June 6, 2019 • 42 mins
Perfect pitch, or absolute pitch, is when you can sing a note with no reference from other notes, perfectly on key. Is it an asset? Chuck says yes. Learn all about this musical rarity today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello. There, It's me Josh, and I'm doing my live
show The End of the World or How I Learned
to Start Worrying and Love Humanity on June in Minneapolis
and in Washington, d C. Go to the Miracle Theater
dot com for d C tickets and the Parkway Theater
dot com for tickets to the Minneapolis show. I'll see
(00:21):
you soon. Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w.
Chiuck Bryant. F that was nice. And there's Jerry Rowland
(00:44):
over there the jar stir rolling on as always. Don't
look at me like that weirdly, I said, F what
was it? I don't know. Let's see you don't know.
This made me think a lot about and singing and
pitch and stuff, and made me think about you and
singing and pitched too, did it? Because I tried? I
(01:07):
know I don't have absolute pitch, but I tried. I
was just like, well, let me test myself. And I
went to the little quiet room here, and the only
way I knew how to test it was to think
of a song. I know, that starts and like, see that,
I know how to play and sing, And then I did.
I sang a see and then I hit the play
button on the YouTube clip of a C and the
(01:30):
C was way higher than I was singing it. But
I think I was in just a different key. It
wasn't like off like oh, it was like, oh, that
sounds like a C in a different octave. So the
way all that works is confusing. Have you have you
ever heard of Charlie Pouth? No, so you we found
this guy. She watches the um John Mayor. You know,
(01:53):
John Mayor has an Instagram TV show every week. I
did not know that, but I know he's big on Instagram.
It's actually pretty well. He went so far as to
create a show good for him. He had a guy
on named Charlie Pooth and Charlie Pooth is has maybe
the most perfect pitch of anybody on the planet. And
there's videos of this guy like kidding a note and
(02:13):
he's like here's enough, and like he's got a um
what would you call that thing? A little magic machine
that shows you exactly what the pitch is? Okay, that
thing it just peeped like the needle just goes right
to act or e or whatever, and he just like
he's not even looking. It's it's just out of nowhere.
It's really impressive. Does you mean like John Mayer? She
actually has become a fan of John Mayor. All right,
(02:37):
his show is actually worth watching. Yeah, current mood got.
So we're talking about perfect pitch or absolute pitch, and
that is we're going to define it right away here,
unlike us, and that is to do like the poof
does pouf pouf um, which is, if someone says hit
(02:58):
a c with no uh and he with nothing to
compare to, I can just belt out of sea or
recognize the see if someone says what notices, it goes
both ways. It's a double edged talent. It's a double
edged talent. That's what absolute or perfect pitches. So you
might say, like, okay, there's some aliens walking around among us,
(03:18):
and this is how they show themselves. They're able to
produce a no at will. Right, But really, if you
step back and the grabster put this article together for us,
he did a good job. He did. He went to
great links to point out that having absolute pitch, or
what's also called perfect pitch, really is kind of useless.
(03:40):
I don't know if I agree with that he went
to such links. I became to wonder if the grabster
is actually jealous of people who well, he makes a
point quite a bit that you know, it doesn't help
you wrote a song. It doesn't make you anymore creative.
So what it sounded like when you're reading it a
little bit? And that is quite true. It does not.
But make no bones about it. If you're a singer
in a band, having perfect pitch is an asset. It
(04:04):
might be annoying to your bandmates, right there's I saw
this video, these two Japanese kids, and it was what
annoying things that people with perfect pitch to? And uh
yeah it was this one kid was annoying the Jesus
out of another. I could see that cute. I mean,
it's got to be an asset, I would guess. So
sure you know, well you like, let me give you
(04:27):
an example of relative pitch that it gives if you're
in the shower. If if I'm in the shower and
I start singing, um, some Morrissey song. Let's say it
starts out pretty normal, but there's some high notes in there.
Maybe if I really stretch, I can hit. Once I
get to those high notes, I can't even come close.
(04:49):
The reason why is because I started in a higher
key than I should have, because I had no reference
point whatsoever, and it just started singing a big male
strikes again. Oh no, eight, that's way too low, right,
I couldn't do that. I mean, like that sounds perfect. Yeah,
I actually do a pretty good Morrissey. Oh yeah, let's
(05:10):
hear it. Oh I can't do it right now. My
voice is all podcasted out. I'm not gonna humiliate myself
on here. I'm sorry. I'll do it for you later
in the shower. Um be like you got some soap,
you have some soup on your own. Sorry, that's my Morrissey. Alright,
(05:32):
So we should talk about reference um, relative pitch and
having a reference point. That's you can be a great
singer and not have perfect pitch. Um. It is right
in that, like you know, it's not like, oh, you
know a perfect pitch, you're probably not gonna be a
good singer. Or you do a perfect pitch, you're like
such a great creator and songwriter. Those don't have any
(05:54):
to do with one another. But if you've ever been
to see a vocal group, sing like star Land Vocal Band.
Never seen them, but Emily, my wife was in a
show choir and high school, so that's you know, that's
exactly what they did. Um. I believe they had piano accompaniment.
Sometimes it was acapella. But but but if you've seen
an acapella group, you will almost always see a pianist
(06:17):
hit a single note before they start playing. And here
that or they might have like akrat tuner, which is
one of those little things you hold up to your mouth.
It's like a round harmonica pitch pipe. Yeah, I mean
it's a type of pitch pipe. What did you call
it a krat tuner? It was It's like a that's
probably like saying band aid or something or Kleenex proprietary epidemic. Yeah,
(06:40):
I think so. Uh, They're all kind of pitch pipes,
but this is a little cool round one. It's like
a round harmonica. Yeah. Yeah, and they usually wear it
like a medallion around their net. The choir director, do
they I've seen it? Okay? Um. So they would either
blow into one of those pitch pipes or they would
hit a piano key and the choir would all know
in their head they would have that reference point. Then
(07:02):
it's like, all right, here's here's where we start with
our barbershop quartet song. Right. That's either the first note
of the song or the key that the song sung in.
But either way, once they have that and they're like
hey or whatever, they can sing the rest of the
song and key relative to that note. That alone, to
me is impressive. So even relative pitch is impressive to me,
(07:25):
let alone absolute pitch. Well, I mean everyone has relative pitch,
I guess. But if somebody who's like, here's an apoo,
I'd be like, what do you want me to do
with that? Oh, I see what you mean? Yeah, sure,
you know. I wouldn't be able to necessarily keep up
with the rest of the song just because I heard
the first note. Yeah, I almost feel like, yeah, but
you know the song. So like, once you have your
(07:46):
starting point, you're good. I guess. Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a good point. Practiced it. Yeah, And I think
about any smoke could do this. Um. I was inquired,
but we always had piano accompaniment and the piano led
the song. Like, I don't remember a single song we
did Inquire that started with just the vocals acapello. It
(08:09):
was always like a piano intro, so you know exactly
where you are. I was just trying to come up
with a song that starts out like that Bohemian rapid. Sure,
you know what's funny. I was just thinking of the
other Queen song, I Want It All. Oh Yeah, which
I believe starts talking Queen. I thought that was a
Burger King adds Burger Queen. Alright, so h relative pitch,
(08:35):
that's the deal. I feel like we should cover some more,
Like I feel like the other half of this episode
should be tone deafness. We did one on tone deafness.
We did I Swear to God. We did one called
his tone deafness Hereditary, and we talked about how in
the Philippines, if you sing my way in a tone
deaf way at karaoke, you may get stabbed because people
have been stabbed before. I don't remember that one. You
(08:57):
don't remember that, not at all. We talked about tone
deafness for sure, So your plan just fell apart. Yeah,
but I mean there's a lot of I never study
music theory, so I'm an air learner as far as
guitar and all that stuff goes. Did Jarry just preview right, yeah,
she just faced me. Um, but it gets a little
like convoluted when you start talking about keys and octaves
(09:20):
and half steps and whole steps and stuff like that.
The thing that calms me down is when you talk
about science, right, So let's talk science here. When you
talk about pitch pitches all relativity, right, Yes, you're talking
about one note in relation to another note. Is that
other note higher or lower? That's really what pitches, right,
(09:42):
It's it's the gradations of notes and relations to one another. Right. Okay, Um,
if you if you look at what you're talking about scientifically,
you're talking about a sound wave. So really what you're
talking about is the frequency of a note is what
gives it? It's A or it's B or is it
C sharp or something like that, And there is a
(10:02):
whole step between an A and a B, but there's
actually a half step in between. Okay, you know all this? Okay,
how am I doing so far? Am I explaining it? Right? Yeah?
