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I knew a man with perfect pitch who was so handicapped by it, he couldn't play anything if it he was hearing the music sung in a different key.I learned to sight-read while transposing on the fly into a different key. It used a certain neurological pathway; it got to be difficult to play in the written key—the customary neurological pathway was different, "too simple".What is perfect pitch? Neuroscientist Diana Deutsch at UC San Diego found that people whose native language is tonal—Chinese—have a higher propensity to have perfect pitch. Also people with mixed-hand preference, the form of left-handedness that...

Musicians and singers work for years to develop their sense of pitch but few can name a musical note without a reference tone. U.S. researchers on Monday said one gene may be the key to that coveted ability. Only 1 in 10,000 people have perfect or absolute pitch, the uncanny ability to name the note of just about any sound without the help of a reference tone. "One guy said, 'I can name the pitch of anything -- even farts,"' said Dr. Jane Gitschier of the University of California, San Francisco, whose study appears in the journal Proceedings of the...