Next time the baby starts wailing, you'll want to pay close attention — the kid could be hitting notes Pavarotti couldn't find. Babies, according to a study by UW-Madison psychologist Jenny Saffran, may have a better grasp of pitch than grownups do.

Saffran, who specializes in linguistic development, had always wanted to study babies. The process by which they pick up language skills is something of a mystery, "and besides," she says, "babies are just really cute." Knowing that sound recognition is vital to learning to speak, she wondered if preverbal babies have a particular ability to discern tones.

To find out, Saffran tested fifty eight-month-old babies and one hundred adults by playing a series of three-note sequences to each individual. While the adults did well at recognizing changes in relative pitch — the difference between various tones — they did poorly at recognizing and remembering absolute pitch — a tone's quality in its own right. The babies, on the other hand, did well at recognizing each note's absolute pitch.

Saffran suspects that people begin life with the ability to clearly remember the various sounds they hear, but that as they learn to classify sounds into language and non-language, they stop paying attention to absolute pitch.

"I think what may be going on here," she says, "is that absolute pitch goes underground and is subsumed by relative pitch, which is more useful. Absolute pitch makes it hard to generalize and learn."

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