I mean like if you sit at a piano, a
half step is the very next key, whether it's a
black or white, and a whole step is skipping a
(10:24):
key and going to the second key. But I thought
there were some stretches where there are two white keys together,
and that was a full step, which are called natural tones.
There's no half step in between those notes. That's not
how I understand it. That's the that's the piano demo
I saw. Yeah, and the other thing that struck me too.
(10:46):
I never knew this before ever. So you know, like
there's a B B flat and a C sharp or
actually I think could be a B sharp and a
C flat same note. Yeah, what with the whole reason
those things exist? And it's a half note sharper flat is,
but the whole reason it exists to tell you which
way to go on the scale up or down a
(11:07):
half not a half note. Yeah, like I'm trying to
think about in band, you can play an A and
if you move that up one bar, that's an A sharp,
but that's also a B flat because B would be
the next thing up from that middle point. So I
never really knew there were rules for why you would
(11:28):
refer to it as an A sharper a B flat.
From what I understand is to know, all right, you
want to go down, So you're going to going down
to A sharp from a B or you're going up
to a B flat from an A interesting that I
think I probably just got it wrong, that we're mangling
so many things. But what we're talking about is is
(11:48):
what's called the Western musical scale. It's a twelve note
scale and it's made up of ten octaves that humans
can hear. And if each note is a specific wavelength
of frequency of a sound vibration that's the same every
single time, and A always has the same frequency and
B always has the same frequency. If you double that frequency,
you've just gone up an octave, right, And that scale
(12:12):
repeats itself and ascends or descends going into higher lower octaves.
So that was good. People with perfect or absolute pitch
will be able to hear any note on at any
octave on that scale and say, oh that's a A
seven or a B six sharp right, Um. They just
(12:38):
from hearing it, or they'll be able to reproduce it.
So it's not like they can just memorize twelve notes.
They can memorize twelve notes over say ten octaves, they
can recognize them. Yeah. And if you're someone who plays
instruments by ear and sings by ear and can't read music,
um it can you really appreciate Um? Two things, the
(12:59):
simply city of people who write three chord major songs,
and then the complexity, even though it's frustrating of like
an Elton John. So like, if I sit down to
play guitar to an Elton John song, I'll look up
the chords and the words, and nine times out of
ten I'm like, I don't what. I don't even know
this chord. Yeah, and I gotta like go to a
(13:20):
chord book and figure it out. He did all kinds
of crazy chords. That's really diminished minor. I mean, minors
are simple enough, but but but that's in that's it
was still in the Western musical scale, or was incorporating
tones from other musical scales that weren't. No, it was
still the Western. But you know, instead of playing an
F it would be like an F sharp minor seventh
or something. So what do is minor and major? Then? Well,
(13:45):
minor is the saddest of all keys. A minor that's
his final tip reference. So you still get it. Thank
you for explaining it though, and not just letting all
the listeners right in and laugh at me. Um, I
mean I don't know how to explain. I mean, a
minor is variation of the major, but it sounds completely
different and much more like it does sound more sad
(14:07):
and like if I played you in a in an
A minor in a B and a B minor, you go, oh,
we need to get a piano in here for this one.
Can we expense a piano? Maybe we should take a
break while we go get a piano. Let's do it, okay?
In things like chuck and chuck. Sorry, alright, so one
(14:49):
thing we should say chuck when we're talking about as
I'm sorry, absolute, Do you feel like people are keeping
up with this or we just throwing out so much
random information? A little both. I think that music majors
are really just like, oh guys, oh lord, nobody likes
them anyway. But for normal people, you think that they're like, okay,
now I understand what pitches because that's really the goal
(15:11):
here a little bit. We're not we're not explaining anything
to music majors that they don't already know, and we're
actually mangling the stuff that they do know. Right. Uh.
One thing we can say that's pretty easy to understand
is though, is that perfect pitch is? Um, it's a
bit of a on a sliding scale. It's hard to
define like it's either perfect or not perfect, because you
(15:32):
have a range from tone deaf to perfect pitch, and
you may be way closer to perfect pitch and may
even say I have perfect pitch, but not have like
absolute perfect pitch at the time when tested right exactly.
So it's not it's not binary, right, there's it's not
whether they're one of those you have it or you
don't have it kind of things. And it's suggested, is
(15:54):
when we'll talk about it a little more, that everybody
has some level of absolute pitch. It's just some people
are way better right than others, so so much so
that they seem like they have perfect pitch compared to
everybody else. Yeah, I'm not sure I understood that part either,
but we'll get to that. Um. And it's interesting to
note too that this, uh, even if you do have
(16:17):
absolute pitch, you might have trouble identifying the same notes
at different octaves. Um, you're not supposed to. You can't
call yourself a perfect pitch person. Yeah, I guess so right. Yeah,
you have to hang your head in shape. But that's tough.
Identical notes and different octaves are tough, and it results
in some weird um phenomena like the Shepherd tone, which
(16:38):
is really neat um. If you've ever been to a
Christopher Nolan movie, Um, specifically dune Kirk. Did dun Kirk
use it? Well, he uses it all the time, Like
the sound of that motorcycle had a specific name, but
the one batman rides with the two big fat wheels
the cycle. Yeah, I think that's what it's called. Okay,
(17:00):
I think I had another name, didn't it? Or no,
well maybe I think of the Adam West's bat cycling
so um, but he uses that sound. Um, it's called
the Shepherd tone, and it's basically several tones from different
octaves layered on one another. The highest tone gets quieter,
the middle tone stays loud, and the bass tone uh
(17:20):
as sinds and volume, and if you play them all together,
it's this mental trick that your mind can't process. And
it sounds like something that's either going up or down
into infinity basically right, But it's really just the same
thing on a loop over and over again. But it sounds, yeah,
clearly just going up and rising in pitch constantly for infinity.
(17:42):
It's really interesting, really tension creating it really puts you
on edge, not like nails on a chalkboard on edge,
but more like like what's gonna happen? This is still
going on? Uh, And shout out to um Roger Shepherd
from Stanford. He's a psychologists in who I guess discovered
(18:03):
this audio illusion. There also another shout out to Diana
Deutsch who was a researcher for m audio illusions, which
are really interesting. It's like the sound version of an
optical illusion and reveals a lot about how the brain
processes information. Um. She has a site I guess that
you see San Diego that I want everybody to go
(18:26):
to right now, pause the pause the episodes and go
to Deutsch d e U T s C H dot
U C S D dot E d U slash psychology
slash pages. Here's where it gets tricky dot pH P
question mark lowercase I equals to one too. Why didn't
(18:49):
you get a your L shortener for that? I don't know,
Just do it and and thank me later. But it
has She has these um these audio clips that show
how when you hear something spoken over and over again
enough times, the same thing over and over again, it
turns into music to you. It turns into being sung interesting,
(19:10):
and the way that she has it laid out and
demonstrated it is the most mind blowing thing I have
heard in ages. I loved. I went right. I was
like you, you've got to hear this, and it's it's
like I'm watching John Mayre. Shut up, who sings better
than him? This Diana Deutsch, Lady, Wow, I'll have to
hear that. That's pretty cool. You're you're gonna love it.
(19:33):
You will love it, Chuck awesome. Okay, it has really
nothing to do with perfect pitch, but it is just
kind of one of those things where it's like this,
this is worth mentioning to the world. Okay, all right.
So there's this guy named Nicholas uh Slanemski who's a
composer and a music lexicologist and a conductor. He wrote
(19:54):
in his autobiography about having absolute pitch. Basically how like
he kind of um, it was a party trick when
he was a kid, and then when he went to
school to music school, of course, um, he kind of
like kind of thought his s didn't stink because he
had perfect pitch and they didn't have to work his hard.
(20:15):
And he was a little snotty about it, I think
from what I gather from ed summation. And apparently while
he was off just like, hmm, I've got perfect pitch,
all his classmates are actually busting their butts and working
hard and actually writing really good music, and he fell
behind him was like, how could I be falling behind?
I have absolute pitch and he's just leaning on that
(20:36):
too hard he was, so he had kind of a
a moment of inspiration where he's like, Oh, I actually
have to put in the work too, And I think
this is where Ed was kind of getting that it
doesn't actually help. It's good, it's a neat thing to have.
You can't write your own ticket though in the music business.
