雅思阅读 99: The Pitch That Names Itself（自己叫出名字的音高）

改编自 University of Chicago / Yale J Biol Med（2016–2026年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/what-is-perfect-pitch

Reading Passage

A. Play a single note on a piano, and almost every listener can tell whether it is high or low, bright or dark. Ask them to name it — is that middle C, or F-sharp? — and nearly everyone is lost. A tiny minority, however, answers instantly, without humming, without a reference note, with the unhesitating confidence of someone naming a colour. This is absolute pitch, the ability to identify or reproduce a musical tone in isolation, and it has exerted a strange hold on both musicians and scientists. It is treated in popular legend as the mark of the born prodigy, a rare gift dropped at birth on a fortunate few, a party trick that separates the musical aristocracy from the rest. Yet the closer researchers look, the more absolute pitch resembles not a magical endowment but a finely tuned interaction between a sensitive brain and the window in which it was trained. The very ease with which its possessors perform the feat has made it seem effortless, when in fact it is anything but. It is a skill so quietly automatic that its owners often cannot explain how they do it — they simply know, as one knows that grass is green.

B. The first strong clue to how the ability arises is when it appears. Study after study finds that people with absolute pitch almost always began serious musical training in very early childhood: one frequently cited analysis reported that about ninety-five per cent of its possessors had started lessons before the age of seven, and on average they began around five and a half years old. By contrast, musicians with normal hearing who started in their teens rarely acquire the ability no matter how hard they practise. This is not a question of motivation; it is a question of timing, and a late start closes a door that early training keeps open. The conclusion drawn is that there is a sensitive period — a developmental window in which the ear and brain are disposed to label individual pitches as distinct objects, in the way they label individual colours — and that window largely closes as childhood ends. The timing matters more than the intensity of later effort; an adult can practise for a lifetime and still cannot file the notes the way a child of six does, because the neural mechanism that labels each pitch has, by then, stopped accepting new entries.

C. Early training, however, cannot be the whole explanation, because countless children take early lessons and only a handful hear names in the notes. Family and twin studies fill the gap. Absolute pitch clusters within families, and identical twins are significantly more likely both to have it than fraternal twins; the children of a possessor are far more likely to develop it than children of the general population. Heredity clearly loads the dice, though it does not by itself throw them. The picture is not of a single "perfect pitch gene" but of a polygenic predisposition, several genetic factors acting together to make the early lesson "take". One striking environmental modifier is language: absolute pitch is markedly more common among speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin, in which the meaning of a word depends on its pitch, as though a skill already used every day for speech lends itself to music. This is why the same early lesson can take root in one child and leave another untouched: the soil of the brain has to be ready as well as the teacher. Those who possess the ability, for their part, rarely recall learning it; it feels, to them, as natural as seeing that a rose is red.

D. Neuroimaging has begun to reveal what the trained, predisposed brain actually does differently. When possessors name a note, activity appears in regions associated with associative memory and with the left hemisphere, including structures around the surface of the auditory cortex that have repeatedly shown subtle anatomical asymmetries compared with non-musicians and ordinary musicians alike. The difference, then, is not in the ear but in how the brain files what the ear hears. The ability is therefore not simply "better ears" — the cochlea itself works much the same — but a way of storing and retrieving the label of a sound, as though the note had been filed in a mental catalogue that the rest of us never built. It is an exercise in memory as much as in hearing, which is why the trained possessor does not so much hear the note as recognise it, the way one recognises a friend's face across a room — instantly, without effort, and without needing to check the features one by one.

E. The romantic image is finally tempered by an awkward finding. Some evidence suggests that possessors of absolute pitch, far from being musically omnipotent, may actually neglect the equally important ability to judge distances between notes — relative pitch — because they have learned to treat each note as an isolated name rather than as a step in a melody. And long-held assumptions about a closed sensitive period have been shaken: carefully designed laboratory tasks have shown that even adults can be trained, slowly and imperfectly, to identify a handful of notes reliably. The gift, in other words, is not forever sealed off from the grown-up mind; it is merely much harder to reach. Absolute pitch turns out, then, to be neither a pure gift nor a purely learned trick, but a meeting of early opportunity and inherited disposition — and a reminder that the most enviable talents are usually the ones built, not merely given. The child with perfect pitch is, on this view, simply the one who happened to be in the right room at the right, irreplaceable age.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. A rare gift, or a tuned interaction? ii. The early window in which the ability is built iii. Why training alone cannot explain it — genes and language iv. What the scanning brain reveals about note-naming v. The talent's hidden weakness — and its revisable limits vi. The history of the piano keyboard vii. Why everyone is born with absolute pitch

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What is the defining feature of absolute pitch? A. Hearing extremely quiet sounds. B. Naming or producing a note without any reference pitch. C. Playing two pianos at once. D. Remembering long pieces of music.

6. What does the evidence about the age of first training suggest? A. Starting before the age of seven is strongly associated with the ability. B. Adults always learn faster than children. C. Training at any age works equally well. D. No training is ever required.

7. Why is language mentioned as a factor? A. Tonal-language speakers more often have absolute pitch. B. Musicians must learn to speak Mandarin. C. Language has no effect on hearing. D. Absolute pitch prevents language learning.

8. What "awkward finding" about absolute pitch is mentioned? A. It may come at the expense of judging intervals between notes. B. It makes people tone-deaf. C. It cannot be measured by scans. D. It fades after the age of thirty.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. About ninety-five per cent of possessors began musical training before the age of seven.
10. A single "perfect pitch gene" has been definitively isolated.
11. The cochlea of a possessor works very differently from that of an ordinary person.
12. Some adults can be trained, however imperfectly, to identify a few notes.
13. Most professional pianists do not suffer from stage fright.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Absolute pitch appears to depend on both a (14) __________ predisposition and musical exposure during an early sensitive (15) __________ rather than on a single gene.

答案与解析

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