September 30, 2010 • 21 mins
If you're tone deaf, you can't hear the difference between musical pitches and notes. And it's probably a hereditary trait, as Josh and Chuck explain in this pitch-perfect episode on tone deafness.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Josh Clark with me. It's Charles W.
(00:21):
Chuck Bryant. Huh huh. You're not a singer, are you? No,
I'm not. I'm not, but I can tell you I'm
not toned death right. Chuck's a little upset with me
right now. We're going to mend fences during this podcast,
aren't we. We'll see Come sit on this chair now.
That's Frank comes sit here, Frank, sit on Frank now
(00:43):
ran chair got his first official email. I saw that.
What was the question? I think it was like, Frank,
who's been sitting on you lately? And who would you
like to sit on you in the future, or something
like that. Who do you think? I think probably the
first person to sit on Frank, as far as we're concerned,
will be Joe Randazzo maybe right, Uh, some of the
other casters might sit there. No, there are other podcasters.
(01:08):
Let's do this thing, Okay, Chuck, I have something of
a lead in you ready, Yes, have you ever heard
of My Way killings. Uh no, no, So there's a
subcategory of crime of violent crime in the Philippines called
My Way killings. That's what the media calls it. Frank Sinatra,
(01:30):
Really yeah, It's a huge karaoke society. Asia in general,
rum is pretty into karaoke. The Philippines are super into karaoke,
but they also have something of a violent society. Is
it people who botched that song get killed or people
who are jeered at for singing that song kill in
(01:50):
return a lot? Um. It's not just Philippines the Philippines,
but at least a half a dozen people have been
documented as having been murdered because of that song in
the last ten years. Right, just in the Philippines. It's
other other songs have been known to um kind of
erupt violence, like uh, there was a guy who who
(02:12):
lived in Thailand who killed eight of his neighbors in
a rage after they sang John Denver's Country Roads Take
Me Home, apparently not to his liking. So it's not
just my Way, but with my Way in the Philippines,
the this this has the highest frequency of murder or violence.
It's attendant to it, right, I would sing it's a
(02:33):
very good year. Maybe that would get me through well.
As a result, a lot of people do avoid my Way.
But isn't that weird? Okay? So most of the reported
my Way killings have been due to tone deafness, right,
actual tone deafness, or they just say people who can't sing. Uh,
it could go either way, and this is weird in
(02:55):
and of itself. No, I don't know that anybody's done
that much investigation, but that is my intro. Chuck, Let's
talk about tone deafness, which is also called amusia. And
I gotta tell you, the people in the Philippines don't
find tone deafness amusing. Thank you, Chris Palette. Uh, if
you're talking actual tone deafness, then you're only talking about
(03:17):
one and twenty people are actually a music so it's
not very many, not five percent five and uh it
has nothing to do with deafness. That has nothing to
do with how your ears work. But this is something
I didn't realize. If you're tone deaf, I just thought
that means you can't like sing in a tune in tone,
(03:38):
but apparently you can't hear it either, right, So that
was surprising to me as well. People who are tone
deaf are actually faithfully reproducing or recreating what they're hearing,
which makes me really sad because that means music sounds
awful of these poor people. Yeah, and apparently one person
described it as um the sound of pots and pans clanging.
(03:58):
That's awful, just not cut as anybody who has a
two year old nose, a two year old and unsecured cabinets. Uh, pitch,
that was what we're talking about, right, that's what they
mean when they're talking about tone. Well, that's what underlies it, right.
So so pitch is the frequency of sound, right, You
(04:19):
have high or low, and that higher low means high
frequency or low frequency. So a high note it's actually
just a high frequency note. Low note is a low
frequency note. Um. And as Tom Sheaf bff, Yeah, you
need to reprimand him because he said that piano was plucked.
It's some to the hammer struck. Harpsichords are plucked, so
(04:41):
are harps. So you need to tell Tom and you
got this kind of wrong. Give him a break. He
said that a violin has a violin note has a
four frequency of four hundred forty wavelengths vibrations per second.
That wavelength. He also said pianos are plucked. But why
he said that um erroneously? Was He was just pointing
(05:03):
out that the length of the string of a stringed
instrument will determine how high or low the pitches, and
pitch is what we talked about when we talked about
tone deafness, and then perfect pitch is on the other
end of that scale, and only about one in ten
thousand people have perfect pitch. Yeah, Chuck, I have a
question for you. What Dud, Jimmy, Hendrix, um Ingway, Malmstein,
(05:25):
being Crosby, and Yannie have in common? You mustaches? It's
no no being cross He didn't have a mustache. Nobody
smoked a pipe. Uh see Ingvy and Jimmy played stratocasters.
