Now that you know all of this about Lucy, you may be shocked by what her particular focus is: early music, which is particularly grating for someone with perfect pitch. You see, compositions from the 1600s, for example, are not tuned to the same standard as modern tuning. An A from that era is not the same frequency as an A today. (This is called having a difference in pitch center.) “Growing up in the modern world, we think of the note A as being at 440 Hz. And a lot of early music does A at 415, which is a half-step lower, or A at 465, which is a half-step higher, in which case I have to transpose.”
In addition, early music often has a different “temperament” than today’s equal temperament. This is basically how notes are shoehorned into an octave. The relationship between a D and a G might be different, frequency-wise, in one temperament than in another. In early music, one of the tuning systems used is called quarter-comma meantone. “The tuning system itself changes where I expect pitches to be. For me, the most annoying part is that the fifths are lower than in equal temperament, so to me they sound flat.” Lucy says that this can make for good tonal symbolism, though. The out-of-tune sound conveys anguish.
For a singer with perfect pitch, that anguish is visceral. “I feel like I have to sing out of tune,” says Lucy. “It isn’t really out of tune, it’s just a different way of thinking about music. I’m sure for people back then who had perfect pitch, that would have been completely normal to them. It does highlight how much of this is artificial—is really just a construct of our brains.”
The annoying part is a construct: the product of learning a musical system and then expecting the sounds you hear to fit within it, which suggests an extrinsic unpleasantness. On the other hand, if you are musically trained and have perfect pitch, there may be no situation in which an out-of-tune note isn’t annoying, which suggests an intrinsic unpleasantness—at least, for this population.
Who is at risk for this special annoyance? There’s a lot of debate about that—particularly about the role of musical training in developing perfect pitch. Lots of musicians had early musical training, but most don’t have perfect pitch. On the other hand, most people who have been identified as having perfect pitch have had early musical training. What David Ross wants to understand is whether you can have perfect pitch with no musical training.
Lucy grew up in a musical house, although she’s the only one with perfect pitch. She started on the violin when she was five, but she doesn’t remember always hearing the world the way she does now. She began singing in the choir in junior high. “It was really strange. I remember one time I sang a wrong note, and one of the girls sitting next to me was like, ‘Lucy makes mistakes!’ and I was like, ‘Of course, I make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes.’ But then I started thinking about it and realized that I really did always know what the pitches were going to be. I don’t think I was born with perfect pitch. And I really didn’t notice it until I started singing.”
The debate about whether absolute pitch is learned or something you are born with has raged in the scientific literature for longer than a hundred years, Ross says. He hopes his research will someday help resolve the debate.
Most perfect-pitch tests go something like this. A researcher—or, more likely, a graduate student—will play a series of notes and ask the listener to name them. Sound fair? No, says Ross. “If you weren’t a musician, you wouldn’t know the names of notes, and you couldn’t take the test. So you’ve tautologically defined that you’re only going to look at musicians, and then you’re going to claim that musical training is required.”
Ross came up with a different test that, instead of naming notes, requires participants to match notes by ear using a “sine function generator” that generates a tone and sweeps through pitches when you turn the front knob. Ross asks people to match the first tone in a long series of notes. This requires people to keep the initial tone in their memories while the other tones play. “We had twenty-two professional non-AP musicians [musicians without absolute, or perfect, pitch], largely faculty from the Yale School of Music.”
How do you think they did? Keep in mind that people in this group could easily play any number of complex classical works entirely from memory. What’s one note? A lot, it would seem, to someone without perfect pitch.
“Their combined performance, when you added together all of their data, didn’t differ from chance,” Ross says, “which is to say that they would have done just as well if they weren’t wearing the headphones when they did our experiments. And these are professional musicians who are really quite invested in their musicianship.” Subjects with perfect pitch didn’t miss a note. This makes sense: if pitches have an identity, it wouldn’t be that hard to learn to the labels and remember them.
Then Ross tested three-, four-, and five-year-olds who were suspected of having perfect pitch but who had little musical training. These kids scored perfectly. “It was hard to explain the instructions because at four years old, it’s pretty hard to understand how to do this test. Yet you have a four-year-old outperforming the faculty at the Yale School of Music,” Ross says sympathetically. This suggests that there’s some predisposition for perfect pitch.
It’s almost impossible, however, to disentangle environmental impact from innate ability. Exposure to music could make a difference, even if formal musical training isn’t required. “You’d have to raise someone in a soundproof world for this person to have no musical exposure,” says Robert Zattore. “I think this is, in a way, one of those false debates. The answer to that question is almost always, ‘It’s got to be both.’ Neither the biological predisposition nor the environmental influence is sufficient; you need both, and that interaction has to come at the right time.” Just what genetic and environmental recipe is required for a particular individual is anybody’s guess. And just what is different about how the brains of people with perfect pitch process notes? That’s the holy grail, Zattore says.
You might think that the annoyance factor of perfect pitch would be worth it if you were a musician, at least a musician who was not interested in weird temperaments and different pitch centers. Yet it’s not so clear. “I tend to think about music in a very linear and discrete fashion,” Lucy says. Another perfect-pitch possessor describes being at a hockey game. The marching band was playing Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” He knew the song, but he didn’t recognize it. The band had changed the key. This is a common problem for people with perfect pitch.
Lucy provided a literary analogy. “Tolstoy was a writer. And he liked to look at all of these tiny details in something. But when he’s writing War and Peace, he wants to write this huge work, so he had to work very hard to extend this practice to an entire novel, which wound up being thousands of pages long. I feel like that’s sort of the way I approach music, at the nitty-gritty, detail-oriented level. Then I have to work harder to think about it in the larger context. Whereas my friends automatically hear it in the larger context.”
When pitches register as individuals with distinct personalities, it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees—or the melody for the notes.
8. Dissonant
Despite the adage, scientists studying music have been relentless in their quest to account for taste. It’s an enormously complicated question: What makes something enjoyable to listen to?
It’s not even clear why we like music at all. Some researchers have speculated that the human tendency to get pleasure out of music is simply a coincidence. Other scientists say that music’s ubiquity around the world argues for a genetic component. When musicologists talk about what kinds of music we like, they use two terms we’ve already discussed a little: consonance and dissonance.