Stuff You Should Know - What is perfect pitch?

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

Perfect pitch, or absolute pitch, is when you can sing a note with no reference from other notes, perfectly on key. Is it an asset? Chuck says yes. Learn all about this musical rarity today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello there, it's me, Josh, and I'm doing my live show, The End of the World, or How I Learn to Start Worrying and Love Humanity, on June 19th and 20th in Minneapolis and in Washington, D.C. Go to themiracletheatre.com for D.C. tickets

and theparkwaytheatre.com for tickets to the Minneapolis show. I'll see you soon. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Jock Bryant. F. That was nice. And there's Jerry Rowland over there,

the Jerryster, rolling on, as always. Don't look at me like that. Weirdly, I said F. What was it? I don't know, a C. You don't know. This made me think a lot about me and singing and pitch and stuff.

It made me think about you and singing and pitch, too. Did it? Yeah. Because I tried. I know I don't have absolute pitch, but I tried. I was just like, well, let me test myself. And I went to the little quiet room here. And the only way I knew how to test it

was to think of a song I know that starts in C that I know how to play and sing. Give me a C. And then I sang a C, and then I hit the play button on the YouTube clip of a C. And the C was way higher than I was singing it. But I think I was in just a different key. It wasn't off like, oh.

It was like, oh, that sounds like a C in a different octave. OK. But the way all that works is confusing. Have you ever heard of Charlie Puth? No. So Yumi found this guy. She watches the John Mayer. You know, John Mayer has an Instagram TV show every week.

I did not know that, but I know he's big on Instagram. It's actually pretty good. Well, he went so far as to create a show. Good for him. He had a guy named Charlie Puth. And Charlie Puth has maybe the most perfect pitch of anybody on the planet. And there's videos of this guy like hitting a note.

And he's like, here's enough. And he's got a, what would you call that thing? A little magic machine that shows you exactly what the pitch is. OK, that thing. It just peeped like the needle just goes right to F or E or whatever. And he's not even looking. And it's just out of nowhere.

It's really impressive. Does Yumi like John Mayer? That's all I've been thinking about. She actually has become a fan of John Mayer. All right. His show is actually worth watching. Yeah, current mood. Gotcha.

So we're talking about perfect pitch or absolute pitch. And that is, we're going to define it right away here, unlike us. And that is to do like the Puth does. Puth. Puth. I know. Which is if someone says, hit a C with no,

with nothing to compare to, I can just belt out a C. Right. Or recognize a C if someone says, what note is this? It goes both ways. It's a double-edged talent. It's a double-edged talent. That's what absolute or perfect pitch is. So you might say like, oh, OK.

There's some aliens walking around among us. And this is how they show themselves. They're able to produce a note at will. Right? Yeah. But really, if you step back and the Grabster put this article together for us, you did a good job. He did.

He went to great lengths to point out that having absolute pitch or what's also called perfect pitch really is kind of useless. I don't know if I agree with that. He went to such lengths, I became to wonder if the Grabster is actually jealous of people who have given pitch. Well, he makes the point quite a bit

that it doesn't help you write a song. It doesn't make you any more creative. Is that what it sounded like when you were reading it? A little bit. And that is quite true. It does not. But make no bones about it. If you're a singer in a band, having perfect pitch is an asset.

Right. It might be annoying to your bandmates. Right. I saw this video of these two Japanese kids, and it was annoying things that people with perfect pitch do. Oh, really? And yeah, this one kid was annoying. Yeah.

The bejesus out of another. Yeah, I could see that. That's cute. I mean, it's got to be an asset. I would guess so, sure. Well, let me give you an example of relative pitch that Ed gives. If you're in the shower, if I'm in the shower,

and I start singing some Morrissey song, let's say, it starts out pretty normal, but there's some high notes in there. Maybe if I really stretch, I can hit. Once I get to those high notes, I can't even come close. The reason why is because I started in a higher key than I should have, because I had no reference point whatsoever, and I just started singing. Oh, big mouth strikes again.

