in their parents鈥� language (). But very fluent students scored highly, getting about 90 per cent of the notes correct on average (see diagram). 鈥淭hey did incredibly well. It was overwhelming,鈥� says Deutsch.
This suggests that learning a tonal language plays a far greater role in perfect pitch than genes. 鈥淚t really looks as though infants should acquire perfect pitch if they are given the opportunity to attach verbal labels to musical notes at the age when they learn speech,鈥� concludes Deutsch.