I don't think being crossby too much thought to this.
They were from Seattle. No perfect pitch. They all had
(05:48):
perfect pitch, which is all called also called absolute pitch. Yeah.
Perfect pitches when you can pick out a note and
name that note by itself solo without any other relative
notes around it, and you can duplicate that. So if
I said, Josh singing a flat, you would be able
to sing an a flat perfectly. That's way too high.
(06:09):
And uh so that's perfect pitch. But relative pitch is
what many more people have. Means you can pick out
a note relative to other notes, right, So somebody can
play something and then they'll play something else, and you can.
You might not be able to, uh say well that's
an A and that's an E flat or something, but
you can say, well that's high and that's low. Right
exact amundo? Um, did you take that tone deafness test?
(06:32):
I did. I took another one. I didn't click the
link that you sent me. What what percentage did you score? Well,
let's pass this out. This is uh if you want
to test your own tone quality um www dot d
E l O s I S dot com dilosis slash
listening slash home dot html and you can take it's
a sixty question. It takes like fifteen to twenty minutes.
(06:55):
I did one in six minutes. Yeah, it's not as thorough.
And there's two parts to this one, and there's thirty,
uh thirty pieces to each part. So you basically listened
to a sound or a series of notes, and then
it's followed directly by either the exact same thing or
something slightly different, and you click same or different. At
the end, you get your results, and I got I
(07:16):
got a twenty seven out of thirty on both sides. Wow,
so that's pretty good. I got a seventy seven eight percent. Yeah,
what's twenty seven thirty percentage wise? Um, Jerry, like she's
sitting around with the advocate kee pulling out your calculating
I am, but keep talking all right. While you're doing that,
(07:36):
I'll tell everybody the site that I took it on.
It was h T T P Colin slash slash Jake
Mandel dot com. That's j A K E M A
N D E l l dot com slash tone deaf.
One word that's really good. Actually mine was average. And
that actually makes sense with me because you know, I
sing in my band and I'm I'm an okay singer,
(07:57):
but I'm clearly not like a great singer. Else wouldn't
be doing this job and singing in a band in
my basement. I'd be singing in a band for real,
So that makes sense. Ten percent of the time, I
probably sound like crap. See now that's not necessarily true, Chuck,
because you should know by now. It's all about who
you know, right, Yeah, but I would you could be
squandering your challenge right now just because you don't know
(08:18):
the right record producer. Yeah, but if you're like, if
you've got the goods, like I always used Chris Cornell
as an example, Like the first time that dude sang
in the shower when he was sixteen, he was probably like, Okay,
I guess this is what I'm supposed to do with
my life. When he shattered the windows of his shower
door and then he um solemnly washed the soap out
from under his arms, out of the shower a person
(08:40):
and said I'm gonna form sound Garden and that was that. Yeah,
he should have never stopped. I think they're getting back together.
Actually they should be awesome. Um. All right, So chuck
pitch actually is not um constant. Did you know that.
I didn't know that until this article about the elevation
That really surprised me. Yeah. Uh. Basically, when you pluck
(09:02):
a piano string um strike, the vibration that it creates
at sea level is different from the vibration that's going
to create a higher altitudes. I would imagine because of
the atmospheric pressure. Right to fix everything, well, it does
baking pianos, everything athleticism, your ability to live by breathing
(09:26):
and absorbing oxygen um. So when that when that vibration
is created, it transfers to the air and it goes
won War War one and hits our ears, and then
inside our ears it goes War war and it goes
to our brain, and we process the sound of the
tone def people here, you or I, because we have
relative pitch and we're not tone deaf um and just
(09:49):
about anybody else who's not tone deaf could say, uh,
if if a frequency is off by a few vibrations
per second, even that slight bit, we would be like,
that doesn't sound quite right. Actually, if it were relative
to a note, like you played one note correctly and
then another note the same note with a couple of
vibrations off per second, you would definitely be able to
(10:10):
hear the difference tone off. People apparently can't do this right.
So it's kind of like color blindness. It happens in degrees.
So some people can who are color blind can tell
red from yellow. They can't really tell black from dark blue.
