Re: Subject: RE: [Harp-L] resonance and higher key harps



The link to Asians and a tendency to absolute pitch is linguistic not ethnic. Everything I've read on the subject seems to indicate that several of the Chinese languages and less so Vietnamese employ pitch as a device for communication. When you realise that infants are born able to make and hear all of the sounds used in all of the languages and discard the ones they don't need to use as they acquire the language of their surroundings it seems likely that the higher incidence of absolute pitch in some Asian ethnic groups is a product of environment, not genetics. The New York Times has had several interesting articles on this subject in their Science Times section, unfortuneately this was some time ago and the information will now only be available from them if you pay for it. I have oftentimes been able to get at Times articles sideways because they can persist on other people's sites or even have direct frre links to the Times articles. Certainly an interesting area of discussion. fjm




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