Oh, no, wait, that's way too low. Right, I couldn't do that. I mean, like, that sounds perfect. Yeah, I actually do a pretty good Morrissey. Oh, yeah? Let's hear it. No. I can't do it right now.

My voice is all podcasted out. I'm not going to humiliate myself on air. I'm sorry. I'll do it for you later. In the shower? Yeah. I'll be like, you got some soap here. You have some soap on your arm.

Sorry, that's my Morrissey. All right, so we should talk about reference relative pitch and having a reference point. You can be a great singer and not have perfect pitch. It is right in that it's not like, oh, you don't have perfect pitch, you're probably not going to be a good singer, or you do a perfect pitch, you're such a great creator and songwriter.

Those don't have anything to do with one another. But if you've ever been to see a vocal group sing. Like Starland Vocal Band? Never seen them. But Emily, my wife, was in a show choir in high school. Oh yeah, that's cute. So that's exactly what they did. I believe they had piano accompaniment.

Sometimes it was acapella. But if you see an acapella group, you will almost always see a pianist hit a single note before they start playing and hear that. Or they might have a crat tuner, which is one of those little things you hold up to your mouth. It's like a round harmonica. I heard it was called a pitch pipe.

Yeah, I mean, it's a type of pitch pipe. What did you call it? A crat tuner. It was, it's like a, that's probably like saying Band-Aid or something or Kleenex. Proprietary epitome. Yeah, I think so. I love those.

They're all kind of pitch pipes, but this is the little cool round ones, like a round harmonica. I know what you're talking about, yeah. Yeah, and they usually wear it like a medallion around their neck. The choir director. Do they? I've seen it.

OK. So they would either blow into one of those pitch pipes or they would hit a piano key and the choir would all know in their head, they would have that reference point then. Right. It's like, all right, here's, here's where we start with our barbershop quartet song. Right, that's either the first note of the song.

Yes. Or the key that the song sung in. Right. But either way, once they have that and they're like eh or whatever, they can sing the rest of the song in key relative to that note. Right. That alone to me is impressive.

So even relative pitch is impressive to me, let alone absolute pitch. Well, I mean, everyone has relative pitch. I guess, but if somebody is like, here's an A, I'd be like, what do you want me to do with that? Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, sure. You know, I wouldn't be able to necessarily keep up

with the rest of the song just because I heard the first note. Yeah, I almost feel like, yeah, but you know the song. So like, once you have your starting point, you're good. I guess, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Like you've learned it and practiced it. Yeah. Yeah, I know.

I think about any schmo could do this. Um, I was inquired, but we always had piano accompaniment and the piano led the song. Like, I don't remember a single song we did inquire that started with just the vocals acapello. It was always like a piano intro. So, you know, exactly where you are. I was just trying to come up with a song

that starts out like that. Bohemian Rhapsody. Sure. Do you know what's funny? I was just thinking of the other Queen song I want it all. Oh, yeah. Which I believe starts acapello. Is that Queen?

Mm-hmm. I thought that was a Burger King, Ed. This is Burger Queen. Oh, yeah. All right. So, uh, relative pitch, that's the deal. I feel like we should cover some more, like, I feel like the other half of this episode

should be Tone Deafness. We did one on Tone Deafness. No, we didn't. I swear to God, we did one called is Tone Deafness Hereditary. And we talked about how in the Philippines, if you sing my way in a Tone Deaf way at karaoke, you may get stabbed

because people have been stabbed before. I don't remember that one. You don't remember that? Not at all. We talked about Tone Deafness for sure. So your plan just fell apart. Yeah, but I mean, there's a lot of, I never study music theory,

so I'm an air learner as far as guitar and all that stuff goes. Did Jerry just prove you right? Yeah. She just faced me? Yeah. But it gets a little like convoluted when you start talking about keys and octaves

and half steps and whole steps and stuff like that. The thing that calms me down is when you talk about science, right? So let's talk science here. Okay. When you talk about pitch, pitch is all relativity, right? Yes.

