[RADIOLAB INTRO]

DIANA DEUTSCH: I'll continue. We're here to report the first large scale study ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, that's better.

DIANA DEUTSCH: ... comparing the prevalence of absolute pitch into normal populations by means of ...

JAD: This is professor Diana Deutsch.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Diana Deutsch.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, yeah. I'm going to turn down my headphone level.

DIANA DEUTSCH: And I'm a professor of psychology at the University of California—San Diego.

JAD: Can you still hear me, Diana?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Okay. Hello?

JAD: Diana studies sound, how humans perceive sound. She's a scientist, she has a lab, but every so often she will also release CDs.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Right.

JAD: These CDs of audio demonstrations that she uses in her research. And that's why we called. Because it was in the production of her second CD that she stumbled onto the weirdest phenomenon.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, I'll tell you what happened is that when you do post-production, as you know, of—of speech, you loop things.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Loop things.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Loop things. So that you can zero in on Ps—puh, puh—that sound too loud, you'll need to unpop. Or Ss that sound too sharp and so on. So you put things on loops in order to fine tune the way the speech sounds. So I had this particular phrase on loop and forgot about it.

JAD: What phrase was this?
DIANA DEUTSCH: It's a phrase that occurs at the beginning of the CD in which I say, "The sounds as they appear to you ..."
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: ... are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.]

DIANA DEUTSCH: ... as to seem quite impossible." Now I had "Sometimes behave so strangely" looped.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

DIANA DEUTSCH: Just those few words.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

DIANA DEUTSCH: And forgot about it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

JAD: So here's what happened: Diana leaves her studio, she closes the door, goes into the kitchen to make some tea. All the while, this loop is whirring away in the background. As she's sipping her tea she thinks, "Is someone singing? Who's singing?"

DIANA DEUTSCH: I heard what sounded like song in the background. 

JAD: She realized, wait a second, that's not singing, that's me talking.

DIANA DEUTSCH: That very phrase.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

DIANA DEUTSCH: But at this point it appeared to be sung, rather than spoken.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

DIANA DEUTSCH: This is [plays melody on a keyboard]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

DIANA DEUTSCH: Right? 

JAD: It's ...

DIANA DEUTSCH: Yeah. You still hear the words but they're sung words rather than spoken words.

JAD: It's weird. Like, it just switches at a certain point, three or four repetitions in.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Right.

JAD: It's going, it's going and then—pow!—it becomes music. And then now none of us can get it out of our head. Like, the whole office is like [sings] sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely.

DIANA DEUTSCH: [singing] Sometimes behave so strangely.

DIANA DEUTSCH: And you know what? If you do this demo and then you go back to the original sentence, it sounds like, you know, speech to begin with, and when you come to that very phrase I seem to be bursting into song.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Diana Deutsch: The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.]

DIANA DEUTSCH: I have to say this can continue for months and months. It's sort of—sort of like your brain gets altered for that particular phrase, and it continues to sound like singing for a very, very long time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

JAD: All right so here we have just one small indication that music is—well, it behaves very strangely. I mean, think about this, we started with some basic speech, repeated it a few times, somewhere along the way it leapt into song. How did it change like that? And if that's all it takes to turn something into music, then what exactly is music really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today's program is about answering that question—or trying to in any case. I'm Jad Abumrad, here with me ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Ba bum ba ba bum bum bum.

JAD: ... is Robert Krulwich, my partner in crime.

ROBERT: It is a little hard to get out of your head.

JAD: I know.

ROBERT: It is really weird.

JAD: I know, I know.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Okay, so this hour what are we doing?

ROBERT: We are going to try ...

JAD: And we will probably fail.

ROBERT: Well, yes we will fail, but we will make an earnest effort to try to find the ingredients of music, both its basis in language, its basis in physics, its basis in your brain. We'll look everywhere we can—software—trying to find out what music is made of and why it touches us so intimately.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

JAD: And touches us sometimes not in a good way. If you've ever had this experience of going to a concert, hearing some music and it ever made you upset for some reason, like irrationally upset, almost like you wanted to hurt someone, if that rings a bell there's a segment later in the show you will not want to miss.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes ...]

JAD: This is Radiolab. Stick around.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes behave so strangely!]

Man: I completely messed up. 

Woman: Should we do it one more time?

Man: Wrong note.

JAD: All right. Shall we start?

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: Well first, thanks to the Laguardia High School Chorus, and Robert Apostle. They were the voices you just heard.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes they behave so ...]

JAD: We'll hear more of them later.

ROBERT: So let's explore a little bit more closely this connection between language and music.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: You think of them as separate. The thing is they're really closely related, says neuroscientist Mark Jude Tramo.

MARK JUDE TRAMO: When we speak we sing. You know how to use the pitch of your voice to convey emotion and meaning, like "I went to the store." Just because I raised the pitch—the note, if you will—you interpret that as an interrogative. A monotonic speech you know, talking at the same rate and the rhythm in the same pitch and loudness, I mean, that is not how humans talk.

JAD: But humans talk in all kinds of different ways, in different languages. Each language has its own musical personality, German is different than French, is different than Swahili. And if you look at those differences closely there are all kinds of things we can learn about music. Take Diana Deutsch.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Okay.

