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Behaves So Strangely

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

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] Trevor Gureckis from New York, NY September 26, 2007 - 11:29AM

    I enjoyed this episode, although I was a little concerned by the Diana Deutsch interview. The speech-music bit was presented as if she single handedly discovered this property at home drinking tea.

    Composer Steve Reich demonstrated this effect in "Come Out", a tape piece written in 1966. This date precedes any of Diana Deutsch's literature on the subject. He later integrated this idea into a full musical language with works like "Different Trains" from 1988 and continues to this day.

    (i'm sure this has been pointed out by someone else by now, but just in case... )

    t


  • [2] E. Dean Sahutske from Detroit MI November 30, 2007 - 02:53PM

    Great episode. We do a show called Detroit JazzStage - http://www.jazzstage.us . One of our guests, Faruq Z. Bey, discussed the relationship between spoken inflection and musical expression. It is fascinating and reinforces the idea that music is conversation.

    http://www.jazzstage.us/index.php?post_id=142596

    http://jazzspotlite.com/index.php?post_id=249638


  • [3] Alistair Mills from Peron, France June 08, 2008 - 02:53PM

    A friend called my attention to this program and I downloaded it and listened to it. It was very interesting, educational and entertaining. Well done.


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