Music and Language

I love languages. I love learning new words and phrases to open up possibilities when I travel, creating opportunities to connect and usually learning something about the culture in the process. Trying to learn Chinese, Thai or Khmer stumps most of us Westerners because these are tonal languages where one word has five different pronunciations based on rising, falling, or middle tones. Our ears just aren't trained to hear all the subtleties and mimic the sounds.

I hadn't thought about the link between tonal langauges and music until recently listening to a RadioLab episode called Musical Language. Diana Deutsch is a professor specializing in the psychology of music, and has conducted experiments with people who's native language is tonal (i.e., Mandarin and Vietnamese) and discovered they're exponentially more likely to have perfect pitch. In one experiment, she recorded a Mandarin speaker saying a sentence in the exact same pitch every time . . . on different days.