Joe Palca - Annoying

Ross came up with a different test that, instead of naming notes, requires participants to match notes by ear using a “sine function generator” that generates a tone and sweeps through pitches when you turn the front knob. Ross asks people to match the first tone in a long series of notes. This requires people to keep the initial tone in their memories while the other tones play. “We had twenty-two professional non-AP musicians [musicians without absolute, or perfect, pitch], largely faculty from the Yale School of Music.”

How do you think they did? Keep in mind that people in this group could easily play any number of complex classical works entirely from memory. What’s one note? A lot, it would seem, to someone without perfect pitch.

“Their combined performance, when you added together all of their data, didn’t differ from chance,” Ross says, “which is to say that they would have done just as well if they weren’t wearing the headphones when they did our experiments. And these are professional musicians who are really quite invested in their musicianship.” Subjects with perfect pitch didn’t miss a note. This makes sense: if pitches have an identity, it wouldn’t be that hard to learn to the labels and remember them.

Then Ross tested three-, four-, and five-year-olds who were suspected of having perfect pitch but who had little musical training. These kids scored perfectly. “It was hard to explain the instructions because at four years old, it’s pretty hard to understand how to do this test. Yet you have a four-year-old outperforming the faculty at the Yale School of Music,” Ross says sympathetically. This suggests that there’s some predisposition for perfect pitch.

It’s almost impossible, however, to disentangle environmental impact from innate ability. Exposure to music could make a difference, even if formal musical training isn’t required. “You’d have to raise someone in a soundproof world for this person to have no musical exposure,” says Robert Zattore. “I think this is, in a way, one of those false debates. The answer to that question is almost always, ‘It’s got to be both.’ Neither the biological predisposition nor the environmental influence is sufficient; you need both, and that interaction has to come at the right time.” Just what genetic and environmental recipe is required for a particular individual is anybody’s guess. And just what is different about how the brains of people with perfect pitch process notes? That’s the holy grail, Zattore says.

You might think that the annoyance factor of perfect pitch would be worth it if you were a musician, at least a musician who was not interested in weird temperaments and different pitch centers. Yet it’s not so clear. “I tend to think about music in a very linear and discrete fashion,” Lucy says. Another perfect-pitch possessor describes being at a hockey game. The marching band was playing Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” He knew the song, but he didn’t recognize it. The band had changed the key. This is a common problem for people with perfect pitch.

Lucy provided a literary analogy. “Tolstoy was a writer. And he liked to look at all of these tiny details in something. But when he’s writing War and Peace , he wants to write this huge work, so he had to work very hard to extend this practice to an entire novel, which wound up being thousands of pages long. I feel like that’s sort of the way I approach music, at the nitty-gritty, detail-oriented level. Then I have to work harder to think about it in the larger context. Whereas my friends automatically hear it in the larger context.”

When pitches register as individuals with distinct personalities, it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees—or the melody for the notes.

Despite the adage, scientists studying music have been relentless in their quest to account for taste. It’s an enormously complicated question: What makes something enjoyable to listen to?

It’s not even clear why we like music at all. Some researchers have speculated that the human tendency to get pleasure out of music is simply a coincidence. Other scientists say that music’s ubiquity around the world argues for a genetic component. When musicologists talk about what kinds of music we like, they use two terms we’ve already discussed a little: consonance and dissonance .

Even the vocabulary isn’t precisely defined. For example, some experts have referred to consonance as the “absence of annoyance.” {30} 30 1. Pantelis Vassilakis, “Perspectives in Systematic Musicology: Auditory Roughness as a Means of Musical Expression,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 12 (2005): 119–144. In one 1962 study, John van de Geer, Willem Levelt, and Reinier Plomp, who worked at the Netherlands’ Institute for Perception, surveyed people to discover what, exactly, we mean by consonant and dissonant —but the answers were far from precise. {31} 31 2. J. P. Van de Geer, W. J. M. Levelt, and R. Plomp, “The Connotation of Musical Consonance,” Acta Psychologica 20 (1962): 308–319. Musicologist David Huron says, “If you just look at the experimental research on consonance and dissonance, we have evidence suggesting that there are at least eleven different phenomena going on here—everything from aspects of the peripheral auditory system and the innervation of nerves in the basilar membrane to enculturation. It spans the whole gamut from detailed physiological issues to familiarization and cultural learning—so the thing to say is that it’s an utter mess.”

Among the various phenomena related to musical preference, Huron says there is a polarization among scientists about the relative importance of learning and culture and physics and biology in explaining musical preference. These are difficult questions to unravel—whether certain sounds are pleasant to all people and why—and one could write a tome on this subject alone. (Many authors have.) That’s not what lies ahead here. We’re diving into a few cases of how scientists are studying taste to see what these cases reveal about annoyance.

Even people who grew up in essentially the same circumstances do not respond to all types of music the same way. You might get chills from the piercing wail of an Eddie Van Halen solo, whereas it may take a Wagner aria to tug your brother’s heartstrings. When you travel to other parts of the world, the disparities in preferences grow even vaster. Although music is ubiquitous among human cultures, one man’s music is another man’s noise.

“We fall into this trap of thinking that Western music is music, but there’s a pretty amazing variation,” says Josh McDermott, the neuroscientist we mentioned earlier for his work with tamarins and music. “Oftentimes, the stuff that people in one part of the world love is just incredibly annoying to us. Some of it is almost unlistenable.”

To understand the limits of Western listenability, you might start with some tunes by the Mafa. The Mafa are one of the 250 ethnic groups that make up Cameroon’s population. The group originated in the Mandara Mountains, which divide northern Cameroon from Nigeria. The landscape is dry, and the people are mostly farmers, cultivating sorghum, millet, and other crops on terraces on the hilly terrain. The Mafa live throughout the mountains, clustered in small villages of circular homes with thatched roofs. In the extreme north of the mountain range, there is no electrical supply, illness is widespread, and cultural isolation is nearly total.

That’s what drew Tom Fritz to the Mandara Mountains. He lives about three thousand miles away in Leipzig, a smallish German city. Among Leipzig’s claims to fame is the city’s musical history. It is home to Germany’s first musical conservatory, and Johann Sebastian Bach worked in Leipzig for nearly thirty years. Fritz is a neurophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Fritz is interested in music, which led him to his unlikely relationship with the Mafa.