Perfect pitch? Probably not the best example of something you “just can’t do”, but the video makes the point extremely clearly and made me think “She’s right, is is weird that most people can easily identify different colours but not different tones”
The two phenomena are probably more analogous than you think.
Native speakers of languages in which tone conveys semantic content (Mandarin, for example) are more likely to have perfect pitch than speakers of tonally indifferent languages. Similarly, speakers of languages which make distinctions between two colours are more likely to be able to distinguish them than speakers of a language that doesn’t. Turkish and Russian split what we call “blue” into two different colours, and as a result their native speakers find it easier distinguishing different shades of blue.
I have actually recently started learning to play the piano, and I told my tutor I could recognise Middle C by ear. She asked me if I had perfect pitch, which was a bit of an awkward question to answer. I’m extremely confident I could train myself to recognise all the tones over seven octaves. I just can’t do it right now because I’m still trying to get the fingering right on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Actually, I’ve read somewhere that there’s a difference between genetic perfect pitch and trained perfect pitch. Those with the first find it physically painful to hear off-key music and to transpose known music into different keys (because it jars so much with their memory of what it’s supposed to sound like), while people with trained perfect pitch have more tolerance for those things because the association isn’t as ingrained. Kind of like the difference between synaesthesia and learned colour-letter combinations I guess.
Perfect pitch? Probably not the best example of something you “just can’t do”, but the video makes the point extremely clearly and made me think “She’s right, is is weird that most people can easily identify different colours but not different tones”
The two phenomena are probably more analogous than you think.
Native speakers of languages in which tone conveys semantic content (Mandarin, for example) are more likely to have perfect pitch than speakers of tonally indifferent languages. Similarly, speakers of languages which make distinctions between two colours are more likely to be able to distinguish them than speakers of a language that doesn’t. Turkish and Russian split what we call “blue” into two different colours, and as a result their native speakers find it easier distinguishing different shades of blue.
I have actually recently started learning to play the piano, and I told my tutor I could recognise Middle C by ear. She asked me if I had perfect pitch, which was a bit of an awkward question to answer. I’m extremely confident I could train myself to recognise all the tones over seven octaves. I just can’t do it right now because I’m still trying to get the fingering right on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Actually, I’ve read somewhere that there’s a difference between genetic perfect pitch and trained perfect pitch. Those with the first find it physically painful to hear off-key music and to transpose known music into different keys (because it jars so much with their memory of what it’s supposed to sound like), while people with trained perfect pitch have more tolerance for those things because the association isn’t as ingrained. Kind of like the difference between synaesthesia and learned colour-letter combinations I guess.