The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (42 page)

Ann Hulbert writes:

For at least a quarter century now, there has been “a benevolent conspiracy” among influential musical figures to fend off burnout by trying to foster “a more humanistic, nonexploitative approach to the development of talent,” as the writer Marie Winn put it in a
New York Times Magazine
article in 1979. What a researcher named Jeanne Bamberger has termed a “midlife” crisis seems to occur for prodigious young musicians: a transitional period of cognitive and emotional maturation during which only some performers manage to move beyond intuitive imitation to a more reflective sense of direction. Parents must carve out space for precocious players to “have a childhood … an adolescence,” according to influential figures like Itzhak Perlman; resist the pressure, they urge, to “get management” and a packed schedule of practice and performance. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)

    
What was the true source of Yo-Yo’s uncanny ability? In her memoir, his mother chalks it up to genetics—but then she details how, from the very moment of his birth, Yo-Yo was exposed to music in the most profound and exquisite way
.

   Marina Ma calls it a genetic gift in her book, but to my eyes, this comment is obviously a combination of her cultural humility and her being a little too close to detect the forest of details that spurred Yo-Yo on.

    
“From the cradle, Yo-Yo was surrounded by a world of music,” his mother recalls. “He heard hundreds of classical selections on records, or played by his father or his sister. Bach and Mozart were engraved on his mind
.
”

   And let’s not forget what can happen
before
birth. Here is Giselle E. Whitwell’s thorough review of the profound impact that sound can have on a fetus in utero:

Verny and others have noted that babies have a preference for stories, rhymes, and poems first heard in the womb. When the mother reads out loud, the sound is received by her baby in part via bone conduction. Dr. Henry Truby, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics and Linguistics at the University of Miami, points out that after the sixth month, the fetus moves in rhythm to the mother’s speech and that spectrographs of the first cry of an abortus at 28 weeks could be matched with his mother’s. The elements of music, namely tonal pitch, timbre, intensity and rhythm, are also elements used in
speaking a language. For this reason, music prepares the ear, body and brain to listen to, integrate and produce language sounds. Music can thus be considered a pre-linguistic language which is nourishing and stimulating to the whole human being, affecting body, emotions, intellect, and developing an internal sense of beauty, sustaining and awakening the qualities in us that are wordless and otherwise inexpressible. The research of Polverini-Rey (1992) seems to indicate that prenates exposed to lullabies in utero were calmed by the stimulus. The famous British violinist Yehudi Menuhin believes that his own musical talent was partly due to the fact that his parents were always singing and playing music before he was born.

The ear first appears in the 3rd week of gestation and it becomes functional by the 16th week. The fetus begins active listening by the 24th week. We know from ultrasound observations that the fetus hears and responds to a sound pulse starting about 16 weeks of age; this is even before the ear construction is complete. The cochlear structures of the ear appear to function by the 20th week and mature synapses have been found between the 24th and 28th weeks. For this reason most formal programs of prenatal stimulation are usually designed to begin during the third trimester. The sense of hearing is probably the most developed of all the senses before birth. Four-month-old fetuses can respond in very specific ways to sound; if exposed to loud music, their heart beat will accelerate. A Japanese study of pregnant women living near the Osaka airport had smaller babies and an inflated incidence of prematurity—arguably related to the environment of incessant loud noise. Chronic noise can also be associated with birth defects. I recently received a report from a mother who was in her 7th month of pregnancy when she visited the zoo. In the lion’s enclosure, the animals were in process of being fed. The roar of one lion would set off another lion and the sound was so intense she had to leave the scene as the fetus reacted with a strong kick and left her feeling ill. Many years later, when the child was 7 years of age, it was found that he had a hearing deficiency in the lower-middle range. This child also reacts with fear when viewing TV programs of lions and related animals. There are numerous reports about mothers having to leave war movies and concerts because the auditory stimulus caused the fetus to become hyperactive.

