Sound Observations on Absolute Pitch

My mother had absolute pitch, but she did not pass it on to me. My piano playing was hell for both of us: for me because of her incredulous “Can’t you hear what you’re doings?” and for her, I suppose, just having to listen to my imperfect tones.

I’d always assumed that her gift meant that she was better than I, a more sensitive and somehow more highly evolved member of our species. That she was different is beyond doubt. Researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered that individuals with absolute pitch have access to a set of internal “standards,” hardware, in the current computer idiom, that allows them to name any of 50 tones without having to think.

Music Students in Study

Using volunteer music students, psychologists tested their theory by monitoring the musicians as they listened to tones in a random sequence and identified each as rapidly as possible. Their mental processes were tracked on electroencephalographs. Students with absolute pitch erred only in the matter of octaves, not of tone, and they worked faster. Most significant, those with absolute pitch did not have to process the problem as reflected in brain activity. They simply knew the right answer. The others had to think.

Which is to say that when it comes to musical ability, people like my mother may have more in common with songbirds and gibbons than with amateur violinists, like Albert Einstein. The ability to produce harmonically satisfying sounds is not unique to Homo sapiens. Animals of species as far from each other as croaker fish and bullfrogs, sparrows and orangutans, produce rhythmic, often melodious combinations of sounds that are specifically theirs.

Thus, producing music is not limited to our own species. And neither is the ability to respond. A gorilla I once “interviewed” in a zoo near Birmingham, England, had been raised in a private home after he had been rescued, as an infant, from a pet shop. Apparently depressed by whatever events had separated him from his mother, he would not sleep at night until his human foster parents turned on the BBC’s Third Program, the classical music station. He was fully adult and weighed 300 pounds when I met him, and was still lured into his sleeping quarters at twilight by the sounds of Bach and Beethoven. Laboratory rats also have musical preferences, selecting, when given a choice, the harmony of Mozart over the atonality of Schoenberg.

Music and the Animal World

Now Frank R. Wilson, a neurologist at the University of California’s Medical Center in San Francisco, suggests in “Tone Deaf and All Thumbs” (Viking, 1986) that producing a song and responding to harmonies is not all that music is about. He argues that music, like language, distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world. Marveling at the variety of skills at work simultaneously in performing musicians and in people listening to music, he has explored the literature on the functioning of the brain and concludes that creating and responding to music entails “a power of synthesis of auditory and cognitive skills unique in the animal kingdom.”

While other animals can create one song or respond to sounds we have created, the human auditory and muscular systems and their connections with the rest of the brain allow us alone constantly to modify our skills as we consciously search for new ways to employ sound.

Wilson suggests that the ability to create music stems from the basic biological rhythms of our bodies: our heartbeat and breathing. Other animals share these rhythms, but none has gone beyond a simple repertory. As a species we think in rhythms. Wilson draws an analogy between the mental processes of sight-reading musicians and those of typists. They share an ability to send messages from their brains to the fingers, which in turn act far more swiftly than the notes, or words, can be understood.

Typists ‘Play’ Letters on Keyboard

An examination of the mental gymnastics of typists reveals that speedy typists “play” letters as if they were rhythmically scored. The brain translates letters and words into rhythms, which are then quickly interpreted by our fingers.

Absolute pitch may be a vestigial talent of our primate ancestors. Members of species that court with a specific song may be at an advantage if they know the right tones without having to think. But absolute pitch can be a brake on creativity. I have been told that violinists with this talent find it difficult to play with orchestras because they are unable to modify their tone to harmonize with the other instruments. Music is probably universal in the animal kingdom, but human music differs from the rest because we alone are constantly creating and elaborating upon new combinations of sound.