Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
Speaker 1: from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. This is Josh Clark with me. It's Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant. Huh huh. You're not a singer, are you? No,
Speaker 1: I'm not. I'm not, but I can tell you I'm
Speaker 1: not toned death right. Chuck's a little upset with me
Speaker 1: right now. We're going to mend fences during this podcast,
Speaker 1: aren't we. We'll see Come sit on this chair now.
Speaker 1: That's Frank comes sit here, Frank, sit on Frank now
Speaker 1: ran chair got his first official email. I saw that.
Speaker 1: What was the question? I think it was like, Frank,
Speaker 1: who's been sitting on you lately? And who would you
Speaker 1: like to sit on you in the future, or something
Speaker 1: like that. Who do you think? I think probably the
Speaker 1: first person to sit on Frank, as far as we're concerned,
Speaker 1: will be Joe Randazzo maybe right, Uh, some of the
Speaker 1: other casters might sit there. No, there are other podcasters.
Speaker 1: Let's do this thing, Okay, Chuck, I have something of
Speaker 1: a lead in you ready, Yes, have you ever heard
Speaker 1: of My Way killings. Uh no, no, So there's a
Speaker 1: subcategory of crime of violent crime in the Philippines called
Speaker 1: My Way killings. That's what the media calls it. Frank Sinatra,
Speaker 1: Really yeah, It's a huge karaoke society. Asia in general,
Speaker 1: rum is pretty into karaoke. The Philippines are super into karaoke,
Speaker 1: but they also have something of a violent society. Is
Speaker 1: it people who botched that song get killed or people
Speaker 1: who are jeered at for singing that song kill in
Speaker 1: return a lot? Um. It's not just Philippines the Philippines,
Speaker 1: but at least a half a dozen people have been
Speaker 1: documented as having been murdered because of that song in
Speaker 1: the last ten years. Right, just in the Philippines. It's
Speaker 1: other other songs have been known to um kind of
Speaker 1: erupt violence, like uh, there was a guy who who
Speaker 1: lived in Thailand who killed eight of his neighbors in
Speaker 1: a rage after they sang John Denver's Country Roads Take
Speaker 1: Me Home, apparently not to his liking. So it's not
Speaker 1: just my Way, but with my Way in the Philippines,
Speaker 1: the this this has the highest frequency of murder or violence.
Speaker 1: It's attendant to it, right, I would sing it's a
Speaker 1: very good year. Maybe that would get me through well.
Speaker 1: As a result, a lot of people do avoid my Way.
Speaker 1: But isn't that weird? Okay? So most of the reported
Speaker 1: my Way killings have been due to tone deafness, right,
Speaker 1: actual tone deafness, or they just say people who can't sing. Uh,
Speaker 1: it could go either way, and this is weird in
Speaker 1: and of itself. No, I don't know that anybody's done
Speaker 1: that much investigation, but that is my intro. Chuck, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about tone deafness, which is also called amusia. And
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you, the people in the Philippines don't
Speaker 1: find tone deafness amusing. Thank you, Chris Palette. Uh, if
Speaker 1: you're talking actual tone deafness, then you're only talking about
Speaker 1: one and twenty people are actually a music so it's
Speaker 1: not very many, not five percent five and uh it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with deafness. That has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with how your ears work. But this is something
Speaker 1: I didn't realize. If you're tone deaf, I just thought
Speaker 1: that means you can't like sing in a tune in tone,
Speaker 1: but apparently you can't hear it either, right, So that
Speaker 1: was surprising to me as well. People who are tone
Speaker 1: deaf are actually faithfully reproducing or recreating what they're hearing,
Speaker 1: which makes me really sad because that means music sounds
Speaker 1: awful of these poor people. Yeah, and apparently one person
Speaker 1: described it as um the sound of pots and pans clanging.
Speaker 1: That's awful, just not cut as anybody who has a
Speaker 1: two year old nose, a two year old and unsecured cabinets. Uh, pitch,
Speaker 1: that was what we're talking about, right, that's what they
Speaker 1: mean when they're talking about tone. Well, that's what underlies it, right.
Speaker 1: So so pitch is the frequency of sound, right, You
Speaker 1: have high or low, and that higher low means high
Speaker 1: frequency or low frequency. So a high note it's actually
Speaker 1: just a high frequency note. Low note is a low
Speaker 1: frequency note. Um. And as Tom Sheaf bff, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: need to reprimand him because he said that piano was plucked.
