Radiolab
Behaves So Strangely
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
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
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
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.
Windows 
Windows 
Windows 
Search current and archival WNYC broadcasts. More
Email us at radiolab@wnyc.org
- The Leonard Lopate Show: The Lyme Disease Epidemic (July 01, 2008)
- The Leonard Lopate Show: Underreported: Nurse-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care (July 03, 2008)
- The Leonard Lopate Show: Give Us This Day, Our Daily Meds (June 30, 2008)
- The Brian Lehrer Show: Before There was Stephen Colbert, There was George Carlin (July 02, 2008)
- The Leonard Lopate Show: The End of Food (June 30, 2008)