"Music is for idiots and neanderthals"

Case closed.

> The greatest determinant of musicality is pitch: the better your pitch, the more likely you are to enjoy music.

I mean, FFS. I don't have anything like perfect pitch, but there's no way anybody's going to persuade me that Rainman derives greater pleasure from harmony and melody than I do.
It has always seemed to me that the ability to discern meaning, emotion and complex structure in music, that most abstract and incorporeal of artforms, is in fact the most profound and highly-evolved of all the gifts bestowed by nature upon humanity. But hell, what do I know?

You haven't exactly demolished his argument there. I could believe that what he says about pitch is true in certain contexts. I guess what I'm saying is that it seems pretty truthy to me.

The article reminded me of the fact that Frank Sinatra once described rock 'n' roll as "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear". Little did he realise that science would one day reveal his balladeering to be equally troglodytic.

I don't think they're intriguing in the least bit. "woah dude, music = proto-language"... (- . -)Zzzzzz

What a douche.

I think the idea that music and language are a sort of zero-sum equation is interesting. But I guess we'll agree to disagree.

And the point about perfect pitch itself seems useless... it adds nothing to appreciation of music

I disagree. Are you a musician?

Huh? I can't really make sense of that. Perfect pitch means you can identify pitches by ear and sing them on command. I don't have it, but I imagine that individuals with perfect pitch have an easier time conceiving of music precisely in their mind. As my relative pitch has improved, my ability to recreate as well as to compose music in my head has increased as well.

this is an interesting point. i heard a "radio lab" show about music a few weeks ago, and they noted that not only do all cultures do this, but most cultures use a very similar cootchy-coo language. the words might be different, but the sequence of sounds to communicate things like approval, disapproval, encouragement, etc. seem somewhat hardwired.

also, they did a segment on perfect pitch and noted that in cultures where the language relies heavily on changes in pitch -- chinese was the example they used -- perfect pitch is much, much more common than in (say) english-speaking societies, where a change of pitch doesn't necessarily mean a change in meaning. (a change in pitch in spoken english can change the intent of a word -- sarcastic, questioning, affirmative, etc. -- but it doesn't change "chair" into "donkey" the way it does in chinese.)

Just because your friend doesn't find her abilities useful doesn't mean that they wouldn't give her an advantage over someone who lacked them if she tried. It's not just a knowledge of how a pitch is labelled, it's more like the extreme end of a scale which measures how one perceives pitch. On the extreme opposite, you have tonedeafness; people who can't differentiate between pitches or can't reproduce a note that's played for them. Then you have various levels of relative pitch, then there's sort of a leap from there to perfect pitch. So I think of it more like visual acuity, where perfect pitch is like having 20/10 vision.

I think you're approaching this narrowmindedly. Imagine that you're looking at a painting. Would you agree that having perfect vision is more conducive to appreciating it than poor vision? That's what we're talking about here. You're talking about perfect pitch like it's a party trick, but it's more than that. Although, people with perfect pitch sometimes seem to be just born that way, and they don't necessarily have to have a lot of musical knowledge, where I think that most people with very good relative pitch probably worked to get that way. But again, the better one's ability to hear and understand pitches and their relationships, the more likely one is to be able to understand and produce music based on the relationship of pitches.

personally, i would rather be one of those people who can see sound as color. i forget what it's called, but that is one rad anomaly.

It's called synesthesia. Olivier Messiaen was synesthetic.

C'mon, that's a totally bogus argument. What is conducive to appreciating a painting is not the acuity of one's eyesight, it's the inclination and depth of one's aesthetic sensibilities.

It's not a bogus argument. The inclination and depth of one's artistic sensibilities is indeed conducive to appreciation of a painting, just as it is for one's appreciation of music. And you can appreciate a painting if your vision isn't perfect, the same way you can appreciate music if you don't have very good pitch. But the appreciation is easier and less mediated if you can sense it accurately, wouldn't you agree? I'm not trying to argue that seeing a painting clearly leads to appreciating it. But surely it's easier to appreciate it if you can see it clearly? The same goes for music. Western music is based around the relationships between pitches, and the more clearly one can perceive and conceive of those relationships, the shorter the path towards understanding and appreciation.

sure dont have perfect pitch but i can identify intervals by ear and i think that's much more important

That's relative pitch. Again, I don't have perfect pitch, but as far as I know it encompasses relative pitch. If you can tell that you're hearing a C and an Eb, you're going to know that it's a minor third. I agree that relative pitch is a good skill and there are some "drawbacks" to perfect pitch, but I'm talking about good pitch generally.