You're talking about one note in relation to another note. Is that other note higher or lower? That's really what pitch is, right? It's the gradations of notes in relations to one another, right? Okay. If you look at what you're talking about scientifically,

you're talking about a sound wave. So really what you're talking about is the frequency of a note is what gives it its A or its B or is it C sharp or something like that. And there is a whole step between an A and a B, but there's actually a half step in between, okay? You know all this. I do.

Okay. How am I doing so far? Am I explaining it right? Yeah. I mean, like if you sit at a piano, a half step is the very next key, whether it's a black or white. And a whole step is skipping a key

and going to the second key. But I thought there were some stretches where there are two white keys together and that was a full step, which are called natural tones. There's no half step in between those notes. That's not how I understand it. That's the piano demo I saw.

Yeah. And the other thing that struck me too, I never knew this before, ever. So, you know, like there's a B flat and a C sharp. Or actually, I think it'd be a B sharp and a C flat. Same note. Yeah. What, the whole reason those things exist

and it's a half note, sharp or a flat is. But the whole reason it exists is to tell you which way to go on the scale, up or down a half note. Yeah, like I'm trying to think about in band. You can play an A and if you move that up one bar,

that's an A sharp, but that's also a B flat because B would be the next thing up from that middle point. Right. So, I never really knew there were rules for why you would refer to it as an A sharp or a B flat. From what I understand is to know, all right, you want to go down,

so you're going down to A sharp from a B or you're going up to a B flat from an A. Interesting. I think, I probably just got it wrong. I bet we're mangling so many things here. But what we're talking about is what's called the Western musical scale. It's a 12 note scale

and it's made up of 10 octaves that humans can hear. And if each note is a specific wavelength, a frequency of a sound vibration that's the same every single time and A always has the same frequency and B always has the same frequency. If you double that frequency, you've just gone up an octave.

Right. And that scale repeats itself and ascends or descends going into higher lower octave. So bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Oh, that was good. People with perfect or absolute pitch will be able to hear any note at any octave

on that scale and say, oh, that's a A7 or a B6 sharp. Right. Right? They just from hearing it or they'll be able to reproduce it. So it's not like they can just memorize 12 notes. Yeah.

They can memorize 12 notes over, say, 10 octaves. They can recognize them. Yeah. And if you're someone who plays instruments by ear and sings by ear and can't read music, you really appreciate two things. The simplicity of people who write three chord major songs and then the complexity, even though it's frustrating,

of like an Elton John. So like if I sit down to play guitar to an Elton John song, I'll look up the chords and the words and nine times out of 10, I'm like, I don't even know this chord. Oh, really? Yeah. And I got to like go to a chord book and figure it out.

OK. He did all kinds of crazy chords. That's really interesting. And diminished minor. I mean, minors are simple enough. But it was still in the Western musical scale or was it incorporating tones from other musical scales that weren't?

No, it was still the Western. But instead of playing an F, it would be like an F sharp minor seventh or something. So what is minor major then? Well, minor is the saddest of all keys, A minor. That's a spinal type for everyone, so you still won't get it. Thank you for explaining it, though, and not just letting all the listeners write in and laugh

at me. I mean, I don't know how to explain. I mean, a minor is a variation of the major, but it sounds completely different. OK. And much more like, it does sound more sad. And like if I played you an A and an A minor and a B and a B minor, you go, oh.

We need to get a piano in here for this one. I don't know how to play piano. Jerry, can we expense a piano? Maybe we should take a break while we go get a piano. Let's do it. OK. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. All right. So one thing we should say, Chuck, when we're talking about absolute- Guys, I'm sorry. Absolutely. Do you feel like people are keeping up with this or are we just throwing out so much random information? A little both.

I think that music majors are really just like, oh, guys, good lord. Nobody likes them anyway. But for normal people, you think that they're like, oh, okay, now I understand what pitch is because that's really the goal here. A little bit. We're not explaining anything to music majors that they don't already know. Yeah, that's true. And we're actually mangling the stuff that they do know. Right.

