2023-05-24 11:02:00
“Come on, let’s do an experiment,” calls Mika. “Say any song, anything, and I’ll try to play it. I just have to have heard it before. But I know a lot of songs.” “Pretender” by the Foo Fighters. “Sure,” he says, turning to the keyboard. He rocks the chorus like he’s spent the past week practicing this song for nothing. But he hasn’t.
13-year-old Mika Mai from Rockenberg in Hesse has a special talent. He has a special musical ear, combined with a particularly good music memory. Mika can hear better than 99 to 99.9 percent of people. He has “perfect pitch”, as researchers call it. “Absolute hearing means the ability to name or produce heard sounds without an external reference,” says Kathrin Schlemmer, professor of musicology at the Catholic University of Eichstädt-Ingolstadt. Schlemmer is Vice President of the German Society for Music Psychology. She wrote her dissertation on the influence of absolute hearing on key memory.
“Absolute hearing is something special,” says Schlemmer, “because the vast majority of all music listeners and music producers, amateurs and professionals alike, can only name tones using comparison tones.” For this reason, musicians use tuning forks to hear a defined reference tone. Normally it is like this: If musicians hear two tones, with a little experience they can recognize the interval between the tones to some extent and also name the instrument with which the tones were played. But what they usually can’t tell is the exact pitch – whether the two tones are the same c and f or around cis and fis acts. But Mike can do it.
Musician Mika Mai
Those: Mika Mai/privat
“Early learning experiences seem to play an important role in the development of absolute hearing,” says Schlemmer. Studies have shown that children who have trained to recognize different tones over the years have been able to learn absolute hearing. “That doesn’t work anymore in adults.” But the genes could also have an influence. “Even with similar training, not all children develop perfect pitch,” says Schlemmer. So it seems to be a mix: a genetically determined talent that needs to be matched by a fair amount of training.
Mika’s parents noticed their child’s special musical talent early on. Even before his first birthday he had hummed along “Killing me softly with his song” by the Fugees. As soon as he could sit up, he began to play the keyboard, and at the age of four he had music lessons. Mika’s hearing soon caught on. Because the ability is not just limited to musical tones.
The boy can assign the exact pitch to every sound: a clapping, a knock or even a pull. When Mika was little, his parents used to take him to Frankfurt Central Station because he liked listening to the frequencies of the trains. Mika could hear whether an ICE 1 or 3, a regional train or an S-Bahn was rolling up.
Did Mozart have perfect pitch?
Mozart, Bach, Jimi Hendrix – the list of stars in music history who are said to have had perfect pitch is long. It is difficult to check whether Mozart and Co. actually had perfect pitch – there were tone identification tests that researchers can now use to test people’s hearing for absoluteness and in which the participants have to hit the right tone at least 80 percent of the time not at the time of Viennese Classicism.
If you browse through the research literature on the topic today, the answer seems to be quite clear. Not much remains of the connection between perfect pitch and musical genius. Rather, one gets the impression that absolute hearing is an entertaining skill, but the practical use is limited. “The fact that many famous composers are said to have absolute hearing contributed to the fact that it was associated with the characteristics of outstanding musical achievements, even if the benefit of absolute hearing for everyday musical life is small,” writes Kathrin Schlemmer together with Jan Hemming , Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Kassel in the “Handbook of Music Psychology”.
This is by no means the case for Mika. His perfect pitch is closely related to how he makes music and how well he can do it. This is mainly due to the fact that Mika has some health restrictions in addition to his perfect pitch.
“On the one hand, Mika has an autism spectrum disorder, on the other hand he is visually impaired,” says Adam Ockelford, professor of music at London’s University of Roehampton. Ockelford knows Mika, the two see each other about three or four times a year. Then they play the piano together, experiment, talk about Mika’s hearing, his musical talent and about music in general. The London professor knows his stuff. Before joining Roehampton University, he taught music to visually impaired children and young people for over 40 years. At the same time, he researched how visual impairments affect the musicality of children. Just like Mika.
The two found each other, the London music professor and the then 7-year-old from Rockenberg, Mika’s dad tells the story at the zoom meeting like this: He, the dad, just set up the new Smart TV. He had run a documentary about autistic people with island talent. While he was tinkering with the cables, he heard through the TV speaker how a young man talked about how he had become aware of his talent: when trains pulled into the station, he could immediately recognize the key of the train noises. Mika’s dad gasped.
The boy, autistic and visually impaired, who talked about his perfect pitch in the documentary was Derek Paravicini. Paravicini, now over 40 years old, was considered an exceptional musical talent even as a child, won countless awards – he was presented with one by Princess Diana – and made a career as a musician. He was also a student of Ockelford, who also had his say in the documentary. When Mika’s family was on vacation in London a little later, the parents wrote to Ockelford, who replied.
Adam and Mika seemed to fit. Mika says about Adam: “He’s great.” Adam says about Mika: “He’s a great boy and also a brilliant musician.” The latter, Ockelford is certain, has something to do with his illness. Mika suffers from septo-optic dysplasia, a neurological disease of the brain. The optic nerve is underdeveloped and its hormone balance in the brain is altered. And the two halves of his brain aren’t properly connected, Ockelford explains. “Such a disease can cause all sorts of problems, such as hormonal imbalances or intellectual problems. But a lot of the kids that are affected are extremely musical.”
Mika is not blind – but he can’t read sheet music while playing keyboard, piano, drums, guitar or bass. This is exactly where his perfect pitch comes in handy, which for Mika has a decisive influence on his ability to make music at all. This is based on an effect that some researchers believe to be a kind of key mechanism behind perfect pitch: a particularly pronounced musical memory. According to the idea, people with perfect pitch can remember auditory stimuli just as well as other people can remember impressive memories. A long-term memory for sounds, so to speak. So they always carry around with them the reference tone that musical amateurs lack for determining the pitch.
Whether it was ultimately perfect pitch that made Mika so musical, or whether it was perhaps the other way around, whether his musicality is related to his autism or visual impairment, or whether everything is somehow intertwined – that’s difficult to say. Perfect pitch itself may not have played a major role in the fact that Mika won state competitions at the age of 13 and performed at jazz festivals. Still, it’s essential for him to re-enact various songs, such as Foo Fighters’ “Pretender.” Because he can’t read the grades. Mika hears a song, recognizes the notes, remembers them and can play them. This would not be possible without his perfect pitch.
He recently implemented a challenge on one of his social media channels: anyone who wanted could name him a song – as soon as the message came through, Mika listened to the song for two seconds, then sat down at the keyboard and played it .
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