I think that that is another aspect of tone deafness
(10:30):
as well. Yeah, I'd be interested to take the one
I took again because the ones that I missed there
were somewhere I was like, oh man, it's it's They
literally would have like twelve notes and one might be
the like half a step down from the other, and
those were really tricky, and I think those are probably
the ones I missed because some sounded really off. Yeah,
some were obviously off too. So, Chuck, we know some
(10:54):
stuff about tone deafness. What's the explanation, Well, josh, uh,
there are a few potential explanations. We seem to think
that it is hereditary. It does seem to have a
genetic basis. Study show that it is hereditary, and twins
identical twins have scored similarly on pitch tests, which also
(11:18):
means it's probably hereditary and it likely has something to
do with the brain and specifically the arcuate. Fasciculous, nice
first try. That is pretty good, Chuck. They study that
and that's that's one of the nerve bundles that sends information,
like so many nerve bundles, and they found that they
(11:40):
think that one of the roles is to send is
to send signals concerning the perception of sound. And they
studied tone deaf people and found that the fibers were
in fact smaller, and people that were tone deaf than
non tone deaf, then some of them didn't have them
at all. There is another right, and and that is
the amount that was there's relative to the degree of
(12:03):
tone deafness. Right. So there was also a two thousand
seven study um or the publish study published in a
two thousand issue of two thousand seven issue of Harvard
Health Letter, which I get mailed to my house. I
thought you wrote it um in my sleep. Uh that
that the studies showed that people who are tone deaf
(12:24):
have less white matter connecting and remember the white matters,
the stuff that connects the gray matter, it's the nerve fibers. Um.
They have less white matter conducting the right frontal lobe,
which is in part responsible for higher thinking, to the
right temporal lobe where basic sound processing first takes place.
And they found that the less what the people who
(12:46):
are tone deaf have less white matter. And among tone
deaf people, the less white matter you had connecting these
two regions, the more tone deaf you were. Just like
the oh, the sorry are quit physics list? I think
I pronounced it different earlier. So we'll just say merging
of those two is the correct way, right, So we
(13:07):
we would say that, yes, it appears to have a
genetic basis. There's actually if you're in the San Francisco
area and you like being a medical guinea pig, you
should go ahead and look up the study that the
University of California, San Francisco UM is launching right now
into tone deafness and its genetic basis. What you do,
you know, I think you probably have to be a
(13:28):
little tone deaf and then you could be part of
the control group, right yeah, and be a great singer.
They do say that you cannot improve upon this. Um.
You can take music lessons, you can take singing lessons,
it's not gonna help you. If your tone deaf, you're
born with it. And if you do find out your
tone deaf, stay out of the Philippines. Yes, and there
(13:48):
was another and of course this is of perception to tone.
That doesn't necessarily mean like you're a bad singer, although
that that would make you a bad singer. But you
can also be a bad singer if you're not tone deaf.
And well this you probably fall into one of these categories.
In a couple of neuroscientists did a study in from
the University of New York at Buffalo and Simon Fraser University,
(14:12):
and they said there's likely for explanations. Poor music perception
is one, which would be tone deaf um. The other
might be poor control of your vocal system, yeah, thick
tongue perhaps, And another might be inability to imitate or
mimic something. So you hear the sound and you hear
(14:33):
it correctly and you know what it is, but you
still can't make it right. And that was something that
occurred to me while we were doing the research for
this article, that there's there. It seems like there could
be a basis for um flawed memory storagereating it. Yeah,
he said. The fourth reason it's just bad memory. Between
the time you hear it and when you sing it back,
you actually forget what the notes were. Too much scotch
(14:56):
and he likens it to like a baseball player. You
can you can know how to hit a curveball, and
you can be a professional baseball player know how to
swing a bat, but that still to mean you're gonna
hit the curveball nice so you can hear the note.
You might not be tone deaf, you might think you
can mimic it, but when it comes out of your mouth,
it's not quite Frank Black. After all. I saw Frank
(15:17):
Black just this very week. It was it good? I
had my friends said it was they phoned it in. No,
I didn't. I disagree. Really, I could have definitely handled
a lot more um songs from Um Trump Plamon. They
played pretty much all of Doolittle. Yeah that was the tour,
right play and Doolittle. I didn't know that. Yeah, I
think that was there actually, but yeah, it was cool.
