Stuff You Should Know - Is tone deafness hereditary?

Episode Date: September 30, 2010

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. This is Josh Clark with me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Huh? Huh? You are not a singer, are you? No, I'm not. I'm not, but I can tell you I'm not tone deaf. Right. Chuck's a little upset with me right now. We're gonna mend fences during

this podcast, aren't we? We'll see. Come sit on this chair. No, that's Frank. Come sit here. Sit on Frank. We'll not sit on Frank no matter what we do. Frank, our 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? Some of the other podcasters might sit there, no? No, I'm saying as far as we're concerned. Oh, yeah. There are other podcasters? 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? No. No? So there's a subcategory

of crime, of violent crime in the Philippines called My Way Killings. It's what the media calls it. Frank Sinatra? Yeah. Really? Yeah. It's a huge karaoke society. Asia in general 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? Yeah. Or people who are jeered at for singing that song Kill in return. Wow. It's not just the Philippines, but at least a half a dozen people have been documented as having been murdered because of that song in the last 10 years. Just in the Philippines. Other songs have been known to kind of erupt violence like there was a guy who 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. Wow. It's not just My Way, but with My Way in the Philippines, this has the highest frequency of murder or violence attendant to it, right? I would say it's a 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? Yeah. 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? It could go either way. I mean, this is weird in and of itself. 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 got to tell you, the people in the Philippines don't find tone deafness

amusing. Thank you, Chris Palette. If you're talking actual tone deafness, then you're only talking about one in 20 people or actually a music. So it's not very many. No, five percent. Five percent. Yeah. And it has nothing to do with deafness. It 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 mean you can't like sing in tune and tone. Yeah, 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 to these poor people. Yeah. And apparently one person described it as the sound of pots and pans

clanging. That's awful. Which is not good, as anybody who has a two-year-old knows. A two-year-old and unsecured cabinets. Yes. Pitch, though, is what we're talking about, right? That's what they mean when they're talking about tone. Well, that's what underlies it. Yeah. Right. So pitch is the frequency of sound. Yeah. Right. You have high or low. Yeah. And that higher low means high frequency or low frequency. So a high note is actually just a high frequency note. Low note is a low frequency note. And as Tom Schief, BFF, puts it. Tom wrote this? Yeah. You need to reprimand him because he said that piano was plucked. It's the tip of the hammer. Struck. Yeah. Harps accords were plucked. So are harps. So you need to tell Tom that you got this kind of wrong.

Give him a break. He said that a violin note has a frequency of 440 wavelength vibrations per second. Right. That's that wavelength. He also said pianos were plucked. But why he said that erroneously was he was just pointing out that the length of the string of a stringed instrument will determine how high or low the pitch is. Right. And pitch is what we talk about. We talk about tone deafness and then perfect pitch is on the other end of that scale. And only about one in 10,000 people have perfect pitch. Yeah. Chuck, I have a question for you. What do Jimi Hendrix, Ingwe Malmsteen, Bing Crosby and Yanni have in common? Ingwe Mustaches? No. No, Bing Crosby didn't have a mustache. Nobody smoked a pipe. See, Ingwe and Jimmy

played Stratocasters. I don't think Bing Crosby played guitar. I think you're giving too much thought to this. They were from Seattle. No. Perfect pitch. They all had perfect pitch. Really? Which is also called absolute pitch. Yeah. Perfect pitch is when you can pick out a note and name that note by itself solo without any other relative notes around it. Yeah. And you can duplicate that. So if I said, Josh, sing an A-flat, you would be able to sing an A-flat. Perfectly. That's way too high. Is that an A-flat? And so that's perfect pitch. But relative pitch is what many more people have, which 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 might not

be able to 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? Exactamundo. Did you take that tone deafness test? I did. I took another one. I didn't click the link that you sent me. What percentage did you score? Well, let's pass this out. This is, if you want to test your own tone quality, www.delsis.com, dilosis, slash listening, slash home.html. And you can take, it's a 60 question. It takes like 15 to 20 minutes. I did one in six minutes. Yeah. It's not as thorough.

It is too. And there's two parts to this one and there's 30 pieces to each part. So you basically listen 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. And at the end, you get your results. And I got a 27 out of 30 on both sides. Wow. So that's pretty good. I got a 77.8%. Yeah. What's 27 and a 30 percentage wise? Jerry likes you sitting around with the advocates. Are you pulling out your calculator?

