Research About Absolute Pitch Education in Young Children
Musical Benefits in Tonal Languages
“We found a very clear difference between the two populations,” Deutsch said. “In Mandarin speakers, perfect pitch appears to be not rare, but rather a readily acquired ability.”
“The study results, Deutsch said, ‘are very like what you would expect if you were dealing with a speech-related system. Tone appears to be analogous to vowel quality and other linguistic features acquired during infancy.'”
“‘The findings support the notion that babies can acquire perfect pitch as part of learning a language, which can later generalize to musical tones,’ Deutsch said.”
The Taneda Method
“A child can be expected to learn absolute pitch before they are 4½ years old.”
“The best time to begin training is between 3-3½. Parents often don’t think of their children as “teachable” at this age, and neglect the best time for learning absolute pitch.”
“A positive atmosphere is crucial. Preschool children can only be taught if the material is made entertaining and fun, so that the children will want to play. Teaching preschool children should never involve mechanical drilling or rote lessons.”
The Findings of Diana Deutsch
Radiolab Podcast Featuring Diana Deutsch
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Radiolab Podcast About Musical Language
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“When we name a color, for example as green, we do not do this by viewing a different color, determining its name, and comparing the relationship between the two colors. Instead, the labeling process is direct and immediate. Consider, also, that note naming involves choosing between only 12 possibilities; namely the 12 notes within the octave… This should not be difficult; indeed, it should be trivial for professional musicians…”
“The evidence strongly indicates that the problem is not one of long term memory for pitch, but is instead related to verbal labeling, and so to speech processing.”
“At best, Brady’s report underscores the extreme difficulty of acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood, in contrast with its unconscious and effortless acquisition in early childhood.”
“There is considerable evidence that absolute pitch is associated with early musical training – and the earlier the musical training the stronger the association. In a large scale survey10, 40% of respondents who began music lessons before age 4 stated that they possessed absolute pitch, and this percentage decreased with increasing age of onset of music lessons, so that only 3% of those who began music lessons after age 9 stated that they possessed the ability.”
“Lennenberg11 was the first to argue persuasively that the acquisition of speech involves a critical period. Learning a second language after puberty is self-conscious and labored; and even following many years of experience, a second language that is learned in adulthood is generally spoken with a ‘foreign accent’…For example, children who were socially isolated early in life, and so were deprived of the opportunity to acquire speech, were unable to acquire normal language when they were later placed in a normal environment…The timeframe for absolute pitch acquisition, as a function of age of onset of music lessons, appears to be remarkably similar to that for the acquisition of a second language.”
“The case for a link between absolute pitch and speech is strengthened by consideration of tone languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese. In these languages, words take on entirely different meanings depending on the [tone] which they are enunciated. This contrasts with nontone languages such as English, in which pitch is employed to convey prosody and emotional tone, but is not involved in determining the meaning of individual words. For example, in Mandarin the word ‘ma’ when spoken in the first tone means ‘mother’, in the second tone means ‘hemp’, in the third tone means ‘horse’, and in the fourth tone means a reproach. So pitches in such languages are employed to create verbal features, analogous to consonants and vowels. Analogously, when people with absolute pitch identify the sound of the note F# as ‘F#’, or the note B as ‘B’ they are also associating a pitch with a verbal label.”
“Given the evidence on critical periods for the acquisition of speech, we can then hypothesize that such circuitry is developed very early in life, during the period in which infants acquire other features of their native language. So if the opportunity to form such associations is unavailable during this critical period, these associations later become very difficult to acquire. Indeed, it has even been argued that when infants acquire nontone languages, they learn to disregard absolute pitches, since individual words in nontone languages carry the same meaning regardless of the pitch level in which they are pronounced. I and my colleagues have therefore been examining the conjecture that absolute pitch is initially acquired by tone language speakers as a feature of speech, and that its rarity in speakers of nontone languages such as English can be explained by the lack of opportunity to acquire it in infancy.”