(15:40):
I liked it. These guys are old back in the day,
so they might be jaded old people. They played like
Winter Long and um not. I mean as far as
just phoning it in are old. You know my friends
who said they phoned it in, our dudes who saw
them back in the eighties and nights, they might have
been all they phoned it and they're just being I
(16:01):
thought it was cool. Cool stage show too. They were
all dressed like stage hands. Yeah what's the stage chand
dress like dark clothes really, and Joey's just bald as
Frank Black is now. Yeah, man, he still plays that
gold top. Donety the less Paul, I don't know I
can't even say, Chuck, don't ask me if you want
to know more about tone deafness and find out the
(16:23):
uh what the one article that Tom Sheep got something
wrong in looks like type tone deaf into the search
bar how stuff works dot com. Oh, while we're at it,
before we move on to listra mill, have you heard
of Paul Data? I think it's d A T E
H and DJ inco one. No, dude, it's this kid.
He's like fifteen, looking perfect. He has absolute pitch, has
(16:46):
violent and he's just playing along with a guy who
looks like his cousin who's a DJ. They're playing like
tribe called Quest and far Side and he's playing it
on the violins um along with his DJ cousin, who's
you know DJing Really cool. I'll have to put that
on the Facebook page when we release it. Do you
have to wait that long as you could do? Now?
(17:06):
We could do that all right? Well, how about listener mail, Chuck?
We are not doing listener mail because we have some
important events coming up that we'd like to share, and
we would also like to build up our Facebook presence. Yes,
we really were, because we've noticed that there are people
that participate on our Facebook page without liking it, which
(17:27):
I understand you might not want it in your news feed,
but it helps us out when you like it. Why
would you not want that in your news fere you
embarrassed that you listen to us? Who knows, some people
just don't like. Like I liked a lot of things
initially before all this stuff started happening, and now I
get everything in my news feed, and so I've had
to unlike some of it because I don't. I love Calexico,
(17:48):
but I don't want to see what Calexico has to
say every day. I thought you were saying, like, yeah,
that's what Twitter's for. I thought you were saying like
people wouldn't want other people to see that they were
fans of stuff. You should know, Well that may don't
want our yes coming up in there, and perhaps, but
we're post that now. We don't post that much, and
when we do post, it's pretty worthwhile. So we would
ask you to hit the like button because that makes
(18:10):
us look good. Our boss when when he sees a
certain amount of fans, he doesn't like write us a
check or anything, but yet it's a good thing for us. Yeah,
so we'd appreciate if you liked our our Facebook page. Um,
let's see, so that's a Facebook, Twitter, s y s
K podcast. We occasionally say something worth chuckling at, Yes,
very often. And then let's do the Atlanta event. A. Yes,
(18:33):
we got a couple of things in mid October coming up.
The first one is a non sanction event, but you
can rub elbows with us if you want to come
to the Drunken Unicorn on East pot sti Leon October twelfth, Tuesday.
Our buddies, the Henry Clay people of l a or
playing a rock and roll show, headlining gig concert concert
(18:55):
and you can come and it'll be a good time.
It's a very small venue, so like a big party. Jerry,
are you coming? She said, yes, ma'am. Serr's going to
be dressed as Thomas pinch On. Wow, you really like
that one. That's good? Thank you? Uh? Anything else? Man?
(19:15):
I feel like I should be like, good night, everybody know.
The following night October is the sanctioned trivia event, the
All Star Trivia the Five Seasons Brewery west Side evening
hours probably around six just just block out six to eleven. Yeah,
And on our celebrity team, we have Joe Randazzo, editor
of The Onion. Dave Willis the co creator of Aquitine
(19:37):
Hunger Force and Squidbillies, who I've got to say, I'm
really looking forward to meeting. Squid Billies is so twisted
and awesome. Um. What I do sometimes the Squidbillies is
just close my eyes and you just imagine it's just
real rednecks. Then you open your eyes in their squids
and it's even funnier. Uh. And then of course Mr
John Hodgman. Yes, I'm gonna get him to sign my
books that I've read of his, and I'm going to
(19:58):
get him to stay overnight at my house. Good luck
with that. Yeah, I'm gonna be like, sorry, the hotel
we book burned down my seriously. Yeah, Um, that's it. Okay,
So if you want to send us an email, what
do we want to hear about chook? Oh? How about
some karaoke stories? Oh that's a good one. If you've
(20:20):
ever been beaten up in the Philippines or you have
a good karaoke story, we want to hear it. Greatest
karaoke songs of all time? How about that? Yeah, we'll
post that one on Facebook. Karaoke stories we want to
hear via email and you can type that up spanking
on the bottom. Send it to stuff podcast at how
(20:40):
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house. Stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camery. It's ready,
(21:01):
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Josh Clark with me. It's Charles W.
