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Radiolab / August 05, 2007 / Behaves So Strangely

Behaves So Strangely

Sunday, August 05, 2007
piano child

We'll kick off the chase with Diana Deutsch, a professor specializing in the Psychology of Music, who could extract song out even the most monotonous of drones. (Think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller. Bueller.)

For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA 'perfect') pitch. And, nope, English isn't one of them.

What is perfect pitch anyway? And who cares? Deutsch, along with Jad and Robert, will duke it out over the merits of perfect pitch. A sign of genius, a nuisance, or an evolutionary superpower? You decide. (We can't).

» Diana Deutsch's Website

» Hear Musical Illusions

» Tone Language Speakers and Perfect Pitch


Comments

  • [1] Irwin Schneiderman from 203 E 72 St NY August 05, 2007 - 07:07PM

    Great, informative show. I now know why Jiulliard is full of young people from the far east
  • [2] Michael Golubov from Cortlandt Manor, New York August 05, 2007 - 08:20PM

    Having:

    1) Seen Fantasia as a kid

    2) Attended Juilliard

    3) Programmed Computers for a living

    I would like to comment:

    1) The Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia was about Dinosaurs - specifically a Brontosaurus getting devoured by a Tyrannosaurus - hardly 'cute mushrooms'. I think for once, Disney began to get it right.

    2) I don't think that Stravinsky's main purpose was to produce novelty. I have been listening to Rite of Spring for many years and still find it disturbing, even though I more or less know what's coming next. For that matter much of Beethoven is disturbing and 'contemporary' in similar fashion. Familiarity with the 'hidden patterns' does not kill the excitement.

    3) Any competant music student at a College or Conservatory can produce authentic sounding examples of music whose rules have been laid down by existing composers. Some of these examples can be very attractive and even moving. The fact that these rules can be extracted and put into a computer program is really not such a big deal.

    I am usually very impressed by what I hear in Radio Lab, but in this case, I think that you could have done your homework better.


  • [3] JOhn McGrath from Great Meadows NJ August 07, 2007 - 06:52PM

    hi

This thread is closed.


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