Because he had perfect pitch, it doesn't help you be
any more creative or anything like that. And as a
(20:56):
matter of fact, Slominski Um points out in that Auto
by bography that, um, there have been plenty of people
who were just master composers like Tchaikovsky and Wagner were
both um. Neither one of them had perfect pitch. And
yet you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who's like
those guys were hacks. You know, they were pretty good,
and they didn't have perfect pitch. So you can do
(21:18):
quite well in music and not have perfect pitch, especially
if you have one of those little round harmonic as
you were talking about Lenny Kravitz harmonica pitch pipe. Um,
it's hard to tell how many people have perfect pitch. Um,
you hear one in ten thousand a lot, But as
Ed points out, it's kind of hard to find any
reference for this that really is accurate or legit. Yeah.
(21:40):
I think he ran into that same thing where you
see the same info on the internet in the same
way everywhere. It means that it's probably not real. I
think so, um, because it's got to be more than
one in ten thousand. Well, he said he found one
that that's found about four percent of the population has it,
so it would be four hundred and four it out
of ten thousand, four times greater than what was previously thought.
(22:05):
That's right. Uh. And you're more likely to have and
this is where it gets interesting, of like where does
it come from? Nature or nurture. You're definitely more likely to, um,
have perfect pitch if you start your training in music
before the age of six. Yeah, there's a critical period
for the brain where it's just mush waiting to be
(22:26):
molded into smarts. So things like language, foreign languages, music, um,
basically anything you can think of that requires talent that
not everybody can do kind of falls into that critical
period where if you start to learn that early on,
before age six, you're going to be able to learn
(22:46):
it way easier than somebody who's an adult trying to
learn it. And so perfect pitch shows up way more frequently,
and kids who had musical training and exposure specifically to
the Western music scale uh at an early age than
it does to two people who were not explosed to it. Yeah.
And also if you speak a tone language uh fluently
(23:10):
and definitely natively, you're more likely to have absolute pitch.
Tone languages are we have a little I mean every
language has a little bit of that. When we people
inflect in English, different things, different tones that can be
different meanings. Oh really, oh really, but we have nothing
(23:34):
on like Mandarin, Chinese or Cantonese. These are real tone
languages where your tones can indicate like the same word
can have five, six, seven different meanings depending on your tone.
Really interesting. Yeah, so people who speak tone languages tend
to have are more likely to have absolute pitch than
people who don't speak tone languages, right, yes, Okay, so
(23:56):
that raises a really good question. Then, Um, there's one
other big clue here, And just because we have the
clues asn't mean we figured out I don't think we
said there. Um is still no full understanding of why
some people have absolute or perfect pitch. Um, but it
also appears more frequently in the population of people with autism.
(24:20):
They tend to have more more frequency of perfect pitch
than people who do not have autism. Yeah, and the
same with I know it correlates to like, uh, supposedly
photographic memory thing synesthesia, which we've talked about and Billy
Joel's a synaesthetz. Yeah, so that might have something to
do with his abilities. So one one UM, actually two
(24:43):
explanations I saw for people with autism is that, UM,
it's believed that they process information piecemeal rather than wholesale,
which would explain rather than hearing like the whole musical
composition that year the individual notes, so it would be
easier for them to be acquainted with the individual will note.
Or Um, they just are more developed. Their sensory input
(25:06):
is way more developed than than people without autism. Those
are the two competing theories for why people with autism
have perfect pitch. More interesting. All right, Well, the whole
question that we talked about is in nature or nurture. Um.
That's sort of a debate that's still going on, UM.
And it's hard to study this stuff, uh universally. First
(25:29):
of all, this seems to apply almost exclusively to the
Western music scale. I think so, right, UM, because that's
what you're doing. You're saying, that's an A, that's an F,
here's n F, here's an A. UM that and what
you're talking about the notes on the Western music scale.
They think that people who have perfect pitch can detect
notes that are more nuanced than the full step or
(25:51):
the half step of the Western music scale. But I
didn't see anywhere where it's like, yes, this translates everywhere
into any music scale. So it does seemed to be
universal from that outset to begin with. Yeah, okay, yeah sure. Uh.
And the other thing that I thought was interesting, you
talked about this at the beginning, UM, about labeling the
(26:12):
sensory input. It's like, you know, they throw the letter
C on that wavelength. Basically, it's no different than than saying, well,
that color is red. It's just a it's just a
label we've created. It was right or it is. I
saw an analogy for this where if somebody with perfect pitch,
(26:33):
if you and I analogize it to somebody who could
pick out color, they could see a blue wall in
somebody's house and then drive to the to the paint
store and pick out that same blue from the wall
of samples. Interesting, it's basically the same thing. But there's
a big clue there with the fact that most people
like that's pretty pretty refined, but most people can look
(26:54):
at something and say that's blue, that's green, that's red.
Because we were almost on the world to a child
trained from a very young age to recognize and identify
and name colors. Not everybody gets that kind of training
around the world with musical notes, right, But where they do,
like in Japan, where far more children are trained more
(27:18):
universally in music, they have found much more prevalences of
absolute pitch there. Okay, which makes sense, right, You're exposed
from a very early age what is an A, what
is an F and you're hitting that critical period. But
that really reveals something important here too, Chuck not everybody.
Not every kid in Japan has absolute pitch. Just like
(27:40):
every kid in Japan can tell you what blue is
or what red is, they can't necessarily all tell you
what an A is or where an F is, right,
They just can't, So that that suggests that there is
perhaps some genetic basis to it. Not everybody can learn
absolute or perfect pitch. All right, I think that's a
good place to break in, and uh, we'll talk more
(28:01):
about your family jeans in perfect pitch right after this,
and things like jo stry All right, Chuck, you said
(28:33):
something about jeans. I'm wearing them, You're always wearing them.
I'm wearing dad jeans, are they They're a little dad jeanie.
Now what our dad jeans? Those look like normal jeans
to me. That's because we both were cool in the
same era, which is twenty years ago. So what faded
his dad jeans? I think it's a little little bag here.
(28:56):
I'm just too old to wear straight up skinny jeans.
Too old, my thighs are too chunky. Yeah, you know
I feel about skinny jeans. I liked it all. Almost
all jeans now are a little stretchy, though they are.
It's like they put elastic in them. Yeah, like every
fabric is a little stretchy. Now it feels like I'm like, oh,
I'm assize thirty. I never knew that. Um. Alright, so
(29:17):
jeans um. Absolute pitch does tend to run in families. Okay,
So clearly it's genetic, right, Well, no, not necessarily. Like
everything that I gathered here is that we just don't know.
There's probably some genetics involved and a lot of uh,
nurture involved that. So that was the old view, and
I think it's still kind of predominant that that that
(29:40):
this was this explained absolute pitch. If I may take
this one, Yeah, that you were born with the genetic
propensity toward absolute pitch. Yeah, Like, if you're Lucy waynewright,
our friend and her mom and her dad are both
professional singers. It's no mistake that Lucy, Martha and Rufus
(30:02):
are all professional singers. There's a genetic component there, for sure.
But the other way to look at it, and this
is the reason why the nature versus nurture debate hasn't
been settled. It's also quite possible that just because Lucy
was exposed to music from a very owning age, including
the critical period. It could have nothing to do with
genetics and could have everything to do with environment. So
(30:24):
the thing that everybody's settled on is it's probably both
that you're you have a genetic propensity toward it, and
that if you are exposed to the Western musical scale
at that critical period before age six, and then you
learn later on like, oh, my parents are will actually
be kind to me and and talk nice to me.
(30:44):
If I show off in front of their friends that
I can do in a off the top of my head,
then that reinforces that and that develops into absolutely a
perfect pitch later on in life. Is that the part
where the child has to see value in it in
order to kind of and I guess that's true with anything. Yeah,
your kid doesn't see value and something, they're not gonna
(31:05):
work towards that, right exactly. See, my parents neither one
of my parents can sing. Really, my sister can't sing,
but my brother and I can both sing. Oh I've
heard you. It's like Angels Scott sing is better than me.
Of course, I mean does that go without saying at
this point? Uh, it's interesting though how that works because
(31:26):
we weren't super exposed to music either a little bit,
but not like my parents weren't big music people that
were like, oh man, let me gotta listen to this record, yeah,
check this track. Yeah. Just that just didn't happen. So
we were discovering music on our own. But I wonder
if my brother gave me the nurture side, because he
was singing and we were inquired and he was giving
(31:48):
me records and stuff. I could totally yeah. I mean,
that's that's nurture right there. It's just not coming from
your parents, but that's still nurturing. I'm just fascinated. I'm
just fast neated by talents period. And like Michelle and
Scott can both draw. I can't draw at all, And
like how that stuff? You know? My mom is an artist?