(00:21):
Chuck Bryant. Huh huh. You're not a singer, are you? No,
I'm not. I'm not, but I can tell you I'm
not toned death right. Chuck's a little upset with me
right now. We're going to mend fences during this podcast,
aren't we. We'll see Come sit on this chair now.
That's Frank comes sit here, Frank, sit on Frank now
(00:43):
ran chair got his first official email. I saw that.
What was the question? I think it was like, Frank,
who's been sitting on you lately? And who would you
like to sit on you in the future, or something
like that. Who do you think? I think probably the
first person to sit on Frank, as far as we're concerned,
will be Joe Randazzo maybe right, Uh, some of the
other casters might sit there. No, there are other podcasters.
(01:08):
Let's do this thing, Okay, Chuck, I have something of
a lead in you ready, Yes, have you ever heard
of My Way killings. Uh no, no, So there's a
subcategory of crime of violent crime in the Philippines called
My Way killings. That's what the media calls it. Frank Sinatra,
(01:30):
Really yeah, It's a huge karaoke society. Asia in general,
rum is pretty into karaoke. The Philippines are super into karaoke,
but they also have something of a violent society. Is
it people who botched that song get killed or people
who are jeered at for singing that song kill in
(01:50):
return a lot? Um. It's not just Philippines the Philippines,
but at least a half a dozen people have been
documented as having been murdered because of that song in
the last ten years. Right, just in the Philippines. It's
other other songs have been known to um kind of
erupt violence, like uh, there was a guy who who
(02:12):
lived in Thailand who killed eight of his neighbors in
a rage after they sang John Denver's Country Roads Take
Me Home, apparently not to his liking. So it's not
just my Way, but with my Way in the Philippines,
the this this has the highest frequency of murder or violence.
It's attendant to it, right, I would sing it's a
(02:33):
very good year. Maybe that would get me through well.
As a result, a lot of people do avoid my Way.
But isn't that weird? Okay? So most of the reported
my Way killings have been due to tone deafness, right,
actual tone deafness, or they just say people who can't sing. Uh,
it could go either way, and this is weird in
(02:55):
and of itself. No, I don't know that anybody's done
that much investigation, but that is my intro. Chuck, Let's
talk about tone deafness, which is also called amusia. And
I gotta tell you, the people in the Philippines don't
find tone deafness amusing. Thank you, Chris Palette. Uh, if
you're talking actual tone deafness, then you're only talking about
(03:17):
one and twenty people are actually a music so it's
not very many, not five percent five and uh it
has nothing to do with deafness. That has nothing to
do with how your ears work. But this is something
I didn't realize. If you're tone deaf, I just thought
that means you can't like sing in a tune in tone,
(03:38):
but apparently you can't hear it either, right, So that
was surprising to me as well. People who are tone
deaf are actually faithfully reproducing or recreating what they're hearing,
which makes me really sad because that means music sounds
awful of these poor people. Yeah, and apparently one person
described it as um the sound of pots and pans clanging.
(03:58):
That's awful, just not cut as anybody who has a
two year old nose, a two year old and unsecured cabinets. Uh, pitch,
that was what we're talking about, right, that's what they
mean when they're talking about tone. Well, that's what underlies it, right.
So so pitch is the frequency of sound, right, You
(04:19):
have high or low, and that higher low means high
frequency or low frequency. So a high note it's actually
just a high frequency note. Low note is a low
frequency note. Um. And as Tom Sheaf bff, Yeah, you
need to reprimand him because he said that piano was plucked.
It's some to the hammer struck. Harpsichords are plucked, so
(04:41):
are harps. So you need to tell Tom and you
got this kind of wrong. Give him a break. He
said that a violin has a violin note has a
four frequency of four hundred forty wavelengths vibrations per second.
That wavelength. He also said pianos are plucked. But why
he said that um erroneously? Was He was just pointing
(05:03):
out that the length of the string of a stringed
instrument will determine how high or low the pitches, and
pitch is what we talked about when we talked about
tone deafness, and then perfect pitch is on the other
end of that scale, and only about one in ten
thousand people have perfect pitch. Yeah, Chuck, I have a
question for you. What Dud, Jimmy, Hendrix, um Ingway, Malmstein,
(05:25):
being Crosby, and Yannie have in common? You mustaches? It's
no no being cross He didn't have a mustache. Nobody
smoked a pipe. Uh see Ingvy and Jimmy played stratocasters.