One thing we can say that's pretty easy to understand is though, is that perfect pitch is, it's a bit of a, on a sliding scale. Yeah. It's hard to define like it's either perfect or not perfect because you have a range from tone-deaf to perfect pitch. And you may be way closer to perfect pitch and may even say I have perfect pitch, but not have like absolute perfect pitch 100% of the time. Right, right. Like when tested. Right, exactly. So it's not, it's not binary, right?

There's, it's not whether one of those you have it or you don't have it kind of thing. Yeah. And it's suggested is when we'll talk about it a little more that everybody has some level of absolute pitch. It's just some people are way better at it than others. So, so much so that they seem like they have perfect pitch compared to everybody else. Yeah, I'm not sure I understood that part either, but we'll get to that. Okay. And it's interesting to note too that this, even if you do have absolute pitch, you might have trouble identifying the same notes at different octaves.

You're not supposed to. You can't call yourself a perfect pitch person. Yeah, I guess so, right? Yeah, you have to hang your head in shame. But that's tough. Identical notes at different octaves are tough and it results in some weird phenomena like the shepherd tone, which is really neat. Yeah, it is. If you've ever been to a Christopher Nolan movie.

Specifically, Dunkirk. Did Dunkirk use it? Oh yeah, throughout. Well, he uses it all the time. Okay. Like the sound of that motorcycle, it had a specific name, but the one Batman rides with the two big fat wheels. The Bat Cycle. Yeah.

I think that's what it's called. Okay. I think I had another name, didn't it? Or no. Well, maybe I'm thinking the Adam West Bat Cycle. I think so. But he uses that sound. It's called the shepherd tone.

And it's basically several tones from different octaves layered on one another. The highest tone gets quieter. The middle tone stays loud and the bass tone ascends in volume. And if you play them all together, it's this mental trick that your mind can't process. And it sounds like something that's either going up or down into infinity, basically. Right. But it's really just the same thing on a loop over and over again. But it sounds, yeah, clearly just going up and rising in pitch constantly for infinity.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Really tension creating. Yeah. It really puts you on edge. Not like nails on a chalkboard on edge, but more like what's going to happen exactly. Just this pitch is still going higher. Exactly. And a shout out to Roger Shepard from Stanford.

He's a psychologist in 1964 who, I guess, discovered this audio illusion. Also, another shout out to Diana Deutsch, who was a researcher for audio illusions, which are really interesting. It's like the sound version of an optical illusion. It's pretty cool. And it reveals a lot about how the brain processes information. She has a site, I guess at UC San Diego, that I want everybody to go to right now. Pause the episodes.

And go to deutsch.ucsd.edu slash psychology slash pages. And here's where it gets tricky,.php, question mark, lowercase i equals 212. Why didn't you get a URL shortener for that? I don't know. Just do it and thank me later, but she has these audio clips that show how when you hear something spoken over and over again enough times, the same thing over and over again, it turns into music to you. It turns into being sung.

Interesting. And the way that she has it laid out and demonstrated, it is the most mind blowing thing I have heard in ages. I loved it. I went right out. I was like, you got to hear this. And it's, it's like I'm watching John Mayer. Shut up.

John Mayer is talking. Who sings better than him? This Diana Deutsch lady. Wow. I'll have to hear that. That's pretty cool. You're, you're going to love it. Yeah.

You will love it, Chuck. Awesome. Okay. It has really nothing to do with perfect pitch, but it is just kind of one of those things where it's like, this, this is worth mentioning the world. Okay. All right. So there's this guy named Nicholas Slonimski who's a composer and a music lexicologist

and a conductor. He wrote in his autobiography about having absolute pitch basically how like he kind of it was a party trick when he was a kid. And then when he went to school, to music school, of course, he kind of like, kind of thought his S didn't stink because he had perfect pitch and they didn't have to work as hard and he was a little snotty about it. I think from what I gather from Ed summation and apparently while he was off just like, I've got perfect pitch.

All his classmates are actually busting their butts and working hard and actually writing really good music and he fell behind and was like, how could I be falling behind? I've absolute pitch and he's just leaning on that too hard. He was. So he had kind of a moment of inspiration where he's like, oh, I actually have to put in the work too. And I think this is where Ed was kind of getting that it doesn't actually help. Right.

It's good. It's a neat thing to have. You can't write your own ticket though in the music business because you have perfect pitch. It doesn't help you be any more creative or anything like that. And as a matter of fact, Slonimski points out in that autobiography that there have been plenty of people who are just master composers like Tchaikovsky and Wagner or both neither one of them had perfect pitch and yet you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who was like, those guys were hacks.

Sure. You know, they were pretty good and they didn't have perfect pitch. So you can do quite well in music and not have perfect pitch, especially if you have one of those little round harmonic as you were talking about Lenny Kravitz harmonica. Pitch pipe, it's hard to tell how many people have perfect pitch. You hear one in 10,000 a lot, but as Ed points out, it's kind of hard to find any reference for this that really is accurate or legit. Yeah, I think you ran into that same thing where you see the same info on the internet

in the same way everywhere. It means that it's probably not real. I think so because it's got to be more than one in 10,000. Well, he said he found one that found about 4% of the population has it. So it'd be 400 out of 10,000, 400 times greater than what was previously thought. That's right. And you're more likely to have, and this is where it gets interesting of like, where does it come from?

Nature or nurture? You're definitely more likely to have perfect pitch if you start your training in music before the age of six. Yeah, there's a critical period for the brain where it's just mush waiting to be molded into smarts. So things like language, foreign languages, music, basically anything you can think of that requires talent that not everybody can do kind of falls into that critical period where if you start to learn that early on before age six, you're going to be able to

learn it way easier than somebody who's an adult trying to learn it. Yes. And so perfect pitch shows up way more frequently in kids who had musical training and exposure specifically to the Western music scale at an early age than it does to people who were not exposed to it. Right. Yeah, and also if you speak a tone language fluently and definitely natively, you're more likely to have absolute pitch.

Tone languages are, we have a little, I mean every language has a little bit of that when we people inflect in English different things, different tones that can be different meanings. Oh, really? Oh, really? Oh, really? Oh, really? That's good. That's a good morse.

But we have nothing on like Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese. These are real tone languages where your tones can indicate like the same word can have five, six, seven different meanings depending on your tone. Really interesting. Yeah. People who speak tone languages tend to have or more likely to have absolute pitch than people who don't speak tone languages, right? Yes.

Okay. So that raises a really good question then. There's one other big clue here and just because we have the clues doesn't mean we figured out. I don't think we said there is still no full understanding of why some people have absolute or perfect pitch. But it also appears more frequently in the population of people with autism. Right.

They tend to have more frequency of perfect pitch than people who do not have autism. Yeah. And the same with, I know it correlates to supposedly photographic memory, if that's the thing, synesthesia, which we've talked about, and Billy Joel's a synesthete. I didn't know that. Yeah. So that might have something to do with his abilities. So one, actually, two explanations I saw for people with autism is that it's believed

that they process information piecemeal rather than wholesale, which would explain rather than hearing like the whole musical composition, they hear the individual notes. So it would be easier for them to be acquainted with the individual notes or they just are more developed. Their sensory input is way more developed than people without autism. Those are the two competing theories for why people with autism have perfect pitch more. Interesting. Yeah.

All right. Well, the whole question that we talked about is it nature or nurture? That's sort of a debate that's still going on. And it's hard to study this stuff universally. First of all, this seems to apply almost exclusively to the Western music scale. I think so. Right? Because that's what you're doing.

You're saying that's an A, that's an F. Here's an F, here's an A. And what you're talking about are the notes on the Western music scale. They think that people who have perfect pitch can detect notes that are more nuanced than the full step or the half step of the Western music scale. But I didn't see anywhere where it's like, yes, this translates everywhere into any music scale. So it doesn't seem to be universal from that outset to begin with. Yeah.

Okay? Yeah. For sure. I think that I thought was interesting. You talked about this at the beginning about labeling the sensory input. It's like, you know, they throw the letter C on that wavelength, basically. It's no different than saying, well, that color is red. It's just a label that we've created.