Speaker 1: It's some to the hammer struck. Harpsichords are plucked, so
Speaker 1: are harps. So you need to tell Tom and you
Speaker 1: got this kind of wrong. Give him a break. He
Speaker 1: said that a violin has a violin note has a
Speaker 1: four frequency of four hundred forty wavelengths vibrations per second.
Speaker 1: That wavelength. He also said pianos are plucked. But why
Speaker 1: he said that um erroneously? Was He was just pointing
Speaker 1: out that the length of the string of a stringed
Speaker 1: instrument will determine how high or low the pitches, and
Speaker 1: pitch is what we talked about when we talked about
Speaker 1: tone deafness, and then perfect pitch is on the other
Speaker 1: end of that scale, and only about one in ten
Speaker 1: thousand people have perfect pitch. Yeah, Chuck, I have a
Speaker 1: question for you. What Dud, Jimmy, Hendrix, um Ingway, Malmstein,
Speaker 1: being Crosby, and Yannie have in common? You mustaches? It's
Speaker 1: no no being cross He didn't have a mustache. Nobody
Speaker 1: smoked a pipe. Uh see Ingvy and Jimmy played stratocasters.
Speaker 1: I don't think being crossby too much thought to this.
Speaker 1: They were from Seattle. No perfect pitch. They all had
Speaker 1: perfect pitch, which is all called also called absolute pitch. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Perfect pitches when you can pick out a note and
Speaker 1: name that note by itself solo without any other relative
Speaker 1: notes around it, and you can duplicate that. So if
Speaker 1: I said, Josh singing a flat, you would be able
Speaker 1: to sing an a flat perfectly. That's way too high.
Speaker 1: And uh so that's perfect pitch. But relative pitch is
Speaker 1: what many more people have. Means you can pick out
Speaker 1: a note relative to other notes, right, So somebody can
Speaker 1: play something and then they'll play something else, and you can.
Speaker 1: You might not be able to, uh say well that's
Speaker 1: an A and that's an E flat or something, but
Speaker 1: you can say, well that's high and that's low. Right
Speaker 1: exact amundo? Um, did you take that tone deafness test?
Speaker 1: I did. I took another one. I didn't click the
Speaker 1: link that you sent me. What what percentage did you score? Well,
Speaker 1: let's pass this out. This is uh if you want
Speaker 1: to test your own tone quality um www dot d
Speaker 1: E l O s I S dot com dilosis slash
Speaker 1: listening slash home dot html and you can take it's
Speaker 1: a sixty question. It takes like fifteen to twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: I did one in six minutes. Yeah, it's not as thorough.
Speaker 1: And there's two parts to this one, and there's thirty,
Speaker 1: uh thirty pieces to each part. So you basically listened
Speaker 1: to a sound or a series of notes, and then
Speaker 1: it's followed directly by either the exact same thing or
Speaker 1: something slightly different, and you click same or different. At
Speaker 1: the end, you get your results, and I got I
Speaker 1: got a twenty seven out of thirty on both sides. Wow,
Speaker 1: so that's pretty good. I got a seventy seven eight percent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's twenty seven thirty percentage wise? Um, Jerry, like she's
Speaker 1: sitting around with the advocate kee pulling out your calculating
Speaker 1: I am, but keep talking all right. While you're doing that,
Speaker 1: I'll tell everybody the site that I took it on.
Speaker 1: It was h T T P Colin slash slash Jake
Speaker 1: Mandel dot com. That's j A K E M A
Speaker 1: N D E l l dot com slash tone deaf.
Speaker 1: One word that's really good. Actually mine was average. And
Speaker 1: that actually makes sense with me because you know, I
Speaker 1: sing in my band and I'm I'm an okay singer,
Speaker 1: but I'm clearly not like a great singer. Else wouldn't
Speaker 1: be doing this job and singing in a band in
Speaker 1: my basement. I'd be singing in a band for real,
Speaker 1: So that makes sense. Ten percent of the time, I
Speaker 1: probably sound like crap. See now that's not necessarily true, Chuck,
Speaker 1: because you should know by now. It's all about who
Speaker 1: you know, right, Yeah, but I would you could be
Speaker 1: squandering your challenge right now just because you don't know
Speaker 1: the right record producer. Yeah, but if you're like, if
Speaker 1: you've got the goods, like I always used Chris Cornell
Speaker 1: as an example, Like the first time that dude sang
Speaker 1: in the shower when he was sixteen, he was probably like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess this is what I'm supposed to do with
Speaker 1: my life. When he shattered the windows of his shower
Speaker 1: door and then he um solemnly washed the soap out
Speaker 1: from under his arms, out of the shower a person
Speaker 1: and said I'm gonna form sound Garden and that was that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he should have never stopped. I think they're getting back together.