I don't think being crossby too much thought to this.
They were from Seattle. No perfect pitch. They all had
(05:48):
perfect pitch, which is all called also called absolute pitch. Yeah.
Perfect pitches when you can pick out a note and
name that note by itself solo without any other relative
notes around it, and you can duplicate that. So if
I said, Josh singing a flat, you would be able
to sing an a flat perfectly. That's way too high.
(06:09):
And uh so that's perfect pitch. But relative pitch is
what many more people have. Means you can pick out
a note relative to other notes, right, So somebody can
play something and then they'll play something else, and you can.
You might not be able to, uh say well that's
an A and that's an E flat or something, but
you can say, well that's high and that's low. Right
exact amundo? Um, did you take that tone deafness test?
(06:32):
I did. I took another one. I didn't click the
link that you sent me. What what percentage did you score? Well,
let's pass this out. This is uh if you want
to test your own tone quality um www dot d
E l O s I S dot com dilosis slash
listening slash home dot html and you can take it's
a sixty question. It takes like fifteen to twenty minutes.
(06:55):
I did one in six minutes. Yeah, it's not as thorough.
And there's two parts to this one, and there's thirty,
uh thirty pieces to each part. So you basically listened
to a sound or a series of notes, and then
it's followed directly by either the exact same thing or
something slightly different, and you click same or different. At
the end, you get your results, and I got I
(07:16):
got a twenty seven out of thirty on both sides. Wow,
so that's pretty good. I got a seventy seven eight percent. Yeah,
what's twenty seven thirty percentage wise? Um, Jerry, like she's
sitting around with the advocate kee pulling out your calculating
I am, but keep talking all right. While you're doing that,
(07:36):
I'll tell everybody the site that I took it on.
It was h T T P Colin slash slash Jake
Mandel dot com. That's j A K E M A
N D E l l dot com slash tone deaf.
One word that's really good. Actually mine was average. And
that actually makes sense with me because you know, I
sing in my band and I'm I'm an okay singer,
(07:57):
but I'm clearly not like a great singer. Else wouldn't
be doing this job and singing in a band in
my basement. I'd be singing in a band for real,
So that makes sense. Ten percent of the time, I
probably sound like crap. See now that's not necessarily true, Chuck,
because you should know by now. It's all about who
you know, right, Yeah, but I would you could be
squandering your challenge right now just because you don't know
(08:18):
the right record producer. Yeah, but if you're like, if
you've got the goods, like I always used Chris Cornell
as an example, Like the first time that dude sang
in the shower when he was sixteen, he was probably like, Okay,
I guess this is what I'm supposed to do with
my life. When he shattered the windows of his shower
door and then he um solemnly washed the soap out
from under his arms, out of the shower a person
(08:40):
and said I'm gonna form sound Garden and that was that. Yeah,
he should have never stopped. I think they're getting back together.
Actually they should be awesome. Um. All right, So chuck
pitch actually is not um constant. Did you know that.
I didn't know that until this article about the elevation
That really surprised me. Yeah. Uh. Basically, when you pluck
(09:02):
a piano string um strike, the vibration that it creates
at sea level is different from the vibration that's going
to create a higher altitudes. I would imagine because of
the atmospheric pressure. Right to fix everything, well, it does
baking pianos, everything athleticism, your ability to live by breathing
(09:26):
and absorbing oxygen um. So when that when that vibration
is created, it transfers to the air and it goes
won War War one and hits our ears, and then
inside our ears it goes War war and it goes
to our brain, and we process the sound of the
tone def people here, you or I, because we have
relative pitch and we're not tone deaf um and just
(09:49):
about anybody else who's not tone deaf could say, uh,
if if a frequency is off by a few vibrations
per second, even that slight bit, we would be like,
that doesn't sound quite right. Actually, if it were relative
to a note, like you played one note correctly and
then another note the same note with a couple of
vibrations off per second, you would definitely be able to
(10:10):
hear the difference tone off. People apparently can't do this right.
So it's kind of like color blindness. It happens in degrees.
So some people can who are color blind can tell
red from yellow. They can't really tell black from dark blue.