“Because pitch is critically important to conveying meaning in tone languages, we would expect that, in such languages, the pitch range of a person’s speaking voice would be particularly consistent across time. And indeed, as described in the entry on Absolute Pitch, we found that speakers of the tone languages Mandarin and Vietnamese were remarkably consistent in the pitches with which they pronounced the same list of words on different days.”
“This finding indicates that AP is associated with an unusually large auditory memory span, including memory for speech sounds, and this in turn could facilitate the development of connections between pitches and their spoken labels early in life. The finding could therefore explain why some nontone language speakers acquire AP while most others, with equivalent age-of-onset and duration of musical training, do not do so.”
-Absolute Pitch is Associated with a Large Auditory Digit Span: A Clue to its Genesis, Diana Deutsch
“To address this question, Deutsch and her colleagues compared 115 advanced music students from Rochester, New York, with 88 students from Beijing. In results to be presented at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego on November 17, the scientists found that the Mandarin speakers were much more likely to have absolute pitch than were English speakers who had started musical training at the same age. For example, 60 percent of Beijing students who had begun studying music between the ages of four and five years old passed a test for absolute pitch, whereas only 14 percent of the American students did.”
-Speaking Tonal Languages Promotes Perfect Pitch
The Importance of Starting Early
“Previous studies have suggested that early musical training is the single most important factor for the development of AP (Takeuchi and Hulse 1993). Our study confirmed the importance of early musical training for the development of AP, since nearly all self-reported AP possessors stated that their formal musical training had begun at age X6 years. The correlation between early musical training and AP could be explained by a developmental critical period for AP, during which the brains of some individuals are particularly amenable to the establishment of new circuits or to the fine-tuning of pre-existing circuits involved in pitch perception. The existence of such a critical period has been demonstrated for singing behavior in songbirds and for language development in humans (Doupe 1993; Neville 1991).”
Brain Function
“In people with absolute pitch, the neurophysiological activity in the frontal and auditory cortex are synchronized, which suggests a close functional connection.”
“The results are not only important to understand absolute pitch, but also efficient auditory processing: “Auditory perception doesn’t only depend on the integrity of the auditory cortex, but also especially on the linking of the auditory cortex with superordinate brain structures that process memory information,” sums up Jäncke. Based on these results, it might be possible to develop training measures…”
“The Absolute Pitch musicians had a significantly larger auditory cortex capable of representing distinct tones without a reference note. “
“Researchers have tried to identify the mechanisms underlying this ability. A 2008 study at McGill University found that those with absolute pitch had a greater amount of grey matter in a brain region near the right auditory cortex that has been previously shown to have a role in the processing of pitch. In addition, cortical thickness in absolute pitch individuals is greater in the right auditory cortex and in parts of the prefrontal cortex that are activated during musical tasks. This suggests that those with absolute pitch have stronger brain activity in these brain regions.”
“It follows from this perspective on AP that the genetic/biological contributions (presumably existing to varying degrees throughout the larger population) give rise to a number of interacting features, including the ability to retain isolated information, a cognitive predilection towards field-independent/narrow attention processing [3], and perhaps an auditory system capable of rendering unusually salient and rich descriptions of the stimuli [4].”
“The first suggestion of distinguishing anatomy came by way of an in vivo study by Schlaug et al. [9] showing that the typical leftward hemispheric asymmetry of the surface area of the planum temporale (first shown in 1968 by Geschwind and Levitsky in post-mortem brains) was exaggerated in the brains of Absolute Pitch musicians compared to their non-Absolute Pitch musician cohort.”
Musical Illusions, Perfect Pitch and Other Curiosities with Diana Deutsch
Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego, presents several musical illusions that she has discovered, showing that people can differ strikingly in the way they hear simple musical patterns. She also explains why perfect pitch is rare in most populations, but not among speakers of tonal languages, such as Mandarin.