(32:11):
Oh is she? Yeah? I didn't Oh yeah that's right.
The mural, yeah she. I mean she's a was a
professional artist. And it's just like I can't draw a
stick figure, right, They didn't get passed out. And it's
funny when I say that around my mom, she's like, oh,
you can draw. I remember all the build a cat
stuff he used to do, and Opus the penguin from
bloom County. It's like, Mom, I was tracing. She's like, well,
(32:31):
that takes talent. I'm like, she's like, oh no, it
really does. I never knew she said tracing takes talent.
But I'm just fascinated about talents, especially having a daughter
now and like, is she good at this? Is she
not gonna be good at this? Yeah? I don't know.
Some some of the stuff you can nurture, but some
(32:53):
stuff you just gotta wait and see. It's the it's
an age old question. I I think that anybody who
is like it's a hundred percent nature a hundred percent
nurtures off. Either way, it's got to be a combination
of the two. I mean, we did that episode on
epigenetics that basically proved it's both. You know, it shows
how it's both. So yeah, it's got to be both.
(33:14):
I would I would say absolute pitchfalls under that well,
and with absolute pitch too. It's interesting because the way
I read this is that people can learn it. Yeah,
with practice, I guess even later in life. Yeah. The
thing that really caught my attention is there's a drug
called valpro eight. The aids in neural plasticity, which means
you learn better, you can restructure your brain to learn
(33:37):
new stuff at a later age. Yeah, I had never
heard of that. I had neither. Apparently that treats epilepsy,
bipolar disorder in migraines and can help you saying better
may literally make you smarter as what I'm getting U.
The other thing I took issue with is that this
said much like an American learning German a H. Forty
will never be as fluent as someone born and raised
(33:58):
in Germany. Is that true? Uh? Yeah, I think native
born speakers always have an edge up on I think.
I don't know. I figure if you really immerse yourself,
you moved to Germany, like you could learn it just
as good. Right, maybe. And I've also heard that you're
never truly and this may be one of those dumb
things you hear in elementary school, but you can never
(34:21):
truly be fluent if you don't dream in that language.
And I don't know if that's true, if that's an
old wives tale. I've never heard that you haven't. No,
I've always heard that like after a certain age, you
can't dream in a foreign tongue and thus you're not
quote unquote fluent. That sounds made up. It sounds like
playground stuff like the bar code being the number of
(34:42):
the UM. There's one last part that I thought was
really fascinating. There's a larger part of this debate that
the fact that there are people walking around with absolute
pitch um and not everybody has it suggests something that
we may have a part of our brain that is
(35:04):
left over to sense and detect music in differences in music,
and that to some people that suggests that music singing
specifically actually predated language in our development or evolution. I
could see that totally. Yeah. And the example uses that
a series of sounds was early communication. Sure means he
(35:30):
got me yeah, or you know ah, like you know
big tuktok is saying big mammoth is coming this way.
That was clearly a lookout. Even before you said it,
I was going to say look out. But if you
really hear what I did there, that's singing in a way, right,
it can write it's a tone and eventually over time, um,
that could be um kind of uh systematized, categorize where standardized.
(35:54):
That's what I was looking for. One of those eyes
um where that's just what your group says, and your
group gets grim bigger, and that spreads and eventually turns
into words something more nuanced. So it makes total sense.
The other reason I saw that made sense to me
was that if we were running around nature we heard
birds calling, we heard um cats growling or something like that,
(36:15):
we may start to imitate those things were through clicks
and whistles and all this stuff. If they sound natural,
um much more than like language does. So it makes
total sense that that song would have come before language. Yeah,
I mean I think there's a uh an eight tonality
and and in words and pre words, yeah, pre words
(36:37):
like it doesn't I don't know, because otherwise it just
would have been a series of grunts and clicks and
things like very staccato and short. Yeah. It's almost like
with some of the first person born who was like,
well how do you do? And that was like the
first person to ever talk, and that was the first
sentence ever spoken, you know, like it's a it's a
great question. Uh. If you want to know more about
(36:58):
great questions like absolute pitch, Well, they're friends. We want
to direct you to our beloved website that we put
a lot of blood, sweat and tears into how stuff works.
They got a lot of good stuff for you there Okay, okay,
And since I said okay, it's time for listener mail. Actually,
can I jump back, jump back? Jack we didn't talk
(37:19):
about people who supposedly had perfect pitch. We'll throw some
names out real quick. Oh man, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's
all right. Michael Jackson supposedly had perfect pitch. And there's
this story. This is from Mental Floss. By the way,
there's a story from will I Am who backed Michael
Jackson up in a song and said that he warmed
up for three hours to sing a five minute song
(37:39):
three hours of me Me Me, Me, Me Me Me.
Mariah Carey supposedly discovered she had perfect pitch at the
age of four. Um Ella Fitzgerald, I love this story.
Apparently she was so dead on that her band would
warm up to her voice, so the other way. That's
really it's pretty cool. I love that. Lady bing Crosby,
(38:00):
m his um travel partner, said that sharing a train ride,
he would snore and pitch to the train whistle. That's cute.
That's like the three stooges who like me Me Me, Me,
Me Me Me. Florence Henderson of the Brady Bunch, he's
(38:21):
a singer as well. Mozart. Sure they assumed Beethoven, although
that was never on record. Paul Shaffer, The World's Most
Dangerous Band, Jimmy Hendrix. As the story goes, Hendrix, when
he was first learning guitar could not afford a guitar tuner,
so he would go to a music store strum the
(38:42):
open strings and then go back and like tune it
to what he remembered hearing. And he learned guitar like
age nine or something, maybe even younger. Uh. And then Yanni.
And Yanni was even tested on dateline someone playing random keys,
and he nailed it. Apparently, of course it's ny Yeah,
I always confused. Yanni was zomb fear. Oh, one was
(39:05):
a pan flutter and one was a pam flute. Greek God,
wasn't one wasn't? I thought they both played the pam flute. No,
Yanni was a composer of the big flowery arrangements. He
may he may pain fluted up every now and then,
but I don't think that he wasn't shy with the
pam flut. But that, yeah, I got you all right. Well,
I think I already said the listener mail things, So
(39:25):
let's jump right into it. Yes, all right, so this
is actually woe Chuck. Before we get into it, let
me add something here. So you remember our friend Lowell
Hutchinson who um who sponsored our our Yes, well, low
didn't include the name of her shop that she donates
(39:46):
of the to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and she
she emailed in with it, so we gotta share it.
You go to etsy dot com, slash shop slash Lowell
hutch Designs l O W E. L. Hutch Designs and
by her would her turned would and some of that
money is going to save elephants. That's awesome and much
(40:08):
easier than the San Diego state you are l you work,
but everybody, all right, here we go everyone. I love
it when we get a uh, a little bit of
Kisman happening. Hey, guys heard the episode and what happens
when the government mistakenly think someone is dead. You mentioned
that you're having trouble finding info on why the postal
(40:28):
service would be reporting a death to the government, And
an amazing coincidence, I actually just had to do that
the very same day that that episode dropped. I work
as a mail carrier in New Rochelle, New York, and
I can confirmed. I confirmed that we are responsible for
reporting deaths, and in some cases it's a bit more
common than you think. Procedure is actually quite simple. When
(40:50):
a government agency, usually the I R. S L or
Social Security, is having trouble reaching an individual, they send
a special form to the post office responsible for to
ring that person's mail. Reform asks the mail carrier knows
the whereabouts of that person. I imagine the first thing
I would say, it's like, I don't know, I just
deliver mail here. Yeah, whether they moved, or whether they're
(41:14):
just ignoring the government's calls and letters, or in some
cases they have unfortunately passed away. The carrier will try
to find out where that person is what they like
to use them as investigators almost that's crazy, um. And
if they don't already know, and they will fill out
the form to be sent back to the agency. If
I are one of my co workers informs the agency
that the individual is deceased, then we get a coupon
(41:36):
for now I'm just kidding. Then they have officially been
reported as such, and it is the responsibility of the
government to confirm this information with next of ken. That
is from tom Uhlongie, the government's like you know, your
mom's postal workers spreading. So thanks Tom, and thanks for
(41:56):
delivering mail to new Rochelle Rochelle in New York show
Rochelle the Musical. That's right. Uh yeah, thanks a lot, Tom.
That's pretty cool you heard that at the same time
you were doing that. We love that kind of thing, amazing.
