first scientific evidence of the Stevie Wonder effect?

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?
type=scienceNews&storyID=5670446

or

http://tinyurl.com/6dpmu

-C.

Hi Carl,

They played the example clips on the radio here.
I was expecting to be able to guess them easily
with all the listening to pitch distinctions
I do debugging FTS. But it wasn't a matter of subtle
distinctions of pitch. Rather it was the
speed, a wide interval, but played
very fast indeed, like a fiftieth
of a second or something at the
fastest one - that's just a guess.
Fast as some of the intervals you
get in birdsong.

Anyway whatever it was, I couldn't
do it either, it was just a matter
of guessing.

Anyway those blind from earlier than
age two were able to hear the sequence
of pitches in even the very fastest
one and got that right as easily as
sighted people do with the slowest
example.

Quite striking. I wonder if one
can train to hear it.
The way it was presented one
got the impression that in
this very particular case, one can
only do so to a very limited
extent later on. But I
don't know if they tested
any practicing microtonalist
musicians.

Or maybe a professional
percussionist would have
a better chance of disentangling
them actually as it is
really not so much a pitch
distinction as a time distinction
that is relevant. You hear the
two distinct pitches easily
but don't know which of them
came first in time.

I wonder if the children
blind from age 2 are also
better at distinguishing
ultra fast percussion patterns
from each other?

Robert