Respond to the following questions after reading journals, articles or studies. Responses should be written in short paragraphs referring to, or citing information/data the article presents.

Source of Article: Scientific America
Title: Perfect Pitch: "You've Either Got It or You Don't" Date: September 6, 2007

(1) What new information did you learn?

- I learned that the ability to determine a note is related to your genes (DNA). However, environment may also be a factor, which means that musical training allows you to discern a note as well.


(2) What is your opinion of the research processes? Is it ethical or exploitive? What are the weaknesses and biases to the research?

- The research is ethical, but is likely to have a large variation when the experiment is conducted several times. People involved in this experiment is randomly chosen, thus, may produce different results. Plus, the experiment was based on an online test, so it is less accurate because there may be factors that affect the result. For example, there was an uncontrolled variable -- people weren't tested under the same circumstance.

(3) What further research could be conducted in this area?

- Simply testing on people through online tests may have limits for this research. There could be a research on the analysis of the genes of people with strong musical abilities, so that it would be able to distinguish which type of DNA contains the musical abilities.


(4) How does this information relate to you?

- I was usually curious about how perfect pitches worked out. My mom and my brother had difficulty identifying notes when a note was played on a piano, whereas my dad and I easily discerned the correct note. Now i know that perfect pitches had to do with genes, and also musical background. However, I am still curious about which factor has a bigger effect, but it seems that perfect pitch is more related to genes.