Chamberlain (1998), using Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences, has presented evidence for musical intelligence before birth. Peter Hepper (1991) discovered that prenates exposed to TV soap opera music during pregnancy responded with focused and rapt attention to this music after birth—evidence of long-term memory. On hearing the music after
birth, these newborns had a significant decrease in heart rate and movements, and shifted into a more alert state. Likewise, Shetler (1989) reported that 33% of fetal subjects in his study demonstrated contrasting reactions to tempo variations between faster and slower selections of music. This may be the earliest and most primitive musical response in utero. The pioneering New Zealand fetologist, William Liley, found that from at least 25 weeks on, the unborn child would jump in rhythm with the timpanist’s contribution to an orchestral performance. The research of Michele Clements (1977) in a London maternity hospital found that four to five month fetuses were soothed by Vivaldi and Mozart but disturbed by loud passages of Beethoven, Brahms and Rock. Newborns have shown a preference for a melody their mother sang in utero rather than a new song sung by their mother. Babies during the third trimester in utero respond to vibroacoustic as well as air-coupled acoustic sounds, indicative of functional hearing. A study by Gelman et al. (1982) determined that a 2000 Hz. stimulus elicited a significant increase in fetal movements, a finding which supported the earlier study by Johnsson et al. (1964). From 26 weeks to term, fetuses have shown fetal heart accelerations in response to vibroacoustic stimuli. Consistent startle responses to vibroacoustic stimuli were also recorded during this period of development. Behavioral reactions included arm movements, leg extensions, and head aversions. Yawning activity was observed after the conclusion of stimuli. Research by Luz et al. (1980 and 1985) has found that the normal fetus responds to external acoustic stimulation during labor in childbirth. These included startle responses to the onset of a brief stimulus. New evidence of cognitive development in the prenatal era is presented by William Sallenbach (1994) who made in-depth and systematic observations of his own daughter’s behavior from weeks 32 to 34 in utero. (The full report of his findings is available on this Web site in Life Before Birth/Early Parenting.) Until recently, most research on early learning processes has been in the area of habituation, conditioning or imprinting sequences. However, Sallenbach observed that in the last trimester of pregnancy, the prenate’s learning state shows movement from abstraction and generalization to one of increased specificity and differentiation. During a bonding session using music, the prenate was observed moving her hands gently. In a special musical arrangement, where dissonance was included, the subject’s reactions were more rhythmic with rolling movements. Similarly, in prenatal music classes, Sister Lorna Zemke has found that the fetus will respond rhythmically to rhythms tapped on the mother’s belly. (Whitwell, “The Importance of Prenatal Sound and Music.”)

    
“Melodic ‘calculation centers’ in the dorsal temporal lobes appear to be paying attention to interval size and distances between pitches as we listen to music
”:
Levitin,
This Is Your Brain on Music
,; see also Münte, Altenmüller, Jäncke, et al., “The musician’s brain as a model of neuroplasticity,” pp. 473–78, and Weinberger, “Music and the Brain,” 88–95.

    
Levitin also concurs with University of California, San Diego’s Diana Deutsch and others in deducing that every human being is likely born with the capacity for absolute pitch, but that it gets activated only in those who are exposed to enough tonal imprinting at a very early age
.

   Glenn Gould had it—so did Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Horowitz, and Sinatra. On the surface, absolute pitch seems like the province of musical geniuses—the exotic gift that they have and we don’t. But the truth about absolute pitch—and the opposite phenomenon of so-called tone deafness—is much more interesting, and helps us understand what “musical talent” really is and isn’t.

  What is absolute pitch?

Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to produce and identify a certain musical tone without any reference tone. A person with AP is able to hum middle C or any other note on request, without any prompting from a song or an instrument.

  How common is AP?

In strict definitional terms, AP is pretty rare—somewhere between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 2,000 in the general population. But the rare part is the note naming, not the note reproducing. Many studies have now shown that most people can sing a familiar song in the right key without being given a reference tone and that virtually everyone who speaks a tonal language such as Mandarin can remember and recall specific pitches. What few people possess is the specific trained ability to link that tone to a named note.

“Our studies tie right in with the idea that we all have this latent absolute pitch ability, but we can’t get fully bloomed absolute pitch without early childhood training,” says Shepherd College’s Laura Bischoff.

“The real puzzle about perfect pitch is not why so few people possess it but rather why most people do not,” UC San Diego’s Diana Deutsch says. “Everyone has an implicit form of perfect pitch, even though we aren’t all able to put a
label to notes. They can recognize the note but can’t label it. What’s learned as a child is the ability to label.”

Also, contrary to public assumption, AP is not an all-or-nothing skill. Many have AP in varying degrees, explain Bischoff and University of Rochester’s Elizabeth West Marvin.

  Is AP a critical ingredient in musical talent?

No. While AP can sometimes be a useful tool for musicians, it is far from essential in helping musicians build the necessary skills or in expressing themselves magnificently. AP is more common among professional musicians than nonmusicians, but research shows very clearly that this is not cause and effect. Rather, the correlation exists because both are so frequently a product of early (prior to age six) musical training.

Neither Wagner nor Stravinsky had AP, to name just two. McGill University’s Daniel Levitin (author of
This Is Your Brain on Music
) does not think AP helps musicians much. What musicians thrive on and must develop to a fine degree, he points out, is relative pitch—the ability to distinguish between tones. Such relative pitch is available to almost everyone, to be developed to whatever individual degree desired.