Speaker 1: Actually they should be awesome. Um. All right, So chuck
Speaker 1: pitch actually is not um constant. Did you know that.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that until this article about the elevation
Speaker 1: That really surprised me. Yeah. Uh. Basically, when you pluck
Speaker 1: a piano string um strike, the vibration that it creates
Speaker 1: at sea level is different from the vibration that's going
Speaker 1: to create a higher altitudes. I would imagine because of
Speaker 1: the atmospheric pressure. Right to fix everything, well, it does
Speaker 1: baking pianos, everything athleticism, your ability to live by breathing
Speaker 1: and absorbing oxygen um. So when that when that vibration
Speaker 1: is created, it transfers to the air and it goes
Speaker 1: won War War one and hits our ears, and then
Speaker 1: inside our ears it goes War war and it goes
Speaker 1: to our brain, and we process the sound of the
Speaker 1: tone def people here, you or I, because we have
Speaker 1: relative pitch and we're not tone deaf um and just
Speaker 1: about anybody else who's not tone deaf could say, uh,
Speaker 1: if if a frequency is off by a few vibrations
Speaker 1: per second, even that slight bit, we would be like,
Speaker 1: that doesn't sound quite right. Actually, if it were relative
Speaker 1: to a note, like you played one note correctly and
Speaker 1: then another note the same note with a couple of
Speaker 1: vibrations off per second, you would definitely be able to
Speaker 1: hear the difference tone off. People apparently can't do this right.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like color blindness. It happens in degrees.
Speaker 1: So some people can who are color blind can tell
Speaker 1: red from yellow. They can't really tell black from dark blue.
Speaker 1: I think that that is another aspect of tone deafness
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, I'd be interested to take the one
Speaker 1: I took again because the ones that I missed there
Speaker 1: were somewhere I was like, oh man, it's it's They
Speaker 1: literally would have like twelve notes and one might be
Speaker 1: the like half a step down from the other, and
Speaker 1: those were really tricky, and I think those are probably
Speaker 1: the ones I missed because some sounded really off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some were obviously off too. So, Chuck, we know some
Speaker 1: stuff about tone deafness. What's the explanation, Well, josh, uh,
Speaker 1: there are a few potential explanations. We seem to think
Speaker 1: that it is hereditary. It does seem to have a
Speaker 1: genetic basis. Study show that it is hereditary, and twins
Speaker 1: identical twins have scored similarly on pitch tests, which also
Speaker 1: means it's probably hereditary and it likely has something to
Speaker 1: do with the brain and specifically the arcuate. Fasciculous, nice
Speaker 1: first try. That is pretty good, Chuck. They study that
Speaker 1: and that's that's one of the nerve bundles that sends information,
Speaker 1: like so many nerve bundles, and they found that they
Speaker 1: think that one of the roles is to send is
Speaker 1: to send signals concerning the perception of sound. And they
Speaker 1: studied tone deaf people and found that the fibers were
Speaker 1: in fact smaller, and people that were tone deaf than
Speaker 1: non tone deaf, then some of them didn't have them
Speaker 1: at all. There is another right, and and that is
Speaker 1: the amount that was there's relative to the degree of
Speaker 1: tone deafness. Right. So there was also a two thousand
Speaker 1: seven study um or the publish study published in a
Speaker 1: two thousand issue of two thousand seven issue of Harvard
Speaker 1: Health Letter, which I get mailed to my house. I
Speaker 1: thought you wrote it um in my sleep. Uh that
Speaker 1: that the studies showed that people who are tone deaf
Speaker 1: have less white matter connecting and remember the white matters,
Speaker 1: the stuff that connects the gray matter, it's the nerve fibers. Um.
Speaker 1: They have less white matter conducting the right frontal lobe,
Speaker 1: which is in part responsible for higher thinking, to the
Speaker 1: right temporal lobe where basic sound processing first takes place.
