Conventional wisdom holds you're born with perfect pitch or
you're not. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Here's how to
train perfect pitch. For my book Brain Trust, I interviewed
Diana Deutsch, University of California San Diego professor and
president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and
she said the trick is pairing pitch with meaning -- early!
First, if you had perfect pitch, you’d know it, if for no other
reason than people whistling in the airport would sound
physically, painfully, out of tune. (This, according to my
friend Ariel, who was an orchestral recorder prodigy before
switching to heavy-metal guitar in college and environmental
architecture after.) And until recently, experts thought that
that was it -- at birth, you can hold a note in your mind’s ear
or you can’t. If you’re born without the gift, the theory went,
your only hope is the consolation prize of painstakingly
training relative pitch. For example, learning that the "way up
high" leap in "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is