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We might think perfect pitch is an innate talent. Well, a study in the American Journal of Human Genetics is providing some evidence for that.
Perfect pitch, aka absolute pitch, is the rare ability to name or recreate musical notes like A or middle C without using any comparable reference.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, studied the results from an online test taken by over ten thousand people. Not surprisingly, individuals tended to either have perfect pitch or not.
But in a closer study of 73 families researchers found a region of genes on chromosome eight in those with perfect pitch and from European ancestry. More study is needed to zero in on just which gene or multiple genes might be responsible. And for comparison they intend to study individuals without perfect pitch but with equivalent musical training.
There is some evidence that babies have the ability for absolute pitch, so researchers for this study theorize that maybe most lose this ability with age, but that what a so-called pitch gene does is extend this talent through a crucial period in childhood.
—Christie Nicholson
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Add CommentA description of the absolute pitch project headed by Dr. Jane Gitschier and Dr. Nelson Freimer can be found here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/study/index.php
And their 2000, 2001, and 2007 papers that can be read for free are listed here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?term=absolute%20pitch%20Gitschier%20Freimer&db=pmc
The more recent of their studies that is referred to in this SciAm article found one region (8q24.21) that was statistically significant among Europeans and three other regions that merit another look. One of these (7q22.3) was a location of interest for Asian families.
(Here is a diagram of the region 8q24.21: http://tinyurl.com/POU5F1B)
This most recent paper was published in July 2009 with the name "Genome-wide Study of Families with Absolute Pitch Reveals Linkage to 8q24.21 and Locus Heterogeneity", by Elizabeth Theusch, Analabha Basu, and Jane Gitschier. The abstract of the article is here:
http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(09)00246-8
The theory may be right ,but are we all lose our perfect pitch now?
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