Speaker 1: And they found that the less what the people who
Speaker 1: are tone deaf have less white matter. And among tone
Speaker 1: deaf people, the less white matter you had connecting these
Speaker 1: two regions, the more tone deaf you were. Just like
Speaker 1: the oh, the sorry are quit physics list? I think
Speaker 1: I pronounced it different earlier. So we'll just say merging
Speaker 1: of those two is the correct way, right, So we
Speaker 1: we would say that, yes, it appears to have a
Speaker 1: genetic basis. There's actually if you're in the San Francisco
Speaker 1: area and you like being a medical guinea pig, you
Speaker 1: should go ahead and look up the study that the
Speaker 1: University of California, San Francisco UM is launching right now
Speaker 1: into tone deafness and its genetic basis. What you do,
Speaker 1: you know, I think you probably have to be a
Speaker 1: little tone deaf and then you could be part of
Speaker 1: the control group, right yeah, and be a great singer.
Speaker 1: They do say that you cannot improve upon this. Um.
Speaker 1: You can take music lessons, you can take singing lessons,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna help you. If your tone deaf, you're
Speaker 1: born with it. And if you do find out your
Speaker 1: tone deaf, stay out of the Philippines. Yes, and there
Speaker 1: was another and of course this is of perception to tone.
Speaker 1: That doesn't necessarily mean like you're a bad singer, although
Speaker 1: that that would make you a bad singer. But you
Speaker 1: can also be a bad singer if you're not tone deaf.
Speaker 1: And well this you probably fall into one of these categories.
Speaker 1: In a couple of neuroscientists did a study in from
Speaker 1: the University of New York at Buffalo and Simon Fraser University,
Speaker 1: and they said there's likely for explanations. Poor music perception
Speaker 1: is one, which would be tone deaf um. The other
Speaker 1: might be poor control of your vocal system, yeah, thick
Speaker 1: tongue perhaps, And another might be inability to imitate or
Speaker 1: mimic something. So you hear the sound and you hear
Speaker 1: it correctly and you know what it is, but you
Speaker 1: still can't make it right. And that was something that
Speaker 1: occurred to me while we were doing the research for
Speaker 1: this article, that there's there. It seems like there could
Speaker 1: be a basis for um flawed memory storagereating it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said. The fourth reason it's just bad memory. Between
Speaker 1: the time you hear it and when you sing it back,
Speaker 1: you actually forget what the notes were. Too much scotch
Speaker 1: and he likens it to like a baseball player. You
Speaker 1: can you can know how to hit a curveball, and
Speaker 1: you can be a professional baseball player know how to
Speaker 1: swing a bat, but that still to mean you're gonna
Speaker 1: hit the curveball nice so you can hear the note.
Speaker 1: You might not be tone deaf, you might think you
Speaker 1: can mimic it, but when it comes out of your mouth,
Speaker 1: it's not quite Frank Black. After all. I saw Frank
Speaker 1: Black just this very week. It was it good? I
Speaker 1: had my friends said it was they phoned it in. No,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I disagree. Really, I could have definitely handled
Speaker 1: a lot more um songs from Um Trump Plamon. They
Speaker 1: played pretty much all of Doolittle. Yeah that was the tour,
Speaker 1: right play and Doolittle. I didn't know that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that was there actually, but yeah, it was cool.
Speaker 1: I liked it. These guys are old back in the day,
Speaker 1: so they might be jaded old people. They played like
Speaker 1: Winter Long and um not. I mean as far as
Speaker 1: just phoning it in are old. You know my friends
Speaker 1: who said they phoned it in, our dudes who saw
Speaker 1: them back in the eighties and nights, they might have
Speaker 1: been all they phoned it and they're just being I
Speaker 1: thought it was cool. Cool stage show too. They were
Speaker 1: all dressed like stage hands. Yeah what's the stage chand
Speaker 1: dress like dark clothes really, and Joey's just bald as
Speaker 1: Frank Black is now. Yeah, man, he still plays that
Speaker 1: gold top. Donety the less Paul, I don't know I
Speaker 1: can't even say, Chuck, don't ask me if you want
Speaker 1: to know more about tone deafness and find out the
Speaker 1: uh what the one article that Tom Sheep got something
Speaker 1: wrong in looks like type tone deaf into the search
Speaker 1: bar how stuff works dot com. Oh, while we're at it,
Speaker 1: before we move on to listra mill, have you heard
Speaker 1: of Paul Data? I think it's d A T E
Speaker 1: H and DJ inco one. No, dude, it's this kid.
