Musical Ear - Nature or Nurture?

[macrobilly]

The whole relative and perfect pitch thing is still kind of in the darkness; there is little research on it.

Recognizing intervals and pitch probably involve different parts of the brain than most logical and mathematical tasks, so traditional IQ tests can not measure one's aptitude toward it. It probably involves the same parts of the brain that handle language.

There is a hypothesis called the Critical Period Hypothesis that may relate to one's ability to learn perfect and relative pitch. "The Critical Period Hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal 'window' of time to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which this is no longer possible."

Since most us are not exposed to interval training or any type of musical training as babies and children, this may greatly hamper our ability to recognize intervals and pitch later in life.

I believe most teachers profess perfect pitch is innate, and can not be learned while relative pitch can be learned by most if not all. Then there is the camp that believes both perfect and relative pitch can be learned by most people.