How Children Develop Perfect Pitch

hey be careful over there perfect pitch is the ability to identify or recreate any musical note without a reference tone like this that notes an a-flat oh well I don't have perfect pitch anyways we're gonna talk about a lot of the misconceptions about it when you're able to develop it and all the latest scientific research on it today on everything music this is my son Dylan at age five a Discoverer D and perfect pitch also known as absolute pitch nearly two years before this video was made in the following two years his pitch recognition has developed to an astounding level it was this video that went viral in December of 2015 receiving 22 million views on Facebook in the first two weeks this was the kind of video I would typically record once every couple years to show my family back in New York his progress in musical development but this time was to be different four weeks after this initial video I released the second one to prove to people that the first one wasn't somehow faked this one also went on to get tens of millions of views so how does one go about developing perfect pitch we're going to talk about both nature and nurture to try and find out the truth behind perfect pitch development did you know that the incidence of perfect pitch is only 1 in 10,000 people yet tonal language speakers such as those who speak Mandarin or Vietnamese have a 30% higher incidence of it according to researcher Diana Deutsch the reason for this is that in these so-called tonal languages changing pitch can completely alter the meaning of words for example the Mandarin word ma means mother when the vowel is a constant high pitch but means hamp when pronounced with a rising pitch so this would lead you to believe that nurture is more important than nature well there's this thing called an S&P a single nucleotide polymorphism it's a variation of a single nucleotide that occurs at a certain position in the genome where each variation is present in some appreciable degree within the population espies occur normally throughout a person's DNA they occur once every 300 nucleotides on average which means there's roughly 10 million snps in the human genome most commonly these variations are found in the DNA between genes they can act as biological markers helping scientists locate genes that are associated with disease or unique abilities like perfect pitch there's actually an SNP that's been identified called rs30 5/7 or the perfect pitch gene so out of curiosity I went and had my DNA tested I also had my son dillan and my daughter Lennon to see if we had this gene rs30 5/7 and much to my amazement we all have it but what I found out was that 31.9% of the population of caucasian people also have it as well as 50% of Asians so as far as it being something rare it isn't so I have to look elsewhere let's get a couple experts to weigh in on it when you think of a note does it just pop into your head yes okay can you think of a G right now sing-sing G play it what about B what about a-flat what about C if you think of a G minor chord can you hear that in your head yes can you sing that when you hear these really complex chords do you recognize pieces of them do you say oh I hear this cord and then I hear this cord so you recognize them because you know some of the theory behind it right yeah so if I said what are the notes in a G major chord yeah some of them I'm some of the courses that you played have little chords I just split them up into groups and say the whole chord what about when you're listening to the radio do you think about all the pitches they're hearing you just listen to music no I just listen to the music and do things that are out of tune bother you no not at all i sat down with Dylan's piano teacher Joey who came yesterday to ask him about students that he's had with perfect pitch okay so over the years how many students have you had with perfect pitch oh gosh over the years maybe 15 20 they're all very intelligent they do very well in school and great memory I can teach them orally I can just sing the right notes and they go straight to it very good what about this cord they're easy to work with in the lesson especially as far as hearing mistakes and they're very quick learners they're the ones that take the most AP classes a lot of high SAT scores one one for student with perfect pitch that now it's doing a double doctorate at Harvard PhD and MD and neurology I'm really good family for long numbers 2.0 ports are you quadrant 902 trillion April I wonder how many six million six hundred forty thousand I can do PI for like a lion digits super one four one five nine two six five through 12 a nice n I did I can also do a periodic table I can lay on this umbrella newborn coming next for another point of view I decided to reach out to my dear friend Gaby Lani whose son Arielle was featured in a 2008 BBC documentary entitled super human genius native fluency is more than just a perfect pitch it's I'm referring basically to the ability to speak the language of music it includes perfect pitch and it includes much other stuff that you did with still and and that I did with our yell when there were tiny babies I like the expression and the idea of native fluency because I like to think about it as being assimilated or absorbed the same way that tiny babies learn the native language at an early age well early age is debatable but certainly begins at birth at the latest according to some even before just how long that window during which native fluency can be acquired how long that window is open we are not for sure we start at birth to make sure that we catch that window and we begin teaching language at birth wherever we like it or not we're not making any kind of effort we start talking to a baby as soon as the baby's born so we want to do the same thing with music yeah that's true all babies hear music but what kind of music do they hear most of the time they hear what you would call low information content