It was, right? Or it is. I saw an analogy for this where if somebody with perfect pitch, if you analogize it to somebody who could pick out color, they could see a blue wall in somebody's house, then drive to the paint store and pick out that same blue from the wall of samples. Oh, interesting. It's basically the same thing. But there's a big clue there with the fact that most people, like that's pretty refined.

But most people can look at something and say, that's blue. That's green. That's red. We were almost around the world to a child trained from a very young age to recognize and identify and name colors. Not everybody gets that kind of training around the world with musical notes. But where they do, like in Japan, where far more children are trained more universally in music, they have found much more prevalences of absolute pitch there.

Which makes sense, right? Sure. You're exposed from a very early age. What is an A? What is an F? Right. You're hitting that critical period. But that really reveals something important here too, Chuck.

Not every kid in Japan has absolute pitch. Oh, sure. Just like every kid in Japan can tell you what blue is or what red is, they can't necessarily all tell you what an A is or what an F is, right? They just can't. So that suggests that there is perhaps some genetic basis to it. Not everybody can learn absolute or perfect pitch. All right.

I think that's a good place to break and we'll talk more about your family genes and perfect pitch right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, you said something about jeans. I'm wearing them.

You're always wearing them. I'm wearing dad jeans. Are they? They're a little dad, Jeannie. Now, what are dad jeans? Those look like normal jeans to me. That's because we both were cool in the same. Same era, which is 20 years ago.

So what? Faded is dad jeans? No, I think it's more the cut, a little, little bag here. I'm just too old to wear straight up skinny jeans. Too old, my thighs are too chunky. You know, I feel about skinny jeans. Sure. I like that.

Almost all jeans now are a little stretchy though. They are. It's like they put elastic in them. Yeah. Like every fabric is a little stretchy now, it feels like. I'm like, oh, I'm a size 30. I never knew that. All right.

So jeans, absolute pitch does tend to run in families. Okay. So clearly it's genetic, right? Well, no, not necessarily. Like everything that I gathered here is that we just don't know. There's probably some genetics involved and a lot of nurture involved. So that was the old view and I think it's still kind of predominant that this explained absolute pitch.

If I may take this one? Yeah. So you were born with the genetic propensity toward absolute pitch. Yeah. Like if you're Lucy Wainwright, our friend, and her mom and her dad are both professional singers. Right. They're Wainwrights.

It's no mistake that Lucy, Martha and Rufus are all professional singers, but there's a genetic component there for sure. But the other way to look at it, and this is the reason why the nature versus nurture debate hasn't been settled, it's also quite possible that just because Lucy was exposed to music from a very young age, including the critical period, it could have nothing to do with genetics and could have everything to do with environment. So the thing that everybody settled on is it's probably both, that you have a genetic propensity toward it and that if you are exposed to the Western musical scale at that critical

period before age six, and then you learn later on, like, oh, my parents will actually be kind to me and talk nice to me if I show off in front of their friends that I can do an A off the top of my head, then that reinforces that and that develops into absolute or perfect pitch later on in life. Yeah. Is that the part where the child has to see value in it in order to kind of, and I guess that's true with anything. Yeah.

If the kid doesn't see value in something, they're not going to work toward that. Right, exactly. See, my parents, neither one of my parents can sing, really. My sister can't sing, but my brother and I can both sing. Oh, I've heard you, it's like angels. Scott sings better than me, of course. Oh, I know. I mean, does that go without saying at this point?

It's interesting, though, how that works, because we weren't super exposed to music either a little bit, but not like my parents weren't big music people that were like, oh, man, we've got to listen to this record. Yeah, he checked this track. Yeah, that just didn't happen. So we were discovering music on our own, but I wonder if my brother gave me the nurture side because he was singing and we were in choir and he was giving me records and stuff. I could totally see that at an early age.

Yeah, I mean, that's nurture right there. It's just not coming from your parents, but that's still nurturing. I'm just fascinated by talent's period and like Michelle and Scott can both draw. I can't draw at all and like how that stuff, you know, my mom is an artist. Oh, is she? Yeah, I did. Oh, yeah, that's right. The mural.