Speaker 1: He's like fifteen, looking perfect. He has absolute pitch, has
Speaker 1: violent and he's just playing along with a guy who
Speaker 1: looks like his cousin who's a DJ. They're playing like
Speaker 1: tribe called Quest and far Side and he's playing it
Speaker 1: on the violins um along with his DJ cousin, who's
Speaker 1: you know DJing Really cool. I'll have to put that
Speaker 1: on the Facebook page when we release it. Do you
Speaker 1: have to wait that long as you could do? Now?
Speaker 1: We could do that all right? Well, how about listener mail, Chuck?
Speaker 1: We are not doing listener mail because we have some
Speaker 1: important events coming up that we'd like to share, and
Speaker 1: we would also like to build up our Facebook presence. Yes,
Speaker 1: we really were, because we've noticed that there are people
Speaker 1: that participate on our Facebook page without liking it, which
Speaker 1: I understand you might not want it in your news feed,
Speaker 1: but it helps us out when you like it. Why
Speaker 1: would you not want that in your news fere you
Speaker 1: embarrassed that you listen to us? Who knows, some people
Speaker 1: just don't like. Like I liked a lot of things
Speaker 1: initially before all this stuff started happening, and now I
Speaker 1: get everything in my news feed, and so I've had
Speaker 1: to unlike some of it because I don't. I love Calexico,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to see what Calexico has to
Speaker 1: say every day. I thought you were saying, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what Twitter's for. I thought you were saying like
Speaker 1: people wouldn't want other people to see that they were
Speaker 1: fans of stuff. You should know, Well that may don't
Speaker 1: want our yes coming up in there, and perhaps, but
Speaker 1: we're post that now. We don't post that much, and
Speaker 1: when we do post, it's pretty worthwhile. So we would
Speaker 1: ask you to hit the like button because that makes
Speaker 1: us look good. Our boss when when he sees a
Speaker 1: certain amount of fans, he doesn't like write us a
Speaker 1: check or anything, but yet it's a good thing for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we'd appreciate if you liked our our Facebook page. Um,
Speaker 1: let's see, so that's a Facebook, Twitter, s y s
Speaker 1: K podcast. We occasionally say something worth chuckling at, Yes,
Speaker 1: very often. And then let's do the Atlanta event. A. Yes,
Speaker 1: we got a couple of things in mid October coming up.
Speaker 1: The first one is a non sanction event, but you
Speaker 1: can rub elbows with us if you want to come
Speaker 1: to the Drunken Unicorn on East pot sti Leon October twelfth, Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Our buddies, the Henry Clay people of l a or
Speaker 1: playing a rock and roll show, headlining gig concert concert
Speaker 1: and you can come and it'll be a good time.
Speaker 1: It's a very small venue, so like a big party. Jerry,
Speaker 1: are you coming? She said, yes, ma'am. Serr's going to
Speaker 1: be dressed as Thomas pinch On. Wow, you really like
Speaker 1: that one. That's good? Thank you? Uh? Anything else? Man?
Speaker 1: I feel like I should be like, good night, everybody know.
Speaker 1: The following night October is the sanctioned trivia event, the
Speaker 1: All Star Trivia the Five Seasons Brewery west Side evening
Speaker 1: hours probably around six just just block out six to eleven. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And on our celebrity team, we have Joe Randazzo, editor
Speaker 1: of The Onion. Dave Willis the co creator of Aquitine
Speaker 1: Hunger Force and Squidbillies, who I've got to say, I'm
Speaker 1: really looking forward to meeting. Squid Billies is so twisted
Speaker 1: and awesome. Um. What I do sometimes the Squidbillies is
Speaker 1: just close my eyes and you just imagine it's just
Speaker 1: real rednecks. Then you open your eyes in their squids
Speaker 1: and it's even funnier. Uh. And then of course Mr
Speaker 1: John Hodgman. Yes, I'm gonna get him to sign my
Speaker 1: books that I've read of his, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: get him to stay overnight at my house. Good luck
Speaker 1: with that. Yeah, I'm gonna be like, sorry, the hotel
Speaker 1: we book burned down my seriously. Yeah, Um, that's it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So if you want to send us an email, what
Speaker 1: do we want to hear about chook? Oh? How about
Speaker 1: some karaoke stories? Oh that's a good one. If you've
Speaker 1: ever been beaten up in the Philippines or you have
Speaker 1: a good karaoke story, we want to hear it. Greatest
Speaker 1: karaoke songs of all time? How about that? Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: post that one on Facebook. Karaoke stories we want to
Speaker 1: hear via email and you can type that up spanking
Speaker 1: on the bottom. Send it to stuff podcast at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
Speaker 1: the house. Stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
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