It’s toward the end of the year and I’ve been making sure that I have enough Category I units of continuing medical education to satisfy the California licensing requirement. Just to be sure, I took a couple of the New England Journal of Medicine’s on-line CME tests. This forces me to dig into the ever-growing stack of journals about which I keep telling myself I’m going to get around to. Anyhow, when completing the test on Peginterferon and Ribavirin for Chronic Hepatitis C (NEJM 2006;355:2444-51) I happened to glance over at the “notices” page and a reference to the University of California Genetics of Absolute Pitch Study.

Absolute pitch is the same as perfect pitch, and there us some good preliminary evidence that this trait runs in families an likely has at least a partial genetic basis. The Absolute Pitch Study’s Web site seeks to recruit subjects. The site includes an auditory test—you can hear the tones through your computer’s sound card.

Alas, I don’t have perfect pitch, but I do have one of those nifty little electronic tuners that clips onto the peghead of my guitar!

Technorati Tags: music, perfect pitch, genetics of music, university of California, San Francisco

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.