Would you call it kismet? Yeah, If you've got a
little bit of kismet going on, let us know. You
can go onto stuff you should Know dot com and
find our social links there, or you can send us
(42:16):
an email to stuff Podcasts at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of i Heeart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hello. There, It's me Josh, and I'm doing my live
show The End of the World or How I Learned
to Start Worrying and Love Humanity on June in Minneapolis
and in Washington, d C. Go to the Miracle Theater
dot com for d C tickets and the Parkway Theater
dot com for tickets to the Minneapolis show. I'll see
(00:21):
you soon. Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w.
Chiuck Bryant. F that was nice. And there's Jerry Rowland
(00:44):
over there the jar stir rolling on as always. Don't
look at me like that weirdly, I said, F what
was it? I don't know. Let's see you don't know.
This made me think a lot about and singing and
pitch and stuff, and made me think about you and
singing and pitched too, did it? Because I tried? I
(01:07):
know I don't have absolute pitch, but I tried. I
was just like, well, let me test myself. And I
went to the little quiet room here, and the only
way I knew how to test it was to think
of a song. I know, that starts and like, see that,
I know how to play and sing, And then I did.
I sang a see and then I hit the play
button on the YouTube clip of a C and the
(01:30):
C was way higher than I was singing it. But
I think I was in just a different key. It
wasn't like off like oh, it was like, oh, that
sounds like a C in a different octave. So the
way all that works is confusing. Have you have you
ever heard of Charlie Pouth? No, so you we found
this guy. She watches the um John Mayor. You know,
(01:53):
John Mayor has an Instagram TV show every week. I
did not know that, but I know he's big on Instagram.
It's actually pretty well. He went so far as to
create a show good for him. He had a guy
on named Charlie Pooth and Charlie Pooth is has maybe
the most perfect pitch of anybody on the planet. And
there's videos of this guy like kidding a note and
(02:13):
he's like here's enough, and like he's got a um
what would you call that thing? A little magic machine
that shows you exactly what the pitch is? Okay, that
thing it just peeped like the needle just goes right
to act or e or whatever, and he just like
he's not even looking. It's it's just out of nowhere.
It's really impressive. Does you mean like John Mayer? She
actually has become a fan of John Mayor. All right,
(02:37):
his show is actually worth watching. Yeah, current mood got.
So we're talking about perfect pitch or absolute pitch, and
that is we're going to define it right away here,
unlike us, and that is to do like the poof
does pouf pouf um, which is, if someone says hit
(02:58):
a c with no uh and he with nothing to
compare to, I can just belt out of sea or
recognize the see if someone says what notices, it goes
both ways. It's a double edged talent. It's a double
edged talent. That's what absolute or perfect pitches. So you
might say, like, okay, there's some aliens walking around among us,
(03:18):
and this is how they show themselves. They're able to
produce a no at will. Right, But really, if you
step back and the grabster put this article together for us,
he did a good job. He did. He went to
great links to point out that having absolute pitch, or
what's also called perfect pitch, really is kind of useless.
(03:40):
I don't know if I agree with that he went
to such links. I became to wonder if the grabster
is actually jealous of people who well, he makes a
point quite a bit that you know, it doesn't help
you wrote a song. It doesn't make you anymore creative.
So what it sounded like when you're reading it a
little bit? And that is quite true. It does not.
But make no bones about it. If you're a singer
in a band, having perfect pitch is an asset. It
(04:04):
might be annoying to your bandmates, right there's I saw
this video, these two Japanese kids, and it was what
annoying things that people with perfect pitch to? And uh
yeah it was this one kid was annoying the Jesus
out of another. I could see that cute. I mean,
it's got to be an asset, I would guess. So
sure you know, well you like, let me give you
(04:27):
an example of relative pitch that it gives if you're
in the shower. If if I'm in the shower and
I start singing, um, some Morrissey song. Let's say it
starts out pretty normal, but there's some high notes in there.
Maybe if I really stretch, I can hit. Once I
get to those high notes, I can't even come close.
(04:49):
The reason why is because I started in a higher
key than I should have, because I had no reference
point whatsoever, and it just started singing a big male
strikes again. Oh no, eight, that's way too low, right,
I couldn't do that. I mean, like that sounds perfect. Yeah,
I actually do a pretty good Morrissey. Oh yeah, let's
(05:10):
hear it. Oh I can't do it right now. My
voice is all podcasted out. I'm not gonna humiliate myself
on here. I'm sorry. I'll do it for you later
in the shower. Um be like you got some soap,
you have some soup on your own. Sorry, that's my Morrissey. Alright,
(05:32):
So we should talk about reference um, relative pitch and
having a reference point. That's you can be a great
singer and not have perfect pitch. Um. It is right
in that, like you know, it's not like, oh, you
know a perfect pitch, you're probably not gonna be a
good singer. Or you do a perfect pitch, you're like
such a great creator and songwriter. Those don't have any
(05:54):
to do with one another. But if you've ever been
to see a vocal group, sing like star Land Vocal Band.
Never seen them, but Emily, my wife was in a
show choir and high school, so that's you know, that's
exactly what they did. Um. I believe they had piano accompaniment.
Sometimes it was acapella. But but but if you've seen
an acapella group, you will almost always see a pianist
(06:17):
hit a single note before they start playing. And here
that or they might have like akrat tuner, which is
one of those little things you hold up to your mouth.
It's like a round harmonica pitch pipe. Yeah, I mean
it's a type of pitch pipe. What did you call
it a krat tuner? It was It's like a that's
probably like saying band aid or something or Kleenex proprietary epidemic. Yeah,
(06:40):
I think so. Uh, They're all kind of pitch pipes,
but this is a little cool round one. It's like
a round harmonica. Yeah. Yeah, and they usually wear it
like a medallion around their net. The choir director, do
they I've seen it? Okay? Um. So they would either
blow into one of those pitch pipes or they would
hit a piano key and the choir would all know
in their head they would have that reference point. Then
(07:02):
it's like, all right, here's here's where we start with
our barbershop quartet song. Right. That's either the first note
of the song or the key that the song sung in.
But either way, once they have that and they're like
hey or whatever, they can sing the rest of the
song and key relative to that note. That alone, to
me is impressive. So even relative pitch is impressive to me,
(07:25):
let alone absolute pitch. Well, I mean everyone has relative pitch,
I guess. But if somebody who's like, here's an apoo,
I'd be like, what do you want me to do
with that? Oh, I see what you mean? Yeah, sure,
you know. I wouldn't be able to necessarily keep up
with the rest of the song just because I heard
the first note. Yeah, I almost feel like, yeah, but
you know the song. So like, once you have your
(07:46):
starting point, you're good. I guess. Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a good point. Practiced it. Yeah, And I think
about any smoke could do this. Um. I was inquired,
but we always had piano accompaniment and the piano led
the song. Like, I don't remember a single song we
did Inquire that started with just the vocals acapello. It
(08:09):
was always like a piano intro, so you know exactly
where you are. I was just trying to come up
with a song that starts out like that Bohemian rapid. Sure,
you know what's funny. I was just thinking of the
other Queen song, I Want It All. Oh Yeah, which
I believe starts talking Queen. I thought that was a
Burger King adds Burger Queen. Alright, so h relative pitch,
(08:35):
that's the deal. I feel like we should cover some more,
Like I feel like the other half of this episode
should be tone deafness. We did one on tone deafness.
We did I Swear to God. We did one called
his tone deafness Hereditary, and we talked about how in
the Philippines, if you sing my way in a tone
deaf way at karaoke, you may get stabbed because people
have been stabbed before. I don't remember that one. You
(08:57):
don't remember that, not at all. We talked about tone
deafness for sure, So your plan just fell apart. Yeah,
but I mean there's a lot of I never study
music theory, so I'm an air learner as far as
guitar and all that stuff goes. Did Jarry just preview right, yeah,
she just faced me. Um, but it gets a little
like convoluted when you start talking about keys and octaves
(09:20):
and half steps and whole steps and stuff like that.
The thing that calms me down is when you talk
about science, right, So let's talk science here. When you
talk about pitch pitches all relativity, right, Yes, you're talking
about one note in relation to another note. Is that
other note higher or lower? That's really what pitches, right,
(09:42):
It's it's the gradations of notes and relations to one another. Right. Okay, Um,
if you if you look at what you're talking about scientifically,
you're talking about a sound wave. So really what you're
talking about is the frequency of a note is what
gives it? It's A or it's B or is it
C sharp or something like that, And there is a
(10:02):
whole step between an A and a B, but there's
actually a half step in between. Okay, you know all this? Okay,
how am I doing so far? Am I explaining it? Right? Yeah?