Yeah, I mean, she was a professional artist and it's just like, I can't draw a stick figure. Right, it didn't get passed out. And it's funny, when I say that around my mom, she's like, oh, you can draw, remember all the Bill the Cat stuff he used to do and Opus the Penguin from Bloom County? It's like, mom, I was tracing. She's like, well, that takes talent. I'm like, no, it really doesn't. I never knew.

She said tracing takes talent. Yeah. That is a sweet mom. That is very sweet. You got a sweet mom and a great brother. But I'm just fascinated about talents, especially having a daughter now and like, is she good at this? Or is she not going to be good at this?

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if you can nurture, but some stuff you just got to wait and see. It's an age old question. I think that anybody who's like, it's 100% nature or 100% nurtures off either way. It's got to be a combination of the two. I mean, we did that episode on epigenetics that basically proved it's both. It shows how it's both.

So yeah, it's got to be both. I would say absolute pitch falls under that. Well, and with absolute pitch too is interesting because the way I read this is that people can learn it with practice, I guess. Even later in life. Yeah. The thing that really caught my attention is there's a drug called Valproate that aids in neuroplasticity, which means you learn better.

You can restructure your brain to learn new stuff at a later age. Yeah. I had never heard of that. I had neither. Apparently that treats epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and migraines and can help you sing better. Literally make you smarter is what I'm getting. The other thing I took issue with is that this said much like an American learning German at age 40 will never be as fluent as someone born and raised in Germany.

Is that true? Yeah. I think native born speakers always have an edge up on, I think. I don't know. I figure if you really immerse yourself, you move to Germany, like you could learn it just as good, right? Maybe. And I've also heard that you're never truly, and this may be one of those dumb things you

hear in elementary school, but you can never truly be fluent if you don't dream in that language. And I don't know if that's true or if that's an old wives tale. I've never heard that. You haven't? No. I've always heard that like after a certain age, you can't dream in a foreign tongue. Wow.

And thus you are not quote unquote fluent. That sounds made up. It sounds like playground stuff, doesn't it? Like the barcode being the number of the beast, you know? There is one last part that I thought was really fascinating. There's a larger part of this debate that the fact that there are people walking around with absolute pitch and not everybody has it suggests something that we may have a part of our brain that is left over to sense and detect music and differences in music.

And that to some people that suggests that music singing specifically actually predated language in our development, our evolution. I could see that. Totally. Yeah. And the example uses that a series of sounds was early communication. Yeah. Like, sure.

It means he got me. Yeah. Or, you know, like, you know, big took took is saying big mammoth is coming this way. That was clearly a lookout. Even before you said it, I was going to say, look out. But if you really hear what I did there, that's singing in a way. Right. It's a tone.

Right. And eventually over time, that could be kind of a systemized categorized where it's standardized. That's what I was looking for. One of those eyes where that's just what your group says and then your group gets bigger and bigger and that spreads and eventually turns into words, something more nuanced. So it makes total sense. The other reason I saw that made sense to me was that if we were running around nature, we heard birds calling, we heard cats growling or something like that.

We may start to imitate those things with your clicks and whistles and all this stuff. They sound natural, much more than like language does. So it makes total sense that that song would have come before language. Yeah. I mean, I think there's an innate tonality in words and pre-words. Yeah. Pre-words. Like it didn't, I don't know, because otherwise it just would have been a series of grunts

and clicks and things, like very staccato and short. Yeah. It's almost like with the first person born, it was like, well, how do you do? And that was like the first person to ever talk and that was the first sentence ever spoken. You know? Yeah. It's a great question.

If you want to know more about great questions like absolute pitch, well then friends, we want to direct you to our beloved website that we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into how stuff works. They got a lot of good stuff for you there. Okay? Okay. It's time for Listener Mail. Actually, can I jump back?

Jump back, Jack. We didn't talk about people who supposedly had perfect pitch. We'll throw some names out real quick. Oh man, I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. That's all right. Sorry. Michael Jackson supposedly had perfect pitch.

And there's a story. This is from Mental Floss, by the way. All right. There's a story from Will I Am who backed Michael Jackson up in a song and said that he warmed up for three hours to sing a five-minute song. Three hours of me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Wow. Okay, Carrie supposedly discovered she had perfect pitch at the age of four, Ella Fitzgerald.

I love this story. Apparently she was so dead on that her band would warm up to her voice instead of the other way around. Wow. That's really cool. That's pretty cool. I love that lady. Bing Crosby, his travel partner said that sharing a train ride, he would snore and pitch to

the train whistle. That's cute. That's cute. That's like the three Stooges who are like, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Florence Henderson or the Brady Bunch? Sure. That's how she's going to do it. She's a singer as well.

Mozart? Sure. They assume Beethoven, although that was never on record. Paul Schaefer from the world's most dangerous band. Jimi Hendrix. Okay. As the story goes, Hendrix, when he was first learning guitar, could not afford a guitar tuner, so he would go to a music store, strum the open strings, and then go back and tune

it to what he remembered hearing. Wow. And he learned guitar at like age nine or something, maybe even younger, right? And then Yanni. And Yanni was even tested on Dateline, someone playing random keys, and he nailed it, apparently. Of course, it's Yanni. Yeah. I always confuse Yanni with Zomfier.

Oh, well, one was a Panfluter, and one was a... Panfluter. Greek God. It wasn't... I thought they both played the Panflute. No. Yanni is a composer of the big flowery arrangements. Okay.

He may Panflute it up every now and then, but I don't think that was his main jam. He wasn't shy with the Panflute, but yeah, I got you. All right. Well, I think I already said the listener mail thing, so let's jump right into it. Yes. All right. So this is... Actually, whoa, Chuck, before we get into it, let me add something here.

So you remember our friend, Lowell Hutchinson, who sponsored our... Elephant? Elephant Force? Yeah. Yes. Well, Lowell didn't include the name of her shop, but she donates 20% to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Okay.

And she emailed in with it, so we got to share it. Yeah, let's do. So you go to etsy.com slash shop slash Lowell Hutch Designs and buy her turned wood and some of that money is going to save elephants. That's awesome. Okay. And much easier than the San Diego State URL. It worked, though, didn't it, everybody?

All right. Here we go, everyone. I love it when we get a little bit of kismet happening. Sure. Hey, guys, heard the episode on what happens when the government mistakenly thinks someone is dead. You mentioned that you are having trouble finding info on why the Postal Service would be reporting a death to the government in an amazing coincidence.

I actually just had to do that the very same day that that episode dropped. Wow. I work as a mail carrier in New Rochelle, New York, and I can confirm that we are responsible for reporting deaths. And in some cases, it's a bit more common than you think. That procedure is actually quite simple when a government agency, usually the IRS or social security, is having trouble reaching an individual. They send a special form to the post office responsible for delivering that person's mail.

The form asks the mail carrier knows the whereabouts of that person. I imagine the first thing it would say is like, I don't know. I just deliver mail there. Yeah. Why all the stress? Whether they moved or whether they're just ignoring the government's calls and letters or in some cases they have unfortunately passed away. The carrier will try to find out where that person is.

What? Yeah, they use them as investigators almost. That's crazy. And if they don't already know and they will fill out the form to be sent back to the agency. Wow. If I or one of my coworkers informs the agency that the individual is deceased, then we get a coupon for, no, I'm just kidding. No, I was kidding.

Then they have officially been reported as such and it is the responsibility of the government to confirm this information with Next of Ken. Wow. That is from Tom Longie. The government's like, you know your mom's postal worker is saying she's dead, spreading rumors. So thanks, Tom. And thanks for delivering mail to new Rochelle Rochelle in New York.

Nice. Rochelle Rochelle the musical. That's right. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Tom. That's pretty cool. You heard that at the same time you were doing that. We love that kind of thing.

Amazing. Would you call it Kismet? Yeah. If you got a little bit of Kismet going on, let us know. You can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and find our social links there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. From the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.