JAD: She's recently been looking at tone languages. Just published her results, and the results are—startling.

JAD: Diana, before we start, what exactly is a tone language?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Okay. In tone languages, words take on different meanings depending upon the tones in which they are enunciated. For example Mandarin has four tones, and the word "Ma" in Mandarin means mother in the first tone, hemp in the second tone, horse in the third tone and a reproach in the fourth tone.

JAD: Could you say them?

DIANA DEUTSCH: The same—would you like me to?

JAD: Yeah could you—could you demonstrate?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Just—oh, I thought you—I thought you were ...

JAD: Well, you know, I have them on CD, but I'd rather hear you say them.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, okay. So excuse my bad pronunciation but I'll try. Ma means mother, Ma means hemp, Ma means horse and Ma is a reproach.

JAD: Huh. So conceivably, if you screwed up the tones you could call your mom a horse.

DIANA DEUTSCH: [laughs] Yes, indeed. In fact, there are quite a lot of jokes where Westerners who don't speak the tones right say terrible things.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

DIANA DEUTSCH: You have to be very careful.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

JAD: See, this is the basic difference: in English, we don't really worry about pitch, we can say our words up here or down here, or gliss it up, or bend it down. It's all the same. Not so with tone languages. In any case, this is where it gets interesting. One day, Diana is working with some Mandarin speakers and she notices something: there were these words, these words that they would say where they would all hit precisely the same note with their voices, not just close to one another either, exactly, precisely and consistently the same pitch. Even on different days.

DIANA DEUTSCH: In fact, would you like me to play for you one person reciting a list of 12 Mandarin tones on two different days?

JAD: Yeah, definitely.

DIANA DEUTSCH: First you have the first word spoken on day one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

DIANA DEUTSCH: Followed by the same word spoken on day two.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

DIANA DEUTSCH: Then you have the second word spoken on day one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

DIANA DEUTSCH: Followed by the same word spoken on day two, and so on. And that way you can see the consistency. It's going to appear as though the words are being repeated immediately, but in fact the repetitions occur on entirely different days.

JAD: So each of those word pairs came out of the mouth of one person separated by, like, 24 hours?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Oh, much more than that. Something like a week.

JAD: Really?

DIANA DEUTSCH: And it was a remarkable consistency.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

JAD: Well, that would be like us saying the word "Mom" always at this note here, "Mom, mom, mom."

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, I concluded that basically this was a form of perfect pitch.

JAD: Huh!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

ROBERT: I—I've never quite understood what perfect pitch is, to be honest.

JAD: You—you don't know what that is?

ROBERT: No. Should I? I mean, I know I should.

JAD: Well, it's—it's ...

ROBERT: Whisper it to me.

JAD: As a musician growing up, perfect pitch is like—it's like the thing. It's the thing you wish you had that none of us have. Basically, it's like having a tuning fork in your brain. Here, I'll give you an analogy.

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Okay, you see this coffee cup I'm holding?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: What color is it?

ROBERT: Brown.

JAD: And you knew that how?

ROBERT: Through my eyes.

JAD: Right. You didn't need me to put this brown coffee cup next to my blue jeans.

ROBERT: No, I didn't.

JAD: In order to see the brown. I mean it's absolute brown.

ROBERT: It's absolute brown.

JAD: Perfect pitch people have that with pitch. They hear a pitch, they know exactly what note it is. The rest of us have to run to the piano.

ROBERT: So if they hear a ding from an elevator, can they name the note?

JAD: Yeah, that's exactly it. Anything with a pitch. Like a horn honk, they can tell you that horn is an F, or those church bells are alternating between B flat and B. And if the faucet were dripping, they could say, "That faucet is dripping and it's D sharp." They don't even have to think about it, they just know.

DIANA DEUTSCH: It used to be that the note names would jump out at me.

JAD: Diana Deutsch actually is one of these lucky people.

DIANA DEUTSCH: To the extent that it would even be a nuisance.

ROBERT: Why—and why is that good?

JAD: Well, it's really rare. It only happens, like, once every 10,000 people here in America or Europe.

ROBERT: Yeah, but so does turning your tongue into a U.

JAD: Yeah, hold on, hold on. And of the people who have it ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Well, let's see. How should I say this? If you look in your music history textbooks you'll see that every famous composer, like the really big ones ...

DIANA DEUTSCH: Like, you know, Mozart and Bach and Beethoven.

JAD: They all had it.

ROBERT: Oh, really?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Mendelssohn, the list goes on and on.

JAD: So if you have perfect pitch, on some level you are closer to them. You've got the gift. Anyhow. Let's get back to Diana Deutsch.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Okay.

JAD: Okay, let's talk about your latest experiment, that's the one I'm really interested in. Okay so you compared Chinese kids to American kids to see who has perfect pitch more. So explain how this works. You had a group of Chinese music students, a group of American music students at the Eastman School of Music here in New York, and you play them a bunch of notes, I imagine in a room, and asked them to guess what those notes were?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Right.

