Musician and YouTuber Rick Beato believes all babies can develop perfect pitch up to nine months old.
Beato came up with this theory after watching a TED talk from Patricia Kuhl, a professor known for her research on early language learning, which he recently discussed on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast. Kuhl showcased a study which looked into the sounds that babies can hear in their early life, and how they are “geniuses” when it comes to detecting language.
Beato feels a baby’s detection of language may also be similar to their detection of pitch. During the podcast, he explains, “I saw a video on YouTube called The Linguistic Genius of Babies. There’s a woman Patricia Kuhl and she had this theory, it’s pretty much proven out, that babies have this ability in the first nine months of their lives – she calls them citizens of the world – where they can hear the sounds of all [over 7,000] languages on earth, so they have all the synapses available and their ears can detect these things.
“Starting at nine months they begin to lose the ability and then they become culturally bound listeners so they can only hear the sounds of the languages spoken in the household. But if you expose a child to, let’s say Mandarin, only a few times within that first nine months, they can hear those sounds of Mandarin forever. So I have a theory that all babies can develop perfect pitch up to nine months of age if they have a certain threshold of this high information music played for them [where] they hear all 12 notes,” he says.
Beato, who previously worked as a college professor, worked on ear training with his students. He found it fascinating that some found it especially hard to pick up on pitch. He to goes on to suggest that old recordings, which may not have been as technically polished as music today, may have had a positive impact on how some people might have developed good relative pitch: “When I meet people with perfect pitch there’s so many different levels of that, and relative pitch is far faster, so people that have good relative pitch, they’re not confused if things are in tune or not, because so many old recordings are out of pitch.”
You can check out the full podcast below:
