Monday, November 26, 2007.

i came across the biology and physics behind perfect pitch while reading the news today. It mentioned the words "perfect pitch" and mentioned that perfect pitch is rare-1 in 10000 people have it.

So being lumpy, i did some research on perfect pitch (i did the test for fun, since i knew i had perfect pitch-http://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/ppsurvey.html). Anyway i found some interesting facts about perfect pitch-it actually can disappear.

and if you ever want to ask me about my perfect pitch test scores, it sucks. I'm below perfect pitch average, caused in part by people signing onto msn and causing me to listen to the wrong note. I'm generally not good at lower notes (since i'm not trained in lower-register instruments) and singing (arrgh choir. but they were good during REservED).

Anyway genetics is just that complicated. It's so uncertain, cause no one can actually tell for sure whether traits like this ever get passed down. Nature or nurture-that is the golden question in genetics.

Many other factors influence it too-speaking tonal languages like Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese gives one an edge, and learning an instrument before 6 years of age helps too. This should qualify the trait as continuous variation-affected by external factors.

But very obviously there is a big difference between perfect pitch people and non-perfect pitch people. Look at the range of scores on that site, and see the big gap. That clearly shows 2 distinct and different scores which do not overlap, and is a clear example of discontinuous variation (hah at least i still remembered stuff like that, after the crazy intensive bio-mugging i did before bio EOYs).

Overall, quite a fun thing to play around with-and anyway having perfect pitch is cool.

Labels: Music