JAD: Now how did that work exactly?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, the test consisted of piano tones which began on the C below middle C. That's this note. And extended up three octaves all the way up to the—that note.

JAD: That's a big range.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Yeah. 36 notes.

JAD: Can you demonstrate?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Sure. Yes. Here are six tones such as were given in the test.

JAD: So you would've played those notes to both sets of kids and asked them to name the notes without going to the piano. What were the notes, really?

DIANA DEUTSCH: What these notes were, D, E, G sharp, C sharp, D sharp, and G.

JAD: What were the results?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, it turns out the Chinese group far outperformed the Eastman group. Of those students who started musical training at ages four and five, 74 percent of the Chinese group showed perfect pitch, but 14 percent of the US non-tone language speakers.

JAD: Whoa! 74 percent?

DIANA DEUTSCH: The Beijing group was nine times roughly more likely to show perfect pitch than the American, English-speaking American group.

JAD: Jesus, that's a staggering difference.

DIANA DEUTSCH: It's a staggering difference.

JAD: And it's your hunch that the—the difference is because they speak a tone language?

DIANA DEUTSCH: That's my hunch. I mean, it's known that in the first year of life, say from age six months up to, you know, a little past a year, infants learn features of their native language. This is a very, very important stage. Let's suppose that tone and the absolute pitch of tones is a feature which is potentially available to anyone. Babies who are exposed only to an intonation language such as English are not given the opportunity to acquire tones. Then they're going to be at a very real disadvantage when they come later on to learn—to take music lessons.

JAD: So you think that as they're—let me ask this—as they're learning their language, which includes inherently music ...

DIANA DEUTSCH: Right.

JAD: ... to some degree, they are essentially learning two languages as they learn one. Is that right?

DIANA DEUTSCH: So imagine if you take the first tone, "Ma." It's a flat tone, it's really sung.

JAD: Yeah.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Compared with English speech, it's really more like song.

JAD: That's—that's always been sort of the stereotype of the Chinese language is it's very sort of sing-songy.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Yes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [speaking Mandarin]]

DIANA DEUTSCH: For example, the third tone in Mandarin, "Ma," is sort of like a J-type pattern. The second tone, which is a gentle upward gliss, "Ma," the fourth tone which is a rapid downward gliss, "Ma." I mean, these are all kind of musical relationships.

JAD: Yeah.

DIANA DEUTSCH: Given the evidence on absolute pitch, one could speculate further and say well, maybe other features of music are also enhanced for individuals who start off learning tone language.

JAD: So then here's my big question: could this explain the experience that I had—and I think a lot of people have this experience—when they're taking music lessons and playing little piddly pieces like Frere Jacques, and here are these lChinese girls, right, who are playing Rachmaninoff.

DIANA DEUTSCH: [laughs] Yeah. Right.

JAD: You know, they're brilliant. Is this why?

DIANA DEUTSCH: Well, I—I think it's a viable hypothesis, I mean, evidently it could be something else. There could be something else going on.

JAD: Like what?

DIANA DEUTSCH: I mean one could argue that instead it might be genetic and so on, but then ...

JAD: But that's—see, that's such a boring theory, frankly.

DIANA DEUTSCH: It is a boring theory, and furthermore we don't have to assume that, knowing what we do about exposure to tone language in very early childhood as a ...

JAD: Ah, it's just not fair!

DIANA DEUTSCH: [laughs] And I think we can look at it another way round. Here we have a faculty that had been thought to be confined to a few rare individuals who are just extraordinarily gifted.

JAD: Right.

DIANA DEUTSCH: That might, in fact, be available to any individual provided they're given the right exposure at a critical period. And that raises the question of what other sorts of abilities could be brought out if we only knew just what to do. There may be much more human potential than we had realized.

JAD: Diana Deutsch is a professor of music psychology at the University of San Diego.

ROBERT: Music psychology?

JAD: Music psychology. And as I mentioned earlier she's also the releaser of two CDs.

ROBERT: She has? I forgot that.

JAD: Yes. Two CDs. One's called Musical Illusions and Paradoxes, and the other one is called Phantom Words and Other Curiosities.

ROBERT: And what would—what would she put on a CD, exactly?

JAD: She puts these little audio pieces that she uses in her research, the stuff I guess that she will play to subjects as she tests them, and she puts these on CDs because they're kind of fun to listen to.

ROBERT: This is like an ear test or ...

JAD: Yeah, sort of. We've actually put a couple on our website.

ROBERT: Well, what do they sound like? Just give us a little sample.

JAD: All right, I'll give you some samples. There is the Chromatic Illusion. [electronic sounds] Kind of a carnival feel to it. There's also the Cambiata Illusion. [electronic sounds]

ROBERT: Oh, the Cambiata Illusion.

JAD: And of course, the Phantom Word Experiments.

ROBERT: Ah, the Phantom Word Experiments.

JAD: None of those pieces are gonna make any kind of sense unless you visit our website, Radiolab.org, where all will be explained.

ROBERT: Coming up, fashionable French ladies in elegant dresses throw things at innocent musicians.

JAD: [laughs] I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Maybe not so innocent.

JAD: Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: [singing] Sometimes behave so strangely ...]

 

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