Having perfect pitch is extremely rare, even among accomplished musicians. So how can you improve your ear, and what does your age, and speaking Mandarin have to do with it? Photo: Paramount Pictures (Meryl Streep as Florence Foster Jenkins in the 2016 movie that portrayed the soprano as having more ambition than vocal talent.) Relatively few people in history—even musical virtuosos—have been known to possess perfect pitch, the ability to identify or reproduce any musical note without having another note with which to compare it. The trait is so rare, it is estimated that only 1 in 10,000 people can tell an F-sharp from a B-flat in Western cultures, where the gift has been widely studied....

Source: Wall Street Journal June 11, 2017 11:00 UTC