Educational CyberPlayGround - Perfect Pitch vs. Tone Deaf People
The way that people talk about 'high' and 'low' notes makes it sound as though musical pitch has something to do with physical location. Now it seems there may be a reason for this: the same bit of our brain could control both our understanding of pitch and spatial orientation.


The Uncanny Symphony of Oliver Sacks
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7.11.2
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i10/10b01301.htm

By LEONARD CASSUTO

Years ago, in the preface to his first book, the neurologist Oliver Sacks announced his interest in founding a "romantic medicine." He's been refining the art and the science together ever since. After recent pauses for a memoir and a book about a trip to observe exotic ferns, Sacks returns in the just-published Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) to the "clinical tales" that made him famous: weird case studies that locate the uncanny in everyday life. The goal is rarely to cure the patient in traditional terms. Most of Sacks's new cases — such as a woman with "amusia," the inability to hear music as anything but random sound — can't be cured at all, and many of the conditions that the author describes don't even qualify as disease. Instead he marvels at the "richness" of human possibility.

Sacks allows himself to be guided by a theme for the first time in Musicophilia. As a universal that can't exist outside the human context, music is a perfect subject for him: It's a powerful yet inarticulate element of who we are. And in keeping with Sacks's increasingly personal approach to his medical observation, it's also a central part of his own history, as he's an enthusiastic amateur pianist who grew up in a musical household.

Musicophilia focuses on the ineffable, intertwined nature of music with humanity; but more than that, it's about the people whom music affects in so many different ways. The book's subjects are filled with music, like the man whose advanced Alzheimer's disease keeps him from conversing but not from singing with feeling, or the community of people with Williams Syndrome, a genetic condition that leaves them unable to add single-digit numbers, but with a near-universal appreciation for music and the skill to make it.

Musicophilia acts as a summa of sorts for Sacks, with quotations from his other books. He brings back famous subjects for encores, like the man who gave the title to one of his most famous books of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (Summit Books, 1985). (Disabled by a brain tumor that kept him from recognizing faces and everyday objects, that man used the rhythm of song to carry him through tasks he could no longer visualize.) Sacks also draws on his own anomalousness — his migraines, his depression, his solitariness — to explain, for example, how a chance hearing of Schubert cuts through his depression and briefly makes him "alive once again." Such accounts extend Sacks's anthropological journey through the world of weird neurological disability — and ability.