since china has established itself as the united states’ successor to global economic supremacy, i’ve noticed attitudes among my fellow round-eyes toward the chinese language have been changing from mocking bewilderment to (outwardly) fascinated reverence. over the last five years or so, i’ve been hearing rumors that recently greater of numbers of children are being born with perfect pitch, ostensibly because spoken chinese famously uses four tones to differentiate meanings for the same syllables, lending it a musical quality, or so some say. i’ve been studying chinese for ten years and i have to say i’m skeptical. for one thing, you don’t hear of kids in other chinese-speaking countries like singapore or taiwan being born with perfect pitch (and one would certainly expect there to be a noticeable effect on taiwan, because not only do they speak chinese there but the taiwanese language has twice as many tones), nor have i heard about it in other countries like tibet or japan where the local languages have tonal qualities. also, i’ve met plenty of native chinese speakers who can’t carry a tune to save their lives but have no trouble with the language, and plenty of musical non-chinese that are totally mystified by the language. i myself am pretty musical but i wouldn’t say that’s contributed in any way to what mastery of the language i’ve attained. and anyway, how can the language represent enough of an evolutionary advantage that would lead to a greater incidence of something as complex and singular as perfect pitch? i could go on for hours listing contrary evidence, but i gotta know - have the most recent generations of chinese kids produced a higher than normal (or at least higher than before) proportion of kids with perfect pitch?
If you really want people to read your posts, please learn to use the shift key. And insert the occasional paragraph break.
Chinese language hasn’t become any more tonal “recently”, so why would incidence of perfect pitch births change?
Did Chinese educational system for the last several decades have an infrastructure for identifying perfect pitch children in the first place? Without that how would you study such a hypothetical trend?
Sounds like a crock. As pointed out earlier, even though Chinese grammar is laughably simple, when posting here both grammar and punctuation are not bad things.
Perfect pitch is not something you’re born with. It’s something you get from repeated exposure to musical tones during early childhood.
And here’s a research paper that suggests that native speakers of tonal languages are more likely to develop perfect pitch.
What’s presumably going on is the following: There has been an increase in the number of classical musicians born in China who have become at least moderately well known in the rest of the world. It’s hard to tell why this is so. Perhaps it’s just because the standard of living in China has been increasing relatively quickly. Perhaps it’s because the government has been increasingly pushing children to study music. In any case, someone from outside China noticed this increase in good musicians and decided there must be complicated explanation for it. He decided that it’s because Chinese is a tonal language. He thinks that speakers of a tonal language are much more likely to have perfect pitch and that someone with perfect pitch is much more likely to become a first-class musician. He explains this to other people and it becomes a popular rumor.
The Dong people in China are famous for their singing, and while it’s not like finding a real life musical, they do get their practice in.
I think what you are noticing is that lots of people have potential to be a good singer, and China has a lot of people, and more of those people are now receiving money and attention to sing and develop their talent. Singapore and Taiwan are tiny, compared to China.
i should point out that i myself am not believing this hype - this is all stuff i’ve heard secondhand, and the question is meant to reflect my cynicism
and basically what everyone seems to be saying is that i’m right, ‘chinese people are being born with perfect pitch’ is based on a number of flawed assumptions, and what’s really happening is the result of cultural and economic changes
as for my want of proper capitalization and punctuation, everyone knows it’s unhip to be emphatic on the internet
With respect punch line, it is good form to adapt to the mores of the website that you visit. Here we capitalize. Or to put it another way, TLDR.
In one study on this subject advanced music students from New York were compared with advanced music students from Beijing.
The study didn’t account for the possibility the differences could be genetic or other factors. They theorize that learning a tonal language early in life opens the door to a higher likelihood of learning perfect pitch.
It theorizes that learning perfect pitch for most is like early language development, e.g. learning a first language. The chance is all but lost for most after early childhood. But to a native tonal language speaker, learning perfect pitch is something more like learning a second language, something very achievable to many even later in life.
good point. did the study say anything about method of instruction, though? i mean, are the methods used to teach music in china at all related to those they use for language? do musicians consciously analogize the tonality of music with the tonality of their language?
one of the “other factors” could be the mechanism of admissions selection. If Chinese entrance process selects purely for ability while American one is “corrupt” in some ways (maybe they are partial to people with glowing recommendations from music-related extracurriculars), then you can get such disparities regardless of existence of ethnic differences.
A more extreme version of this would be comparing typical student math ability between MIT and Tsinghua without filtering out “underrepresented minorities”.
The same author of that study did several other studies with Mandarin and Vietnamese speakers linked from that web page. In some, the subjects had no musical training at all but still demonstrated absolute pitch at a rate exponentially higher than any known non-tonal language speakers.
The theory is pretty simple: we learn our first language in a way more profoundly than others we might learn later. A small child might have a vocabulary of thousands of words even though they could never memorize a list of thousands of items. Learning perfect pitch is just memorizing sounds and associating them with the names of the corresponding notes. So if your first language is based on associating linguistic tones with the meanings of words, later it is easier to associate musical tones with notes whereas for most it would be an extraordinary feat of memorization.
I don’t buy it at all. An English speaker uses all the same “tones” as a Mandarin speaker in conversation. The tones are just used to convey information in a different way, and without as rigid a structure as might be taught in a Chinese elementary school. Tones themselves have nothing particularly “musical” or otherwise magical about them, insofar as every language (AFAIK) has them in one form or another.
I don’t speak Chinese. And those who have heard me sing have expressed their doubts over my ability to do that as well.
But would speaking a tonal language have any connection with perfect pitch? The fact that your voice is rising or falling doesn’t mean you’re using a particular pitch.
i have to disagree. tones in english may convey information differently, but tones in mandarin will more often than not convey different information, such that if you can’t differentiate the tone with which a chinese word is being said then you’ll lose the meaning of the sentence completely. if you intonate the english word “kiss” in every possible way, the meaning will still be kiss. but in chinese, the word that means kiss could also mean ask, smell, or language, or dozens of other things. similarly, a rising tone in english might indicate a question, but in chinese it will inform the meaning of the word you’re using. it’s not about what is “taught in a chinese elementary school,” but the tonality is a facet of the language itself. if you use the wrong tone, you could very well end up saying you like to eat dog meat when you want to say you’ve eaten enough; the tone creates no such confusion in english.
You don’t have to buy it, but you are incorrect in your statement. Pitch (more accurately than tone) is essential to the meaning of otherwise identical words in those languages. So saying “boo” in C sharp might mean “thank you” and “boo” in D might mean “your mother is a goat”. That is a unique characteristic of just a few languages, and the speakers of those languages do seem to have a much higher ability to learn absolute musical pitch.
wait a minute - is there a language that relies on pitch perception rather than tone? tibetan and japanese will differentiate between ‘low’ pitch and ‘high’ pitch, but i haven’t heard of a language that differentiates the pitch of words further than that.
in chinese it’s about recognizing what change has occurred in the tone, i.e. if it rises, falls, stays the same, etc. thus recognizing a change in pitch is crucial to understanding the language, but the pitch itself is not. the skill still lends itself to music very well.
According to one of the cited studies:
That is like a group of different musicians all reading the same musical score almost identically at different times on different days. But it was a list of words not a musical score.
This is what I mean, which I posted on this board nine years ago:
As you can see, “yes” in each context does convey different information.
Also, I’m pretty fluent in Mandarin after learning it for two and a half decades now and y’all are full of 狗屎