With great power comes great annoyance. Lucy says that her case isn’t so extreme. “I had a friend who used to say that every morning before he got up, he would have to sit in his room and meditate so that he wouldn’t be driven crazy by all of the sounds that he would encounter during the day. I’m not quite like that. If I’m having sort of a nervous or irritable day, I think I tend to pay more attention to sounds that annoy me. But for the most part, you have to block it out. Just like you can’t pay attention to every piece of sensory information that’s coming through; otherwise, you end up overwhelmed.”
But it takes some effort to tune out sounds that are out of tune. Imagine that you are Lucy as a college senior. You sit down to write your senior thesis about the opera La Callisto by Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli. You’re interested in exploring how “it functions as a criticism of the Venetian practice of forced monachization.” (We had to look up the word monachization, too: it’s a noun meaning “the act or process of becoming a monk or of becoming or making monastic.”)
You turn on your laptop, and it starts to hum. “My laptop usually starts off just south of an F sharp,” Lucy says, “and then sits around just south of a G sharp for a while, and eventually winds up just south of a C natural. It changes, depending on how fast the fan is running in the computer.” It was annoying, but, fortunately, between voice lessons (she’s a soprano), a graduate-level chamber music class, her lead as Deidamia in Francesco Sacrati’s La Finta Pazza, and learning Pierrot Lunaire, Lucy mostly hears her own voice—singing in tune.
Tutto a posto—everything is in its place.
About fifteen years ago, David Ross also spent a great deal of time on the Yale campus, singing. Today he’s a professor of psychiatry. He hasn’t left Yale—after doing his undergraduate work there, he went on to complete an M.D./Ph.D. at the Yale School of Medicine.
As an undergrad, Ross was a singer in Redhot & Blue, an a cappella group at Yale. He recalls that the director of the group had perfect pitch. “At that point, I really didn’t even know what that meant. She would ask me to do stuff that didn’t make sense. She’d say, ‘Can’t you just sing a C? Can’t you hear that’s a quarter of a step flat?’” Ross, however, couldn’t do either of those things. “It was incredibly annoying to go through this experience.”
It’s true. Being told to fix something when you don’t know the difference between fixed and broken and being reprimanded for something you can’t control are annoying. (In fact, as we’ll see later, these are simple and foolproof ways to annoy people if you’re conducting an experiment on frustration.)
Ross and the group director were hearing the same notes but experiencing them differently—Ross wanted to know why. He continues to study this question, now in his own lab. He says that the acoustic world is a mental minefield for people with perfect pitch. “They notice stuff that we don’t,” Ross says. “Radio stations will speed up or slow down a song to make it fit in the time spot that they have. So if they have three minutes, they might play a song that’s supposed to be three minutes and five seconds and simply speed it up. Well, that’s also increasing the pitch. We don’t notice that, but people with perfect pitch do. And it might be really annoying.”
Why is it annoying, though? People with absolute pitch talk about pitch differently than we do. Ross says, “They describe pitch as having a fundamental salience that’s present for them but absent for us.” It’s as if pitches have identities. “That a B flat sounds like a B flat because it just does.”
Robert Zatorre, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies perfect pitch at the Montreal Neurological Institute, gives this analogy for how people with perfect pitch hear the world: “It’s like if I see a cat or a dog. When I was a child, I didn’t know what they were called, but I knew a cat was a cat when I saw one and a dog was a dog when I saw one. Someone eventually told me the label for that creature is cat.” For people with perfect pitch, the difference between an A flat and a C sharp is the difference between a cat and a dog.
Some have used colorblindness to help explain what it’s like for those of us without perfect pitch—but Zattore doesn’t think this is quite right. If you can see color, a particular hue probably doesn’t have a distinct identity. For example, try to match the color of your wall from memory when you’re at the paint store. “You try that and see how successful you are when you get back home. It’ll be off, there’s no question. Why is that? Because we don’t have absolute color. If we had absolute color, we’d be able to look at that wall and say, ‘Okay, I know the exact shade that is.’ And I could go to the paint store and pick that one out of the thousands of possible shades that might exist. There may actually be people who have something like absolute color, and maybe they’re artists or interior decorators, I don’t know.”
For Lucy, each pitch does have a unique identity—and this may explain why an out-of-tune note is so annoying. “They sort of have different characters or textures to them in my head now,” she says. “And I associate them in groups of fifths.” A fifth would be two notes that are seven semitones apart—that’s the number of notes, including sharps and flats, between two notes. Lucy associates A and E, F and C, and D and G. In terms of frequencies lining up, they are the next most perfect interval to an octave. (A fifth is more familiar to your ear as a power chord, the building blocks of rock music for bands that range from the Kinks to the Kings of Leon.) “I hear them sort of in these pairs of fifths with similar textures to them, if you will. This sounds kind of weird—F and C are sort of like flat and ribbonlike. Like a flat, smooth ribbon. And A and E are more like a single strand. But D and G to me sound more rich, softer. Like a fuzzy ribbon.”
Lucy doesn’t see a fuzzy ribbon in her brain, she says, she feels it. “Like if my brain had fingers, it could feel these notes, and that’s what they would feel like. It seems like everyone should feel this way, too, because they are all different, they’re all their own unique selves. You don’t exactly think about it; it’s just how they are. It’s like they’re all individual different people or something like that. And they all have different characteristics.”
For her, when a note is out of tune, it doesn’t have an identity. “Maybe what makes it annoying, when the pitch is in this nebulous area between two notes, is that it’s in no-man’s-land.” There is something unsettling about an unidentifiable signal. It’s irritating to hear something that we can’t place.
Out-of-tune sounds bother her because her brain is expecting a tone to sound a certain way. David Ross puts it like this: “A similar phenomenon exists in psychotherapy.” (When he’s not doing perfect-pitch research, he’s a psychiatrist treating patients with post-traumatic stress disorder at the Veterans Administration.) “If you’re feeling frustrated at any point in time, it’s because there’s a gap in expectation. If you’re frustrated with a patient, it’s because your expectations of what’s going to happen don’t match with what the patient’s expectations are. If you have somebody who is drinking, he keeps drinking and you get really frustrated. It’s your problem, not his problem. He doesn’t want to stop drinking. Once you adjust your expectations, everything is fine. If your expectation is that the notes will be perfect, you’re going to be disappointed.”
As someone who is interested in how music has changed over history, Lucy is acutely aware of this. “It’s definitely a construct that’s occurring within this artificial system that we’ve created in Western tonal music.”