music it's pop and and stuff like that in a couple of keys with a few chord progressions most of it one four and five we want to expose kids to high contact information music which in western music is mostly classical music and jazz right perfect pitch is in a way a precondition for all the things to happen in order to have to be natively fluent in music you need to have perfect pitch but I believe that all children all babies are born with perfect pitch already what happens is that they lose it because it is not reinforced because nobody tells them they're seasoned see that an f-sharp is an f-sharp that a b-flat is a b-flat so how are they to know consider how we learn our colors it is constant uninterrupted repetition day after day after day of the names of the various columns essentially the brain receives a bunch of input through the eyes and receives inputs through the ears why should it process the wavelengths that it receives through the eyes and it different from the way it processes the wavelengths that it receives through the ears we see a whole spread spectrum of colors from violet to red and we identify them by people telling us constantly that red is red and green is green and blue is blue but the same way we hear a bunch of frequencies from about sixteen to twenty thousand Hertz and we hear this all the time but nobody's telling us that it is the drg is a G so how are we to know but in western music the sounds that we really refer to sounds that appear on the piano keyboard okay on the piano keys these are what we call we can refer to them as the official sounds okay and so let's call them notes for now in fact there's only twelve of them but they appear many times in the various registers I think how babies learn their native language they hear the same word repeated endlessly day after day day in day out they collect statistics on them and after a while meanings begin to attach to individual words the same thing is happening to the sounds they hear these sounds repeatedly and they hear all kinds of sounds in nature but these 88 sounds in fact they hear more often than the other sounds so as they're collecting statistics on their sounds these 88 are beginning to gain on the other sounds to test this theory of named their official pitches versus unnamed are in between pitches courted one minute of everyday household sounds that a baby would likely be exposed to and put a digital tuner to it as you can see there are virtually no sounds that fall exactly on one of the official pitches used in western music as a matter of fact most of them are not even close now watch the tuner again when I play what I like to call high information music for it all of this flashing that you're seeing is a signal that the name notes are catching up to the unnamed ones so they begin to fall into place and they hear the more and more often but still somebody has to name them no matter how often you hear them if you don't know that a b-flat is a b-flat you'll never know we have to name the sounds for them what I did to facilitate this note naming process was to create 24 major and minor pieces each of which began by me playing the individual notes of the chord and stating their names this was then followed by an etude based on this chord C sharp minor C sharp the G sharp c-sharp minor' C sharp e G sharp C sharp minor even if you don't have perfect I don't have perfect pitch and I cannot produce a b-flat but I can sing a b-flat with the piano the good news is that we don't need to teach babies anything because their brains are wired to learn and they're wired to figure out the patterns and to figure out to figure out the other rules okay here's a question I get asked all the time can adults develop perfect pitch no adults cannot you have to be a baby to develop it I'll give you a couple obvious examples that you may not have thought about before we talk about the real reasons why okay if an adult could develop perfect pitch then every piano tuner in the world would have it and everybody that goes to music conservatories would have it too well I know from personal experience being a former college music professor that any student that came in without perfect pitch left without it if you think about it these students are practicing five hours a day if there are performance majors if anybody was going to develop it they would this is because babies are born with the unique ability to hear the phonetic units of every language spoken on earth that's 6500 different languages which contain about 2,000 phonemes just to put that number in perspective only forty-four phonemes are used in the English language this period of increased brain plasticity is called a critical window at ten months before their first birthday and long before learning to talk babies have already evaluated to dedicated themselves to their native language including the language of music this is dubbed the use it or lose it phase simply put if babies do not need to recognize certain sounds tones or pitches they lose the ability to do so imagine a baby's brain comprised of billions of neurons branching out interacting with one another by forming synaptic connections the more you stimulate a synapse the more you reinforce the connection but when certain synapses are not reinforced they fade away never to return again when a baby is immersed in the language of music they are looking for patterns of repetition and sequences and sound this is how perfect pitch begins to develop thanks as always for watching please subscribe here or at my everything music Facebook page if you haven't already also be sure to check us out on patreon at the link provided I'm Rick Beato

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 893,378

Keywords: everything music, dylan beato, perfect pitch, absolute pitch, ear training, how to develop perfect pitch, nuryl

Id: TgFdics3uKo

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/SHOTbyGUN]

That was much more interesting than I anticipated. 5/7