Peak

Mozart's Ear Was Trained, Not Born

In 1763, a seven-year-old Mozart astonished Europe by naming any note he heard. A violin, a clock chime, even a sneeze — he could pin down the pitch. The Augsburg newspaper reported it, aristocrats whispered about a child touched by God, and for two and a half centuries that story has done what such stories always do, which is to settle a stubborn question with a tidy answer. Some people are simply born this way. The rest of us, the implication runs, should sit down.

Anders Ericsson spent thirty years quietly dismantling that answer. He was a Swedish psychologist who became the world's foremost authority on what he called expert performance, and his patient verdict, gathered from violinists and surgeons and chess masters and people who memorize digits for sport, is that the gift Mozart had was not a sense of pitch. The gift was something far more interesting, and we all have it.

Here is how we know. In 2014, a Japanese researcher named Ayako Sakakibara published the results of an experiment at the Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo. She took twenty-four children, ages two to six, and ran them through a structured program of chord identification — four or five short sessions a day, the difficulty creeping upward. Some children finished in under a year. Others took eighteen months. Every single one of them developed perfect pitch. Not most of them. All of them. The ability that occurs in roughly one person in ten thousand — and that Beethoven had but Brahms did not, that Sinatra had but Miles Davis did not — turned out to be a thing you could teach to ordinary kids if you caught the brain at the right age and trained it correctly.