I am, but keep talking. All right. While you're doing that, I'll tell everybody the site that I took it on. It was HTTP colon slash slash jakemandell.com. That's J-A-K-E-M-A-N-D-E-L-L.com slash tone deaf. One word. 90%. 90% not bad. That's really good actually. Mine was average. And that actually makes sense with me because I, you know, I sing in my band and I'm an okay singer, but I'm clearly not like a great singer. Else I wouldn't be doing this job.

You know, Yanni and singing in a band in my basement. I'd be singing in a band for real. So that makes sense. 10% 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 talents right now just because you don't know the right record producer. Yeah, but if you're like, if you've got the goods, like I always use Chris Cornell as an

example, like the first time that dude sang in the shower when he was 16, he was probably like, okay, I guess this is what I'm supposed to do with my life. Yeah. When he shattered the windows of his shower door. And then he solemnly washed the soap out from under his arms, got out of the shower and new person and said, I'm going to form Soundgarden. And that was that. Yeah.

He should have never stopped. I think they're getting back together actually. They should. It'd be awesome. All right. So Chuck, pitch actually is not constant. Did you know that? I didn't know that until this article about the elevation that really surprised me. Yeah, basically when you pluck a piano string.

Strike. The vibration that it creates at sea level is different from the vibration it's going to create at higher altitudes. I would imagine because of the atmospheric pressure, right? Yeah, altitude affects everything. Well, it does. Baking, sure. Pianos, everything.

Athleticism. Your ability to live. Yeah. By breathing. Sure. And absorbing oxygen. So when that vibration is created, it transfers to the air and it goes and hits our ears and then inside our ears it goes and it goes to our brain and we process the sound.

And the tone deaf people hear you or I because we have relative pitch and we're not tone deaf. And just about anybody else who's not tone deaf could say 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. Right. Especially if it were relative to a note. Like you played one note correctly and then another note, the same note with a couple vibrations off per second, you would definitely be able to hear the difference. Tone deaf people apparently can't do this, right?

Right. So it's kind of like color blindness. It happens in degrees. So some people who are colorblind can tell red from yellow, but they can't really tell black from dark blue, right? Sure. I think that that is another aspect of tone deafness as well. Yeah, I'd be interested to take the one I took again because the ones that I missed,

there were some where I was like, oh man, they literally would have like 12 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. Yeah. Some were obviously off. Yeah. I mean too.

So Chuck, now that we know some stuff about tone deafness, what's the explanation? Well Josh, there are a few potential explanations. We seem to think that it is hereditary. It does seem to have a genetic basis. Studies show that it is hereditary and twins, identical twins, have scored similarly on pitch test, which also means it's probably hereditary. Right. And it likely has something to do with the brain and specifically the arcuate fasciculus.

Nice. First try. That is pretty good Chuck. They study that and that's one of the nerve bundles that sends information like so many nerve bundles and they found that they think that one of the roles is to send signals concerning the perception of sound and they studied tone deaf people and found that the fibers were in fact smaller in people that were tone deaf than non-tone deaf. Right.

And some of them didn't have them at all. There is another. Right. And that is the amount that was there relative to the degree of tone deafness, right? Yeah. So there is also a 2007 study published in a 2007 issue of Harvard Health Letter, which I get mailed to my house. I thought you wrote it.

In my sleep. Gotcha. That the study showed that people who are tone deaf have less white matter connecting, and remember the white matter is the stuff that connects the gray matter. Yeah. It's the nerve fibers. 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.

Right. And they found that the people who 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. There you have it. Just like the... Oh, sorry. Arqueate fasciculus.

Nice, Chuck. I think I pronounced it different earlier. So we'll just say merging of those two is the correct way. Right. So 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, is launching right now into tone deafness and its genetic basis.

What do you got to do? Do you know? I think you probably have to be a little tone deaf. And then listen to things. Or you could be part of the control group. Right. Yeah. And be a great singer.

Yeah. They do say that you cannot improve upon this. You can take music lessons. You can take singing lessons. It's not going to help you if you're tone deaf. No. You're born with it. And if you do find out you're tone deaf, stay out of the Philippines.

Yes. And there was another, and of course this is of perception to tone. That doesn't necessarily mean like you're a bad singer, although that would make you a bad singer, but you can also be a bad singer if you're not tone deaf. Like me. And well, you probably fall into one of these categories then. A couple of neuroscientists did a study from the University of New York at Buffalo and Simon Frazier University.

And they said there's likely four explanations. Poor music perception is one. Okay. Which would be tone deaf. The other might be poor control of your vocal system. Yeah. Thick tone. Perhaps.

