EAR TRAINING AND PERFECT PITCH zt

EAR TRAINING AND PERFECT PITCH
Learn why the entire population of tonal language speaking cultures have perfect pitch.
Also learn about the Absoute Time.
EVOLUTION OF PERFECT PITCH, ABSOLUTE PITCH
Music is Language Language is Music
The Evolutionary Roots of Language


Can a person be born with Perfect Pitch or born tone deaf? TONAL LANGUAGES
Tonal languge speaking cultures have perfect pitch because their babies learn that the meaning of words depends on it\'s pitch.


Babies excercise and develop perfect pitch when the brain is plastic enough to do it. There is a finite window of time when this can be done. Non Tonal Language cultures who don\'t depend on pitch for word meaning will not produce people with perfect pitch.

Nature Neuroscience 2007
Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns Music and speech are very cognitively demanding auditory phenomena generally attributed to cortical rather than subcortical circuitry. We examined brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch and found that musicians show more robust and faithful encoding compared with nonmusicians. These results not only implicate a common subcortical manifestation for two presumed cortical functions, but also a possible reciprocity of corticofugal speech and music tuning, providing neurophysiological explanations for musicians\' higher language-learning ability.
The Mandarin word mi means to squint when delivered in a level tone, to bewilder when spoken in a rising tone, and rice when given in a falling then rising tone. The researchers recorded neural responses from the brains of volunteers during the experiments. Half the volunteers had at least six years of training in a musical instrument starting before the age of 12. The others had no more than three years of musical experience.All were native English akers who had no knowledge of Mandarin.
Even with their attention focused on the movie, and though the sounds had no linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians, said neuroscientist Patrick Wong at Northwestern University.Wong emphasized these results were seen in more or less everyday people. You don\'t have to be a top musician to find these kinds of effects.

Surprisingly, the researchers found these changes occurred in the brainstem, the ancient part of the brain responsible for controlling automatic, critical body functions such as breathing and heartbeat. Music was thought largely to be the province of the cerebral cortex, where higher brain functions such as reasoning, thought and language are seated. The brainstem was thought to be unchangeable and uninvolved in the complex processes linked with music.

These results show us how malleable to experience the brainstem actually is, Kraus said of the findings detailed in the April issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. We think music engages higher level functions in the cortex that actually tune the brainstem.

While these gate-barring songs are reserved mainly for tourists and official guests, the Dong song-style is a form of communication every child learns from the age of 5. And they sing on key, on rhythm, perfectly a capella, in tune with one another, Tan says. But Dimen\'s rich oral history is at risk. Only one woman can sing the hours-long story that recounts the entire story of the Dimen people and the younger generation doesn\'t seem interested in learning it.


Speaking Tonal Languages is responsible for Perfect Pitch 11/9/04
A new study concludes that young musicians who speak Mandarin Chinese can learn to identify isolated musical notes much better than English speakers can. Fewer than one American in 10,000 has absolute pitch, which means they can identify or produce a note without reference to any other note. Also called perfect pitch, this skill requires distinguishing sounds that differ by just 6 percent in frequency. Five years ago researchers led by Diana Deutsch of the University of California at San Diego found that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese frequently match this level of precision during ordinary speech. In these so-called tonal languages, changing pitch can completely alter the meaning of words. For example, the Mandarin word ma means mother when the vowel is a constant high pitch, but means hemp when pronounced with a rising pitch. Until now, it was not known whether this precision in linguistic pitch transferred to musical tones. 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. f 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. In both groups, students who started their musical instruction later were less likely to have absolute pitch, and none of the Rochester students that began training after their eighth birthday had the ability.
Deutsch suggests that for students who speak a tonal language, acquiring absolute pitch is like learning a second language, which becomes much more difficult after a “critical period” of development. For students who speak a nontonal language such as English, however, absolute pitch is more like a first language, for which the critical period occurs at a much younger age. One limitation of the study was that all of the Mandarin speakers from the Chinese institute were also ethnically Chinese, so genetic differences could explain some of the effect. --Don Monroe

Mandarin, a tone (tonal) language.
In tone languages, a single word can differ in meaning depending on pitch patterns called tones. For example, the Mandarin word mi delivered in a level tone means to squint, in a rising tone means to bewilder, and in a dipping (falling then rising) tone means rice. English, on the other hand, only uses pitch to reflect intonation (as when rising pitch is used in questions).
The relationship between the brainstem -- a lower order brain structure thought to be unchangeable and uninvolved in complex processing -- and the neocortex, a higher order brain structure associated with music, language and other complex processing. The findings also are consistent with studies by Kraus and her research team that have revealed anomalies in brainstem sound encoding in some children with learning disabilities which can be improved by auditory training.

Chinese: the first clear correlation between language and genetic variation.

Perfect Pitch in Tone Language Speakers Carries Over to Music: Potential for Acquiring the Coveted Musical Ability May be Universal at Birth Our new results follow up on a 1999 study, in which some of us made a startling discovery while exploring the realm of language rather than music. The 1999 study tested native speakers of two tone languages, Mandarin and Vietnamese. In tone languages, words get their meaning in part from the pitches in which the vowels are pronounced. (In Mandarin, for example, the word ma means mother when spoken in the first tone, hemp in the second tone, horse in the third tone and a reproach in the fourth tone.) The study found that Mandarin and Vietnamese speakers displayed a remarkably precise and stable form of absolute pitch in reciting lists of words. Based on these findings, we proposed that absolute pitch originated in human history as a feature of speech. We further proposed that tone language speakers naturally acquire this feature in the first year of life, during the period in which infants acquire other features of their native language . On this line of reasoning, absolute pitch for music might then be acquired by tone language speakers in the same way as they would acquire the pitches of a second tone language. We might therefore expect to find a much higher prevalence of absolute pitch for music among tone language speakers than among speakers of nontone languages such as English.

Listen to the Pitch change when teaching a word. It goes high at the end of the sentence and the