I mean like if you sit at a piano, a
half step is the very next key, whether it's a
black or white, and a whole step is skipping a
(10:24):
key and going to the second key. But I thought
there were some stretches where there are two white keys together,
and that was a full step, which are called natural tones.
There's no half step in between those notes. That's not
how I understand it. That's the that's the piano demo
I saw. Yeah, and the other thing that struck me too.
(10:46):
I never knew this before ever. So you know, like
there's a B B flat and a C sharp or
actually I think could be a B sharp and a
C flat same note. Yeah, what with the whole reason
those things exist? And it's a half note sharper flat is,
but the whole reason it exists to tell you which
way to go on the scale up or down a
(11:07):
half not a half note. Yeah, like I'm trying to
think about in band, you can play an A and
if you move that up one bar, that's an A sharp,
but that's also a B flat because B would be
the next thing up from that middle point. So I
never really knew there were rules for why you would
(11:28):
refer to it as an A sharper a B flat.
From what I understand is to know, all right, you
want to go down, So you're going to going down
to A sharp from a B or you're going up
to a B flat from an A interesting that I
think I probably just got it wrong, that we're mangling
so many things. But what we're talking about is is
(11:48):
what's called the Western musical scale. It's a twelve note
scale and it's made up of ten octaves that humans
can hear. And if each note is a specific wavelength
of frequency of a sound vibration that's the same every
single time, and A always has the same frequency and
B always has the same frequency. If you double that frequency,
you've just gone up an octave, right, And that scale
(12:12):
repeats itself and ascends or descends going into higher lower octaves.
So that was good. People with perfect or absolute pitch
will be able to hear any note on at any
octave on that scale and say, oh that's a A
seven or a B six sharp right, Um. They just
(12:38):
from hearing it, or they'll be able to reproduce it.
So it's not like they can just memorize twelve notes.
They can memorize twelve notes over say ten octaves, they
can recognize them. Yeah. And if you're someone who plays
instruments by ear and sings by ear and can't read music,
um it can you really appreciate Um? Two things, the
(12:59):
simply city of people who write three chord major songs,
and then the complexity, even though it's frustrating of like
an Elton John. So like, if I sit down to
play guitar to an Elton John song, I'll look up
the chords and the words, and nine times out of
ten I'm like, I don't what. I don't even know
this chord. Yeah, and I gotta like go to a
(13:20):
chord book and figure it out. He did all kinds
of crazy chords. That's really diminished minor. I mean, minors
are simple enough, but but but that's in that's it
was still in the Western musical scale, or was incorporating
tones from other musical scales that weren't. No, it was
still the Western. But you know, instead of playing an
F it would be like an F sharp minor seventh
or something. So what do is minor and major? Then? Well,
(13:45):
minor is the saddest of all keys. A minor that's
his final tip reference. So you still get it. Thank
you for explaining it though, and not just letting all
the listeners right in and laugh at me. Um, I
mean I don't know how to explain. I mean, a
minor is variation of the major, but it sounds completely
different and much more like it does sound more sad
(14:07):
and like if I played you in a in an
A minor in a B and a B minor, you go, oh,
we need to get a piano in here for this one.
Can we expense a piano? Maybe we should take a
break while we go get a piano. Let's do it, okay?
In things like chuck and chuck. Sorry, alright, so one
(14:49):
thing we should say chuck when we're talking about as
I'm sorry, absolute, Do you feel like people are keeping
up with this or we just throwing out so much
random information? A little both. I think that music majors
are really just like, oh guys, oh lord, nobody likes
them anyway. But for normal people, you think that they're like, okay,
now I understand what pitches because that's really the goal
(15:11):
here a little bit. We're not we're not explaining anything
to music majors that they don't already know, and we're
actually mangling the stuff that they do know. Right. Uh.
One thing we can say that's pretty easy to understand
is though, is that perfect pitch is? Um, it's a
bit of a on a sliding scale. It's hard to
define like it's either perfect or not perfect, because you
(15:32):
have a range from tone deaf to perfect pitch, and
you may be way closer to perfect pitch and may
even say I have perfect pitch, but not have like
absolute perfect pitch at the time when tested right exactly.
So it's not it's not binary, right, there's it's not
whether they're one of those you have it or you
don't have it kind of things. And it's suggested, is
(15:54):
when we'll talk about it a little more, that everybody
has some level of absolute pitch. It's just some people
are way better right than others, so so much so
that they seem like they have perfect pitch compared to
everybody else. Yeah, I'm not sure I understood that part either,
but we'll get to that. Um. And it's interesting to
note too that this, uh, even if you do have
(16:17):
absolute pitch, you might have trouble identifying the same notes
at different octaves. Um, you're not supposed to. You can't
call yourself a perfect pitch person. Yeah, I guess so right. Yeah,
you have to hang your head in shape. But that's tough.
Identical notes and different octaves are tough, and it results
in some weird um phenomena like the Shepherd tone, which
(16:38):
is really neat um. If you've ever been to a
Christopher Nolan movie, Um, specifically dune Kirk. Did dun Kirk
use it? Well, he uses it all the time, Like
the sound of that motorcycle had a specific name, but
the one batman rides with the two big fat wheels
the cycle. Yeah, I think that's what it's called. Okay,
(17:00):
I think I had another name, didn't it? Or no,
well maybe I think of the Adam West's bat cycling
so um, but he uses that sound. Um, it's called
the Shepherd tone, and it's basically several tones from different
octaves layered on one another. The highest tone gets quieter,
the middle tone stays loud, and the bass tone uh
(17:20):
as sinds and volume, and if you play them all together,
it's this mental trick that your mind can't process. And
it sounds like something that's either going up or down
into infinity basically right, But it's really just the same
thing on a loop over and over again. But it sounds, yeah,
clearly just going up and rising in pitch constantly for infinity.
(17:42):
It's really interesting, really tension creating it really puts you
on edge, not like nails on a chalkboard on edge,
but more like like what's gonna happen? This is still
going on? Uh, And shout out to um Roger Shepherd
from Stanford. He's a psychologists in who I guess discovered
(18:03):
this audio illusion. There also another shout out to Diana
Deutsch who was a researcher for m audio illusions, which
are really interesting. It's like the sound version of an
optical illusion and reveals a lot about how the brain
processes information. Um. She has a site I guess that
you see San Diego that I want everybody to go
(18:26):
to right now, pause the pause the episodes and go
to Deutsch d e U T s C H dot
U C S D dot E d U slash psychology
slash pages. Here's where it gets tricky dot pH P
question mark lowercase I equals to one too. Why didn't
(18:49):
you get a your L shortener for that? I don't know,
Just do it and and thank me later. But it
has She has these um these audio clips that show
how when you hear something spoken over and over again
enough times, the same thing over and over again, it
turns into music to you. It turns into being sung interesting,
(19:10):
and the way that she has it laid out and
demonstrated it is the most mind blowing thing I have
heard in ages. I loved. I went right. I was
like you, you've got to hear this, and it's it's
like I'm watching John Mayre. Shut up, who sings better
than him? This Diana Deutsch, Lady, Wow, I'll have to
hear that. That's pretty cool. You're you're gonna love it.
(19:33):
You will love it, Chuck awesome. Okay, it has really
nothing to do with perfect pitch, but it is just
kind of one of those things where it's like this,
this is worth mentioning to the world. Okay, all right.
So there's this guy named Nicholas uh Slanemski who's a
composer and a music lexicologist and a conductor. He wrote
(19:54):
in his autobiography about having absolute pitch. Basically how like
he kind of um, it was a party trick when
he was a kid, and then when he went to
school to music school, of course, um, he kind of
like kind of thought his s didn't stink because he
had perfect pitch and they didn't have to work his hard.
(20:15):
And he was a little snotty about it, I think
from what I gather from ed summation. And apparently while
he was off just like, hmm, I've got perfect pitch,
all his classmates are actually busting their butts and working
hard and actually writing really good music, and he fell
behind him was like, how could I be falling behind?
I have absolute pitch and he's just leaning on that
(20:36):
too hard he was, so he had kind of a
a moment of inspiration where he's like, Oh, I actually
have to put in the work too, And I think
this is where Ed was kind of getting that it
doesn't actually help. It's good, it's a neat thing to have.
You can't write your own ticket though in the music business.
