International musical virtuosos might have benefited in their craft from speaking a foreign language, a new study about the nature of musical ability suggests.
UCSD psychology professor Diana Deutsch discovered a link between speaking a tone language and having absolute, or perfect pitch — the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a tone without the convenience of a reference note.
Identifying a musical note is analogous to naming colors. A person can identify an apple as red without having to compare it to another object, like a banana. In music, this is not the case for most people, who are only capable of judging pitches in relation to others.
In tone languages, words take on different meanings depending on the tone used or how the word is enunciated. These include Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Thai, as well as some African and South American languages. Pitch-accent languages also use some tonal differences, like tone languages, and include Korean and Japanese, according to Deutsch.
Conversely, in intonation languages — English, French and Spanish, among others — pitch is used to emphasize or stress an idea, rather than provide meaning.
Deutsch’s study concluded that there is a strong possibility that speaking a tone language lengthens the “critical period,” or window of opportunity, for one to acquire language — or in this case, perfect pitch — in early infancy and likens learning to play an instrument to learning the tones of a second language. Tone language speakers have a relatively easier time learning musical pitches compared to speakers of intonation languages, Deutsch found.
“They acquire tones in their tone language, so when they come to have music lessons, musical tones will then be treated by the brain as the acquisition of tones of a different tone language,” Deutsch said.
The premiere study compares two different populations on the basis of tones and language and their effects on musical abilities.
“It is really interesting that Mandarin speakers have a higher prevalence of having absolute pitch for music compared with nontone language speakers,” Deutsch said. “And it does raise the question of what other aspects of music might also be enhanced by the learning of tone languages at an early age.”
The first group included in the study consisted of 88 first-year Mandarin-speaking students enrolled in the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. The second group consisted of 115 first-year students — none of whom knew a tone language or had parents who did — enrolled in the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
Statistics showed a strong correlation between perfect pitch and the onset of musical training in both groups. The earlier an individual started training, the higher the probability that the individual would develop perfect pitch, the study found. For students who began their training between ages four and five, approximately 60 percent of Chinese students met the criteria for perfect pitch, as opposed to 14 percent of the American nontone language speakers.
In the music world, several issues have surrounded the perceived importance of perfect pitch. Although many accomplished musicians have been known to possess it, including the likes of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin and Mozart, having perfect pitch is not necessarily indicative of one’s musical abilities, according to UCSD music department systems programmer Trevor Henthorn.
“There have certainly been really great composers who do not have perfect pitch and there are a lot of [people] I know who are just horrible musicians, yet they have perfect pitch,” Henthorn said.
Henthorn has worked closely with Deutsch since 1986 and aided Deutsch in designing and creating the sounds for the experiment, in addition to managing and analyzing the huge amount of data collected.
“The study came out a lot better than we ever anticipated,” Henthorn said. “And a lot of factors that you’d think might factor in and could interfere with [Deutsch’s] end results just didn’t factor in.”
The new study piggybacks on other research Deutsch conducted in 1999. The previous study discovered speakers of tone languages, particularly Mandarin and Vietnamese, were able to pronounce a list of words and respective pitches consistently. Deutsch concluded that this ability resulted from their early acquisition of tone language.
Although having perfect pitch is considered to be an extremely rare ability — it is estimated that less than one in 10,000 possess perfect pitch in the United States and Europe — studies suggest that many people do, in fact, possess an implicit form of absolute pitch even though they are unable to verbally label the notes.
