Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

In particular, a good deal of research has shown that nearly everyone with perfect pitch began musical training at a very young age — generally around three to five years old.3 But if perfect pitch is an innate ability, something that you are either born with or not, then it shouldn’t make any difference whether you receive music training as a child. All that should matter is that you get enough musical training — at any time in your life — to learn the names of the notes. The next clue appeared when researchers noticed that perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch. If perfect pitch is indeed a genetic gift, then the only way that the tonal-language connection would make sense would be if people of Asian ancestry are more likely to have genes for perfect pitch than people whose ancestors came from elsewhere, such as Europe or Africa. But that is something that is easy to test for. You just recruit a number of people of Asian ancestry who grew up speaking English or some other nontonal language and see if they are more likely to have perfect pitch.

Asians and perfect pitch