Because he had perfect pitch, it doesn't help you be
any more creative or anything like that. And as a
(20:56):
matter of fact, Slominski Um points out in that Auto
by bography that, um, there have been plenty of people
who were just master composers like Tchaikovsky and Wagner were
both um. Neither one of them had perfect pitch. And
yet you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who's like
those guys were hacks. You know, they were pretty good,
and they didn't have perfect pitch. So you can do
(21:18):
quite well in music and not have perfect pitch, especially
if you have one of those little round harmonic as
you were talking about Lenny Kravitz harmonica pitch pipe. Um,
it's hard to tell how many people have perfect pitch. Um,
you hear one in ten thousand a lot, But as
Ed points out, it's kind of hard to find any
reference for this that really is accurate or legit. Yeah.
(21:40):
I think he ran into that same thing where you
see the same info on the internet in the same
way everywhere. It means that it's probably not real. I
think so, um, because it's got to be more than
one in ten thousand. Well, he said he found one
that that's found about four percent of the population has it,
so it would be four hundred and four it out
of ten thousand, four times greater than what was previously thought.
(22:05):
That's right. Uh. And you're more likely to have and
this is where it gets interesting, of like where does
it come from? Nature or nurture. You're definitely more likely to, um,
have perfect pitch if you start your training in music
before the age of six. Yeah, there's a critical period
for the brain where it's just mush waiting to be
(22:26):
molded into smarts. So things like language, foreign languages, music, um,
basically anything you can think of that requires talent that
not everybody can do kind of falls into that critical
period where if you start to learn that early on,
before age six, you're going to be able to learn
(22:46):
it way easier than somebody who's an adult trying to
learn it. And so perfect pitch shows up way more frequently,
and kids who had musical training and exposure specifically to
the Western music scale uh at an early age than
it does to two people who were not explosed to it. Yeah.
And also if you speak a tone language uh fluently
(23:10):
and definitely natively, you're more likely to have absolute pitch.
Tone languages are we have a little I mean every
language has a little bit of that. When we people
inflect in English, different things, different tones that can be
different meanings. Oh really, oh really, but we have nothing
(23:34):
on like Mandarin, Chinese or Cantonese. These are real tone
languages where your tones can indicate like the same word
can have five, six, seven different meanings depending on your tone.
Really interesting. Yeah, so people who speak tone languages tend
to have are more likely to have absolute pitch than
people who don't speak tone languages, right, yes, Okay, so
(23:56):
that raises a really good question. Then, Um, there's one
other big clue here, And just because we have the
clues asn't mean we figured out I don't think we
said there. Um is still no full understanding of why
some people have absolute or perfect pitch. Um, but it
also appears more frequently in the population of people with autism.
(24:20):
They tend to have more more frequency of perfect pitch
than people who do not have autism. Yeah, and the
same with I know it correlates to like, uh, supposedly
photographic memory thing synesthesia, which we've talked about and Billy
Joel's a synaesthetz. Yeah, so that might have something to
do with his abilities. So one one UM, actually two
(24:43):
explanations I saw for people with autism is that, UM,
it's believed that they process information piecemeal rather than wholesale,
which would explain rather than hearing like the whole musical
composition that year the individual notes, so it would be
easier for them to be acquainted with the individual will note.
Or Um, they just are more developed. Their sensory input
(25:06):
is way more developed than than people without autism. Those
are the two competing theories for why people with autism
have perfect pitch. More interesting. All right, Well, the whole
question that we talked about is in nature or nurture. Um.
That's sort of a debate that's still going on, UM.
And it's hard to study this stuff, uh universally. First
(25:29):
of all, this seems to apply almost exclusively to the
Western music scale. I think so, right, UM, because that's
what you're doing. You're saying, that's an A, that's an F,
here's n F, here's an A. UM that and what
you're talking about the notes on the Western music scale.
They think that people who have perfect pitch can detect
notes that are more nuanced than the full step or
(25:51):
the half step of the Western music scale. But I
didn't see anywhere where it's like, yes, this translates everywhere
into any music scale. So it does seemed to be
universal from that outset to begin with. Yeah, okay, yeah sure. Uh.
And the other thing that I thought was interesting, you
talked about this at the beginning, UM, about labeling the
(26:12):
sensory input. It's like, you know, they throw the letter
C on that wavelength. Basically, it's no different than than saying, well,
that color is red. It's just a it's just a
label we've created. It was right or it is. I
saw an analogy for this where if somebody with perfect pitch,
(26:33):
if you and I analogize it to somebody who could
pick out color, they could see a blue wall in
somebody's house and then drive to the to the paint
store and pick out that same blue from the wall
of samples. Interesting, it's basically the same thing. But there's
a big clue there with the fact that most people
like that's pretty pretty refined, but most people can look
(26:54):
at something and say that's blue, that's green, that's red.
Because we were almost on the world to a child
trained from a very young age to recognize and identify
and name colors. Not everybody gets that kind of training
around the world with musical notes, right, But where they do,
like in Japan, where far more children are trained more
(27:18):
universally in music, they have found much more prevalences of
absolute pitch there. Okay, which makes sense, right, You're exposed
from a very early age what is an A, what
is an F and you're hitting that critical period. But
that really reveals something important here too, Chuck not everybody.
Not every kid in Japan has absolute pitch. Just like
(27:40):
every kid in Japan can tell you what blue is
or what red is, they can't necessarily all tell you
what an A is or where an F is, right,
They just can't, So that that suggests that there is
perhaps some genetic basis to it. Not everybody can learn
absolute or perfect pitch. All right, I think that's a
good place to break in, and uh, we'll talk more
(28:01):
about your family jeans in perfect pitch right after this,
and things like jo stry All right, Chuck, you said
(28:33):
something about jeans. I'm wearing them, You're always wearing them.
I'm wearing dad jeans, are they They're a little dad jeanie.
Now what our dad jeans? Those look like normal jeans
to me. That's because we both were cool in the
same era, which is twenty years ago. So what faded
his dad jeans? I think it's a little little bag here.
(28:56):
I'm just too old to wear straight up skinny jeans.
Too old, my thighs are too chunky. Yeah, you know
I feel about skinny jeans. I liked it all. Almost
all jeans now are a little stretchy, though they are.
It's like they put elastic in them. Yeah, like every
fabric is a little stretchy. Now it feels like I'm like, oh,
I'm assize thirty. I never knew that. Um. Alright, so
(29:17):
jeans um. Absolute pitch does tend to run in families. Okay,
So clearly it's genetic, right, Well, no, not necessarily. Like
everything that I gathered here is that we just don't know.
There's probably some genetics involved and a lot of uh,
nurture involved that. So that was the old view, and
I think it's still kind of predominant that that that
(29:40):
this was this explained absolute pitch. If I may take
this one, Yeah, that you were born with the genetic
propensity toward absolute pitch. Yeah, Like, if you're Lucy waynewright,
our friend and her mom and her dad are both
professional singers. It's no mistake that Lucy, Martha and Rufus
(30:02):
are all professional singers. There's a genetic component there, for sure.
But the other way to look at it, and this
is the reason why the nature versus nurture debate hasn't
been settled. It's also quite possible that just because Lucy
was exposed to music from a very owning age, including
the critical period. It could have nothing to do with
genetics and could have everything to do with environment. So
(30:24):
the thing that everybody's settled on is it's probably both
that you're you have a genetic propensity toward it, and
that if you are exposed to the Western musical scale
at that critical period before age six, and then you
learn later on like, oh, my parents are will actually
be kind to me and and talk nice to me.
(30:44):
If I show off in front of their friends that
I can do in a off the top of my head,
then that reinforces that and that develops into absolutely a
perfect pitch later on in life. Is that the part
where the child has to see value in it in
order to kind of and I guess that's true with anything. Yeah,
your kid doesn't see value and something, they're not gonna
(31:05):
work towards that, right exactly. See, my parents neither one
of my parents can sing. Really, my sister can't sing,
but my brother and I can both sing. Oh I've
heard you. It's like Angels Scott sing is better than me.
Of course, I mean does that go without saying at
this point? Uh, it's interesting though how that works because
(31:26):
we weren't super exposed to music either a little bit,
but not like my parents weren't big music people that
were like, oh man, let me gotta listen to this record, yeah,
check this track. Yeah. Just that just didn't happen. So
we were discovering music on our own. But I wonder
if my brother gave me the nurture side, because he
was singing and we were inquired and he was giving
(31:48):
me records and stuff. I could totally yeah. I mean,
that's that's nurture right there. It's just not coming from
your parents, but that's still nurturing. I'm just fascinated. I'm
just fast neated by talents period. And like Michelle and
Scott can both draw. I can't draw at all, And
like how that stuff? You know? My mom is an artist?
(32:11):
Oh is she? Yeah? I didn't Oh yeah that's right.
