Dr. Poppy Crum

And I think we alluded to the fact I have absolute pitch.

And absolute pitch is for anyone that doesn't know.

It's not anything that means I always sing in tune.

What it means is I hear the world like I hear sound like people see color.

And I can't turn it off really.

I can kind of push it back.

Okay, so when you walk down the street, your brain is going, oh, that's red, that's black, that's blue, that's green.

My brain's going, that's an A, that's a B, that's a G, that's an F, right?

There's a categorical perception about it.

And because of the nature of, I think, my...

exposure to sound in my life, I also know what frequency it is, right?

So I can say that's 350 hertz or that's 400 hertz or that's 442 hertz.

And it has different applications.

I mean, I can transcribe a jazz solo when I listen to it.

That's a great party trick.

But it doesn't mean that it's not necessarily a good thing for a musician, right?

You know, as well as I do, that categorical perception is—we all have different forms of it, usually for speech and language, like units of vowels or phonetic units.

Well, especially vowels, you can hear many different versions of a—

an E and still hear it as an E. And that's what we would call categorical perception.

And my brain does the same thing for a sort of set of frequencies to hear it as an A. And that can be good at times, but when you're actually a musician...