Ah, I see. How exactly did they make this "trade"?

And musical savants are not rare. In his book Musical Savants: Exceptional Skill in the Mentally Retarded, Leon Miller, of the University of Illinois, described 13 people who were indeed mentally retarded. Typically, their IQs and social skills were so rudimentary that they could not speak or dress themselves. But musically they were gifted, not only playing well but also composing creatively. And, typically, they had perfect pitch.

Oh I see, they're not rare because a researcher was able to find thirteen of them.

The best explanation for these unexpected findings comes from baby talk.We all, when we talk to babies, instinctively use a cootchy-coo language that is essentially musical.

Except it isn't really. The pitch might go up an down in a generally predictable way, but there are no set pitches. If anything, baby talk suggests that infants have some kind of relative pitch, which is the opposite of what the experiment on perfect pitch suggests. (It sounds a little dubious, by the way -- it consists of measuring babies' reaction to changes in pitch sequences by the way they turn their heads)

Biologically, perfect pitch and musical composition are no big deal. Songbirds have perfect pitch and, despite their tiny brains, they can be good composers, employing many of the repetitions that characterise human music such as refrains, rhymes and reprises. So the winter wren will, from the adults around him, learn a set of songs that he will then dissect into shorter phrases to rearrange into thousands of different songs. The chocolate-backed kingfisher moves up and down its own scale, while the appropriately named music wren sings with a near-perfect scale.

Well, perfect pitch and musical composition are two entirely different things, the latter having more to do with relative pitch. And I don't really see how ability to sing a scale = musical composition.

Music still has its human uses, of course, but they are emotional, not intellectual.

Oh right, which explains why autistics traded their emotional empathy for music. What?

This is speculation for me though, because I have perfect pitch and good relative pitch.

Regardless, this seems like a tangent.

Perfect pitch is also learnable (although that's a controversial topic that's not really worth getting into.)

A distance is the space between two points. It is created by the two points; it doesn't exist independently from them.

I'm glad the article makes it clear that it's OK for us to listen to music still, even if it may mean we're unevolved idiots..

Susan, are you saying that someone could have the ability to recognize that they were hearing D and F#, but then be unable to recognize that there is a major third between D and F#?

http://www.zlab.mcgill.ca/docs/Zatorre_et_al_1998.pdf

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:8TqTvvT0k08GPM:http://www.angelfire.com/alt/pdfhut/neanderthal3.jpg

am i the only one seriously thinking this might be the work of someone in the throws of a midlife crisis? hates music b/c he feels sexually, spiritually weak and generally inneffectual.

I bet if you gave matlewis and the person with perfect pitch a reaction time test to determine a given tone, matlewis would be milliseconds faster.

Of course - even though I portrayed absolute pitch as being at the extreme end of the relative pitch scale, I think it's clear that they are in some sense different skills. So I don't disagree that the means of perception are different - just that if we accept that someone can clearly identify the 2 pitches being played, it's irrelevant to ask whether or not they know what the interval is called.

And after some googling: Perception of relative pitch with different references: some absolute-pitch listeners can't tell musical interval names.

But the article is not really relevant either:

"Listeners with absolute pitch showed declined performance when the reference was out-of-tune C, out-of-tune E, or F#, relative to when the reference was C. In contrast, listeners who had no absolute pitch maintained relatively high performance in all reference conditions."

It's quite well-known that people with perfect pitch have big problems when you give them notes that are slightly out-of-tune, while people with relative pitch don't because they can't tell. This is often considered one of the disadvantages to perfect pitch. But I don't really think it has an impact on what we're talking about here. Presumably this says that if you play a major third that lies somewhere between D to F# and Eb to G, that someone with perfect pitch will have trouble with it. But that's not what I was arguing about - I was saying that if the pitches are in tune and someone can identify those pitches, the act of naming it "correctly" is trivial.

And I think that what we're talking about at this point is sort of a minute tangent from the original argument anyway. Psychoacoustics is quite interesting, though.

suddenly the whole human history is put under a new light...

Fuck you NY Times!

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http://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/312/563/05d.jpg