In my first curacy, the choirmaster used to tell me that he could teach people who were supposedly tone deaf to hold a tune. I asked him to elucidate a bit. Part of his answer was that we use pitch in speech and English speakers do so very well; we can 'sing' our sentences fine. Listen to this programme and in the first few minutes you will hear why this is significant; I mean literally hear it -and you will find it hard to 'unhear' it afterwards! Go here for it. WNYC - Radiolab: Musical Language (April 21, 2006)
Here's what it's about: "For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA 'perfect') pitch." That's like, in a sample group of Mandarin speaking children, Chinese were nine times more likely to have perfect pitch than American children. Fascinating. However, the bad news -to counter the good just mentioned- is that there are developmental windows.
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