Summary

Among musicians absolute pitch is more common then among the vice versa, because this type of gift as a result can be identified as a factor of musical talent development. In today’s fast moving world an individual has to prove his being unique in order to play a role among the highly-competitive society. The author, Oliver Sacks, also brings out the main reasons of how this ability gets developed among individuals. He describes genetic reasons, lingual peculiarities of different nations, and child development specialties. Besides portraying various absolute pitch musicians Oliver Sacks also describes how people owning this ability go on after going deaf, how musicians are still able to do what they are best at. He describes the difference in world views of people with absolute pitch, their relation and reaction to people who don’t possess such capabilities.

It is quite remarkable knowing that people with absolute pitch are able to define the pitch of any sound, note, noise without comparison. People having absolute pitch notified how remarkable this developed sense was, and they described how unordinary it was and how special this sense showed. The author described some examples in his article, where some people having absolute pitch used it in their professions. Gordon B. a professional violinist remarked to the author that when he had his tinnitus it was specifically a “high F-natural”, which is very odd when someone identifies the pitch of his tinnitus. When you have absolute pitch, you can define the tone of any sound, whether you hear it in your everyday life or you even from your head. People with this ability can differ up to 70 tones, and they can identify their differences with high precision.

The author tells how the “Oxford Companion to Music” was a sort of story book to him as he was a boy, which included multiple examples of absolute pitch. Oliver Sacks loved the example of Sir Frederick Ouseley, who was once a professor at Oxford. Sir Ouseley mentioned that at a very young age of five e already remarked that, “the pope blowed his nose in G, the wind whistled in D, the clock struck in B minor.” When these effects were tested later on, they appeared to be correct. To ordinary people, who don’t have absolute pitch, these abilities seem marveling odd, as if these people have a sort of sixth sense, similar to “x-ray vision”.

The author also gave an example of Olavi Sotavalta, a Finnish entomologist, who did studies on insects. Sotavalta was greatly assisted by his absolute pitch in his studies, he used his precise hearing in identifying the frequency of insect wingbeats by knowing the pitch of the hum. He did not make any musical notations, but with his hearing he precisely identified the amount of wingbeat cycles per second. This example proved that by having absolute pitch and knowledge on frequency scales and their correlation, one can make fascinating studies.

People with absolute pitch hear pitches of various sounds as normal people see various colors. It is like we see green or any tones of green, that people with absolute pitch hear notes. This is the key wonder about having absolute pitch, that the ones wielding it have an almost completely different world view.

However the few problems of having absolute pitch especially among musicians are of those that Mozart had. When people who have absolute pitch hear a song in a specific pitch, they cannot apprehend the same song when it is a half-tone different, it does not seem right to such people. These problems are more distinctly viewed when it goes to tuning instruments. The author remarked, when the composer Michael Torke heard his old piano with the original nineteenth-century strings, he encountered that it played a third of a tone flat. A sharpness or flatness of such would have been notice by an ordinary person with great doubt.