Link Between Tonal Languages and Perfect Pitch

Remember these hideous ads? haha

There was a story in Sunday's New York Times (that actually turned out to be a 9 year old story... slow news day, NYT?) that said scientists had discovered a correlation between languages that had a tonal component such as many Chinese dialects, and the elusive musical ability known as perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is the ability to accurately sing a specific note on cue without any reference, or to identify notes in music you are listening to, just as you would identify the colors in a painting. The scientists found that nearly 90% of people fluent in one of these tonal languages also had perfect pitch. So you never had to buy a perfect pitch training system and get a douchey 1990's haircut like the dude in the ad. Although he does look pretty psyched.