I suspect that all of us are physically capable of "perfect pitch",
but since relative pitch is so much more important for language, we
lose the capability. There's a small "module" in the brain that
converts a rising pitch to "going up" and a falling pitch to "going
down" and only those signals make it to the next stage in the brain.
I'll bet if you announced dinner to a baby with a Bb and changing time
with a C, etc., you'd get a child with perfect pitch.
Years ago (gosh, 22 years ago, to be exact!!) I took a course at the
"Better Baby Institute" in Philadelphia; you may have heard some of the
hoopla at the time - it was thought that baby's could soak up all kind
of advanced information (math, foreign languages, music, etc.)
beautifully while still young and in the space where their brains were
almost completely tuned in to learning things. They absolutely
guaranteed that one could teach one's child to have perfect pitch by
playing the notes daily to the child. I even bought the little
zylophone they sold to do this for my first son. There was only really
one catch to this - the parent had to present the information in little
mini-chunks multiple times each day. Being too lazy to actually do this
for any length of time, I never got to prove whether it worked or not,
though other parents who had done the course swore by it.
My great aunt swore that I could do the same thing using a violin or
piano as well, and that she had successfully done it with her son.
Later, I came to think that real perfect pitch might be a very mixed
blessing. I prefer my very good relative pitch in most cases.
Sharon Szymanski
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