I think that that is another aspect of tone deafness
(10:30):
as well. Yeah, I'd be interested to take the one
I took again because the ones that I missed there
were somewhere I was like, oh man, it's it's They
literally would have like twelve notes and one might be
the like half a step down from the other, and
those were really tricky, and I think those are probably
the ones I missed because some sounded really off. Yeah,
some were obviously off too. So, Chuck, we know some
(10:54):
stuff about tone deafness. What's the explanation, Well, josh, uh,
there are a few potential explanations. We seem to think
that it is hereditary. It does seem to have a
genetic basis. Study show that it is hereditary, and twins
identical twins have scored similarly on pitch tests, which also
(11:18):
means it's probably hereditary and it likely has something to
do with the brain and specifically the arcuate. Fasciculous, nice
first try. That is pretty good, Chuck. They study that
and that's that's one of the nerve bundles that sends information,
like so many nerve bundles, and they found that they
(11:40):
think that one of the roles is to send is
to send signals concerning the perception of sound. And they
studied tone deaf people and found that the fibers were
in fact smaller, and people that were tone deaf than
non tone deaf, then some of them didn't have them
at all. There is another right, and and that is
the amount that was there's relative to the degree of
(12:03):
tone deafness. Right. So there was also a two thousand
seven study um or the publish study published in a
two thousand issue of two thousand seven issue of Harvard
Health Letter, which I get mailed to my house. I
thought you wrote it um in my sleep. Uh that
that the studies showed that people who are tone deaf
(12:24):
have less white matter connecting and remember the white matters,
the stuff that connects the gray matter, it's the nerve fibers. Um.
They have less white matter conducting the right frontal lobe,
which is in part responsible for higher thinking, to the
right temporal lobe where basic sound processing first takes place.
And they found that the less what the people who
(12:46):
are tone deaf have less white matter. And among tone
deaf people, the less white matter you had connecting these
two regions, the more tone deaf you were. Just like
the oh, the sorry are quit physics list? I think
I pronounced it different earlier. So we'll just say merging
of those two is the correct way, right, So we
(13:07):
we would say that, yes, it appears to have a
genetic basis. There's actually if you're in the San Francisco
area and you like being a medical guinea pig, you
should go ahead and look up the study that the
University of California, San Francisco UM is launching right now
into tone deafness and its genetic basis. What you do,
you know, I think you probably have to be a
(13:28):
little tone deaf and then you could be part of
the control group, right yeah, and be a great singer.
They do say that you cannot improve upon this. Um.
You can take music lessons, you can take singing lessons,
it's not gonna help you. If your tone deaf, you're
born with it. And if you do find out your
tone deaf, stay out of the Philippines. Yes, and there
(13:48):
was another and of course this is of perception to tone.
That doesn't necessarily mean like you're a bad singer, although
that that would make you a bad singer. But you
can also be a bad singer if you're not tone deaf.
And well this you probably fall into one of these categories.
In a couple of neuroscientists did a study in from
the University of New York at Buffalo and Simon Fraser University,
(14:12):
and they said there's likely for explanations. Poor music perception
is one, which would be tone deaf um. The other
might be poor control of your vocal system, yeah, thick
tongue perhaps, And another might be inability to imitate or
mimic something. So you hear the sound and you hear
(14:33):
it correctly and you know what it is, but you
still can't make it right. And that was something that
occurred to me while we were doing the research for
this article, that there's there. It seems like there could
be a basis for um flawed memory storagereating it. Yeah,
he said. The fourth reason it's just bad memory. Between
the time you hear it and when you sing it back,
you actually forget what the notes were. Too much scotch
(14:56):
and he likens it to like a baseball player. You
can you can know how to hit a curveball, and
you can be a professional baseball player know how to
swing a bat, but that still to mean you're gonna
hit the curveball nice so you can hear the note.
You might not be tone deaf, you might think you
can mimic it, but when it comes out of your mouth,
it's not quite Frank Black. After all. I saw Frank
(15:17):
Black just this very week. It was it good? I
had my friends said it was they phoned it in. No,
I didn't. I disagree. Really, I could have definitely handled
a lot more um songs from Um Trump Plamon. They
played pretty much all of Doolittle. Yeah that was the tour,
right play and Doolittle. I didn't know that. Yeah, I
think that was there actually, but yeah, it was cool.
