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This doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can distinguish relative pitch, that's how humans understand music. It was probably a crucial part of human evolution, s

This doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can distinguish relative pitch, that's how humans understand music. It was probably a crucial part of human evolution, somehow, as we all can do it. Tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute pitch. Everyone can learn Cantonese regardless whether they have AP or not. If you claim tonal languages train you for AP that's citation needed, I don't think that's true (we would expect tonal language speakers to be more likely to have AP, a trend we haven't observed).

monort 8y ago
Here is one paper about that: Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training. http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf