You might think singer Bing Crosby, the 20th century crooner whose biggest hit was “White Christmas”, would not share much musical common ground with Jimi Hendrix, the 20thcentury guitar-god whose biggest hit was “Purple Haze” (except perhaps that their two best-selling hits both involved pigments).
But you would be wrong.
At a fundamental level, the musical aptitudes of Bing and Jimi were identical. They both had perfect pitch, the famously unusual capacity that is the envy of many in the musical world. It’s also known as absolute pitch, an ability allowing you to identify the frequency of a given note with no external cueing. If someone plays an “A” on the piano, a musician with absolute pitch will be able to name it. Or any other note. It is a relatively rare phenomenon, resident in about one in ten thousand people.
The ability isn’t confined to musical notes, interestingly. People with absolute pitch can detect the frequency of anything. A person with the gift once told me this as we entered a lecture hall: “That air conditioner is out of tune!” He could identify the pitch of someone’s footsteps strolling along a gravelly sidewalk. Or the hum of electricity coming from loose wires in the electrical sockets of older homes. Or the vibrations of my cell phone. “Your phone vibrates in D,” he’d say, “but mine’s in B-flat.”
What do we know about this extraordinary talent? Are you born with it? Can you acquire it if you’re not? How does that relate to our discussion about how the brain processes music?
Let’s talk about the origins of absolute pitch.
NATURE AND NURTURE
As with most complex human behaviors, there are both genetic and environmental components. Perfect pitch tends to run in families, the same genetic variant showing up in both Canadian and Finnish populations. Twin studies seem to confirm this heritability. If one person in an identical twin pair has absolute pitch, their sibling is more likely to share that talent when compared to fraternal (non-identical) pairs. There are several genetic hotspots associated with the capability, one resident on chromosome eight.
Research shows that environment can play a strong role in acquiring the behavior, too. Babies born into cultures who speak tonal languages (like Mandarin) have a greater prevalence of absolute-pitchers than babies born in non-tonal languages, like German.
Perfect pitch can be taught to some people, even as adults. The major requirement is that they have a good short-term memory for sounds, something called auditory working memory. The training is more likely to work when the subjects are young, however. And I do mean young (think four-year-olds) compared to older people (anybody over age nine).
How these findings relate to the brain’s music module is not clear. People with absolute pitch have a bigger auditory cortex, the region above your ears that processes sound. Exactly what that means, however, is still a mystery. As we like to say whenever there are such unsatisfactory findings, the field awaits more research.
Except that their best-selling songs were all about colors, it will be a long time before we know what Bing and Jimi actually had in common.
REFERENCES
Herceg, A., & Szabó, P. "Absolute Pitch: A Literature Review of Underlying Factors, with Special Regard to Music Pedagogy." Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain. https://doi.org/10.1037/pmu0000298 (2023).
Wesseldijk, Laura et al. "Music and Genetics." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 152 (2023): 105302.
Witynski, M. "Perfect Pitch, Explained." UChicago News https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/what-is-perfect-pitch#:~:text=Perfect%20pitch%20refers%20to%20a,a%20given%20note%20on%20cue.(2024).
Theusch, E. et al. "Genome-Wide Study of Families with Absolute Pitch Reveals Linkage to 8q24.21 and Locus Heterogeneity." Am J Hum Genet. 85, no. 1 (2009): 112-19.
The genetic component may have a linkage to autism:
https://www.kennedykrieger.org/stories/interactive-autism-network-ian/perfect-pitch-autism-rare-gift#:~:text=Perfect%20pitch%20may%20be%20associated,to%20autism.%228%20Dr.