Social Question
What percentage of people in the world are tone deaf ?
Are there any scientific studies? I think the percentage is quite small, but I could be wrong. Here’s a definition:
Tone deafness is the lack of relative pitch, or the inability to discriminate between musical notes. Being tone deaf is the difficulty or being unable to correctly hear relative differences between notes that is not due to the lack of musical training or education. Tone deafness is also known variously as amusia, tune deafness, dysmelodia and dysmusia.
The ability of relative pitch, as with other musical abilities, is inherent in healthy functional humans. The hearing impairment appears to be genetically influenced, though it can also result from brain damage. While someone who is unable to reproduce pitches because of a lack of musical training would not be considered tone deaf in a medical sense, the term might still be used to describe them casually. Someone who cannot reproduce pitches accurately, because of lack of training or tone deafness, is said to be unable to “carry a tune.” Tone deafness affects ability to hear pitch changes produced by a musical instrument.
However, tone deaf people seem to be only disabled when it comes to music, and they can fully interpret the prosody or intonation of human speech. Tone deafness has a strong negative correlation with belonging to societies with tonal languages. This could be evidence that the ability to reproduce and distinguish between notes may be a learned skill, but may conversely suggest that the genetic predisposition towards accurate pitch discrimination may influence the linguistic development of a population towards tonality. A correlation between allele frequencies and linguistic typological features has been recently discovered, supporting the latter hypothesis.
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