(15:40):
I liked it. These guys are old back in the day,
so they might be jaded old people. They played like
Winter Long and um not. I mean as far as
just phoning it in are old. You know my friends
who said they phoned it in, our dudes who saw
them back in the eighties and nights, they might have
been all they phoned it and they're just being I
(16:01):
thought it was cool. Cool stage show too. They were
all dressed like stage hands. Yeah what's the stage chand
dress like dark clothes really, and Joey's just bald as
Frank Black is now. Yeah, man, he still plays that
gold top. Donety the less Paul, I don't know I
can't even say, Chuck, don't ask me if you want
to know more about tone deafness and find out the
(16:23):
uh what the one article that Tom Sheep got something
wrong in looks like type tone deaf into the search
bar how stuff works dot com. Oh, while we're at it,
before we move on to listra mill, have you heard
of Paul Data? I think it's d A T E
H and DJ inco one. No, dude, it's this kid.
He's like fifteen, looking perfect. He has absolute pitch, has
(16:46):
violent and he's just playing along with a guy who
looks like his cousin who's a DJ. They're playing like
tribe called Quest and far Side and he's playing it
on the violins um along with his DJ cousin, who's
you know DJing Really cool. I'll have to put that
on the Facebook page when we release it. Do you
have to wait that long as you could do? Now?
(17:06):
We could do that all right? Well, how about listener mail, Chuck?
We are not doing listener mail because we have some
important events coming up that we'd like to share, and
we would also like to build up our Facebook presence. Yes,
we really were, because we've noticed that there are people
that participate on our Facebook page without liking it, which
(17:27):
I understand you might not want it in your news feed,
but it helps us out when you like it. Why
would you not want that in your news fere you
embarrassed that you listen to us? Who knows, some people
just don't like. Like I liked a lot of things
initially before all this stuff started happening, and now I
get everything in my news feed, and so I've had
to unlike some of it because I don't. I love Calexico,
(17:48):
but I don't want to see what Calexico has to
say every day. I thought you were saying, like, yeah,
that's what Twitter's for. I thought you were saying like
people wouldn't want other people to see that they were
fans of stuff. You should know, Well that may don't
want our yes coming up in there, and perhaps, but
we're post that now. We don't post that much, and
when we do post, it's pretty worthwhile. So we would
ask you to hit the like button because that makes
(18:10):
us look good. Our boss when when he sees a
certain amount of fans, he doesn't like write us a
check or anything, but yet it's a good thing for us. Yeah,
so we'd appreciate if you liked our our Facebook page. Um,
let's see, so that's a Facebook, Twitter, s y s
K podcast. We occasionally say something worth chuckling at, Yes,
very often. And then let's do the Atlanta event. A. Yes,
(18:33):
we got a couple of things in mid October coming up.
The first one is a non sanction event, but you
can rub elbows with us if you want to come
to the Drunken Unicorn on East pot sti Leon October twelfth, Tuesday.
Our buddies, the Henry Clay people of l a or
playing a rock and roll show, headlining gig concert concert
(18:55):
and you can come and it'll be a good time.
It's a very small venue, so like a big party. Jerry,
are you coming? She said, yes, ma'am. Serr's going to
be dressed as Thomas pinch On. Wow, you really like
that one. That's good? Thank you? Uh? Anything else? Man?
(19:15):
I feel like I should be like, good night, everybody know.
The following night October is the sanctioned trivia event, the
All Star Trivia the Five Seasons Brewery west Side evening
hours probably around six just just block out six to eleven. Yeah,
And on our celebrity team, we have Joe Randazzo, editor
of The Onion. Dave Willis the co creator of Aquitine
(19:37):
Hunger Force and Squidbillies, who I've got to say, I'm
really looking forward to meeting. Squid Billies is so twisted
and awesome. Um. What I do sometimes the Squidbillies is
just close my eyes and you just imagine it's just
real rednecks. Then you open your eyes in their squids
and it's even funnier. Uh. And then of course Mr
John Hodgman. Yes, I'm gonna get him to sign my
books that I've read of his, and I'm going to
(19:58):
get him to stay overnight at my house. Good luck
with that. Yeah, I'm gonna be like, sorry, the hotel
we book burned down my seriously. Yeah, Um, that's it. Okay,
So if you want to send us an email, what
do we want to hear about chook? Oh? How about
some karaoke stories? Oh that's a good one. If you've
(20:20):
ever been beaten up in the Philippines or you have
a good karaoke story, we want to hear it. Greatest
karaoke songs of all time? How about that? Yeah, we'll
post that one on Facebook. Karaoke stories we want to
hear via email and you can type that up spanking
on the bottom. Send it to stuff podcast at how
(20:40):
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house. Stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camery. It's ready,
(21:01):
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