The mural, yeah she. I mean she's a was a
professional artist. And it's just like I can't draw a
stick figure, right, They didn't get passed out. And it's
funny when I say that around my mom, she's like, oh,
you can draw. I remember all the build a cat
stuff he used to do, and Opus the penguin from
bloom County. It's like, Mom, I was tracing. She's like, well,
(32:31):
that takes talent. I'm like, she's like, oh no, it
really does. I never knew she said tracing takes talent.
But I'm just fascinated about talents, especially having a daughter
now and like, is she good at this? Is she
not gonna be good at this? Yeah? I don't know.
Some some of the stuff you can nurture, but some
(32:53):
stuff you just gotta wait and see. It's the it's
an age old question. I I think that anybody who
is like it's a hundred percent nature a hundred percent
nurtures off. Either way, it's got to be a combination
of the two. I mean, we did that episode on
epigenetics that basically proved it's both. You know, it shows
how it's both. So yeah, it's got to be both.
(33:14):
I would I would say absolute pitchfalls under that well,
and with absolute pitch too. It's interesting because the way
I read this is that people can learn it. Yeah,
with practice, I guess even later in life. Yeah. The
thing that really caught my attention is there's a drug
called valpro eight. The aids in neural plasticity, which means
you learn better, you can restructure your brain to learn
(33:37):
new stuff at a later age. Yeah, I had never
heard of that. I had neither. Apparently that treats epilepsy,
bipolar disorder in migraines and can help you saying better
may literally make you smarter as what I'm getting U.
The other thing I took issue with is that this
said much like an American learning German a H. Forty
will never be as fluent as someone born and raised
(33:58):
in Germany. Is that true? Uh? Yeah, I think native
born speakers always have an edge up on I think.
I don't know. I figure if you really immerse yourself,
you moved to Germany, like you could learn it just
as good. Right, maybe. And I've also heard that you're
never truly and this may be one of those dumb
things you hear in elementary school, but you can never
(34:21):
truly be fluent if you don't dream in that language.
And I don't know if that's true, if that's an
old wives tale. I've never heard that you haven't. No,
I've always heard that like after a certain age, you
can't dream in a foreign tongue and thus you're not
quote unquote fluent. That sounds made up. It sounds like
playground stuff like the bar code being the number of
(34:42):
the UM. There's one last part that I thought was
really fascinating. There's a larger part of this debate that
the fact that there are people walking around with absolute
pitch um and not everybody has it suggests something that
we may have a part of our brain that is
(35:04):
left over to sense and detect music in differences in music,
and that to some people that suggests that music singing
specifically actually predated language in our development or evolution. I
could see that totally. Yeah. And the example uses that
a series of sounds was early communication. Sure means he
(35:30):
got me yeah, or you know ah, like you know
big tuktok is saying big mammoth is coming this way.
That was clearly a lookout. Even before you said it,
I was going to say look out. But if you
really hear what I did there, that's singing in a way, right,
it can write it's a tone and eventually over time, um,
that could be um kind of uh systematized, categorize where standardized.
(35:54):
That's what I was looking for. One of those eyes
um where that's just what your group says, and your
group gets grim bigger, and that spreads and eventually turns
into words something more nuanced. So it makes total sense.
The other reason I saw that made sense to me
was that if we were running around nature we heard
birds calling, we heard um cats growling or something like that,
(36:15):
we may start to imitate those things were through clicks
and whistles and all this stuff. If they sound natural,
um much more than like language does. So it makes
total sense that that song would have come before language. Yeah,
I mean I think there's a uh an eight tonality
and and in words and pre words, yeah, pre words
(36:37):
like it doesn't I don't know, because otherwise it just
would have been a series of grunts and clicks and
things like very staccato and short. Yeah. It's almost like
with some of the first person born who was like,
well how do you do? And that was like the
first person to ever talk, and that was the first
sentence ever spoken, you know, like it's a it's a
great question. Uh. If you want to know more about
(36:58):
great questions like absolute pitch, Well, they're friends. We want
to direct you to our beloved website that we put
a lot of blood, sweat and tears into how stuff works.
They got a lot of good stuff for you there Okay, okay,
And since I said okay, it's time for listener mail. Actually,
can I jump back, jump back? Jack we didn't talk
(37:19):
about people who supposedly had perfect pitch. We'll throw some
names out real quick. Oh man, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's
all right. Michael Jackson supposedly had perfect pitch. And there's
this story. This is from Mental Floss. By the way,
there's a story from will I Am who backed Michael
Jackson up in a song and said that he warmed
up for three hours to sing a five minute song
(37:39):
three hours of me Me Me, Me, Me Me Me.
Mariah Carey supposedly discovered she had perfect pitch at the
age of four. Um Ella Fitzgerald, I love this story.
Apparently she was so dead on that her band would
warm up to her voice, so the other way. That's
really it's pretty cool. I love that. Lady bing Crosby,
(38:00):
m his um travel partner, said that sharing a train ride,
he would snore and pitch to the train whistle. That's cute.
That's like the three stooges who like me Me Me, Me,
Me Me Me. Florence Henderson of the Brady Bunch, he's
(38:21):
a singer as well. Mozart. Sure they assumed Beethoven, although
that was never on record. Paul Shaffer, The World's Most
Dangerous Band, Jimmy Hendrix. As the story goes, Hendrix, when
he was first learning guitar could not afford a guitar tuner,
so he would go to a music store strum the
(38:42):
open strings and then go back and like tune it
to what he remembered hearing. And he learned guitar like
age nine or something, maybe even younger. Uh. And then Yanni.
And Yanni was even tested on dateline someone playing random keys,
and he nailed it. Apparently, of course it's ny Yeah,
I always confused. Yanni was zomb fear. Oh, one was
(39:05):
a pan flutter and one was a pam flute. Greek God,
wasn't one wasn't? I thought they both played the pam flute. No,
Yanni was a composer of the big flowery arrangements. He
may he may pain fluted up every now and then,
but I don't think that he wasn't shy with the
pam flut. But that, yeah, I got you all right. Well,
I think I already said the listener mail things, So
(39:25):
let's jump right into it. Yes, all right, so this
is actually woe Chuck. Before we get into it, let
me add something here. So you remember our friend Lowell
Hutchinson who um who sponsored our our Yes, well, low
didn't include the name of her shop that she donates
(39:46):
of the to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and she
she emailed in with it, so we gotta share it.
You go to etsy dot com, slash shop slash Lowell
hutch Designs l O W E. L. Hutch Designs and
by her would her turned would and some of that
money is going to save elephants. That's awesome and much
(40:08):
easier than the San Diego state you are l you work,
but everybody, all right, here we go everyone. I love
it when we get a uh, a little bit of
Kisman happening. Hey, guys heard the episode and what happens
when the government mistakenly think someone is dead. You mentioned
that you're having trouble finding info on why the postal
(40:28):
service would be reporting a death to the government, And
an amazing coincidence, I actually just had to do that
the very same day that that episode dropped. I work
as a mail carrier in New Rochelle, New York, and
I can confirmed. I confirmed that we are responsible for
reporting deaths, and in some cases it's a bit more
common than you think. Procedure is actually quite simple. When
(40:50):
a government agency, usually the I R. S L or
Social Security, is having trouble reaching an individual, they send
a special form to the post office responsible for to
ring that person's mail. Reform asks the mail carrier knows
the whereabouts of that person. I imagine the first thing
I would say, it's like, I don't know, I just
deliver mail here. Yeah, whether they moved, or whether they're
(41:14):
just ignoring the government's calls and letters, or in some
cases they have unfortunately passed away. The carrier will try
to find out where that person is what they like
to use them as investigators almost that's crazy, um. And
if they don't already know, and they will fill out
the form to be sent back to the agency. If
I are one of my co workers informs the agency
that the individual is deceased, then we get a coupon
(41:36):
for now I'm just kidding. Then they have officially been
reported as such, and it is the responsibility of the
government to confirm this information with next of ken. That
is from tom Uhlongie, the government's like you know, your
mom's postal workers spreading. So thanks Tom, and thanks for
(41:56):
delivering mail to new Rochelle Rochelle in New York show
Rochelle the Musical. That's right. Uh yeah, thanks a lot, Tom.
That's pretty cool you heard that at the same time
you were doing that. We love that kind of thing, amazing.
Would you call it kismet? Yeah, If you've got a
little bit of kismet going on, let us know. You
can go onto stuff you should Know dot com and
find our social links there, or you can send us
(42:16):
an email to stuff Podcasts at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of i Heeart
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