What the hell does music have to do with anything? Eh? mavpace made some thoughful arguments in the thread, but this one stupid statement ruined it.
Is he too stupid to comprehend that some cultures have a radically way of playing music? So different that it operates on different tonal scales. While it may sound bad to us, it sounds really really good to the people brought up to appriciate that style. Our stuff probably sounds terrible to them. Does mavpace really think that everyone in the middle east (or whoever the hell he was talking about) is too stupid to play Beethoven? No, they dont freaking want Beethoven, cos to their ears Beethoven sucks!
A hearty “suck on a lemon full of spit” to you, dear mavpace. Us people of a liberal bent dont talk about certain races having an advantage in music because it is UNTRUE, and makeing such an assertation makes one an ASSHOLE.
Not to defend stereotyping, but I remember an article in the NY Times about a year ago that said that a far greater number of people raised on tonal languages have perfect pitch. Would account for some of those Chinese musical child prodigies.
Well, sven, I’m not sure you picked up on mavpace’s implication: I think he was unsubtly referring to the stereotype that all blacks can sing and tapdance, which we liberals deny out of wimpy PCness.
And Space Vampire, perfect pitch is learnable, so it isn’t surprising that different cultures have different ratios of people who possess it.
The OP is making a mountain out of a molehill. I think mavspace might be saying that different races have advantages in making certain kinds of music (obviously disputable, nature vs nurture and all that). Or perhaps he is saying that some races might be more manually dextrous, so they are more capable of being musicians.
Interesting how you don’t dispute his statement concerning sports and scholastic achievement.
Anyways, the point being that there are more than one “reasonable” interpretations of mav’s statement, so there really isn’t a need to pick a bone here.
[nitpick alert]
While you can certainly train your ear, actual perfect pitch cannot be taught. As an example, my high school band director used to play the following trick. He would claim to have perfect pitch and then offer to prove it. Someone would play a note, he would guess (usually incorrectly), but then correctly name every subsequent note played. Because he had a very good ear, once he had the first note as a reference, he could identify the rest. Perfect pitch refers to the ability to identify a note played without any reference.
I have read that we are all (with the exception of people who are actually tone deaf, which is quite rare) born with perfect pitch, but that most of us lose the ability early in our lives. It does make sense that people who use a tonal language would tend to more often keep the ability. Horses have perfect pitch, too. You can train a horse to respond to an F, but ignore an F#.
[/nitpick]