So Pithy

Heard an interesting segment on Science Friday recently:

Some people just can’t carry a tune — not because they have poor voices, but because the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ notes isn’t significant to them. Writing this week in the journal PLOS One, however, a team of researchers report that the brains of tune-deaf people do actually react to incorrect notes unconsciously.

The summary suggests that this discovery won’t help improve anybody’s singing, but I have to wonder about that. As a caller noted, if the brains of tone-deaf and tune-deaf individuals can tell the difference between right and wrong then all is not lost; training could help individuals to process what their brain is telling them. After all, the brain also has to learn to see, a process that usually begins at birth. Why can’t it learn to recognize and (to varying degrees of fidelity) reproduce differences in pitch?