And another might be inability to imitate or mimic something. So you hear the sound and you hear 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 flawed memory storage. Well, that's the fourth one. Recreating it.

Oh, really? Yeah. You said the fourth reason is 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. 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 doesn't mean you're going to hit the curveball. Nice. So you can hear the note and 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 Black just this very week. Was it good? I had, my friend said it was, they phoned it in.

No, I didn't, I disagree. Really? I could have definitely handled a lot more songs from Tromplemon. They played pretty much all of Doolittle. Yeah, that was the tour, right? Playing Doolittle. I didn't know that. Yeah, I think that was the deal.

I found out there, actually. But yeah, it was cool. I liked it. They played Doolittle. These guys are old though. They like song back in the day, so they might be jaded old people. They played like winter long and. No, I mean, as far as just phoning it in.

Oh, gotcha. Are you saying the Pixies are old? No, I'm saying my friends who said they phoned it in are dudes who saw them back in the 80s and 90s. Oh, gotcha. So they might have been old. They phoned it in, they're just me, you know. I thought it was cool.

Cool stage show too. They were all dressed like stage hands. Really? Yeah. What's a stage hand dress like? Dark clothes. Really? And Joey's just bald as Frank Black is now.

Oh, yeah. He still plays that gold top, doesn't he? The Les 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 what the one article that Tom she's got something wrong in looks like, type tone deaf into the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

Oh. While we're at it, before we move on to Listener Mail, have you heard of Paul's data? I think it's D-A-T-E-H and DJ Inko one. No, dude, it's this kid. He's like 15 looking. Perfect. He has absolute pitch. He has a violin 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 Farside and he's playing it on the violin. Awesome. Along with his DJ cousin who's, you know, DJing. Really? Really cool. Check that out. We'll have to put that on the Facebook page when we release it. We will.

Do we have to wait that long as we could do it now? 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 would. Because we've noticed that there are people that participate on our Facebook page

without liking it, which 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 feed? Are 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 colexico.

I can't just see what you mean. But I don't want to see what colexico 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 might happen too. They don't want RBS coming up in their news feed. Yeah, perhaps.

I got you. But we don't post that much. No, 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 us look good. Our boss, when he sees a certain amount of fans, I think he doesn't like write us a check or anything. But yeah, it's a good thing for us.

Yeah. So we would appreciate it if you liked our Facebook page. Um, let's see. So that's Facebook, Twitter, SYSK podcast. Yep. We occasionally say something worth chuckling at. Yes. Very often.

And then let's do the Atlanta event. Hey, yes, 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. Yeah. To come to the drunken unicorn on East Ponce de Leon. October 12th, Tuesday, our buddies, the Henry Clay people of LA are playing a rock and roll show, headlining gig. A concert.

Concert. And you can come and it'll be a good time. It's a very small venue. So is Jerry gonna be there? Be like a big party. Jerry, are you coming? She said yes, ma'am. Jerry's going to be dressed as Thomas Pinchon.

Wow, you really like that one, didn't you? Oh, that's good. Thank you. Thanks. Anything else, man? I feel like I should be like, good night, everybody. No, the following night, October 13th is the Sanction Trivia event. Oh, yeah.

The All-Star Trivia at the Five Seasons Brewery West Side. Evening hours, probably around 6, 6.30. Just block out 6 to 11. Yeah. Yeah. And on our celebrity team, we have Joe Randazzo, editor of the Onion. Dave Willis, the co-creator of Aquatine Hunger Force and Squidbillies. Who, I've got to say, I'm really looking forward to meeting.

Squidbillies is so twisted and awesome. What I do sometimes with Squidbillies is just close my eyes and you just imagine it's just real red necks. Yeah. Then you open your eyes and they're squids and it's even funnier. Yeah. And then, of course, Mr. John Hodgman. Yes.

I'm going to get him to sign my books that I've read of his. And I'm going to get him to stay overnight at my house. Good luck with that. Yeah. I'm going to be like, sorry, the hotel we booked burned down mysteriously, John. Creepy. Yeah. That's it.

Okay. So if you want to send us an email, what do we want to hear about Chuck? Oh, how about some karaoke stories? Oh, that's a good one. If you've 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. Yeah. Karaoke stories we want to hear via email and you can type that up, spank it on the bottom, send it to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry.

It's ready. Are you? The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jackmove or being

robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's today's Fortnite weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and Fortnite into a winter wonderland. With new festive games, including a winter themed escape room,

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