Maybe you would enjoy this radiolab podcast if you haven’t heard it before.

We’ll kick off the chase with Diana Deutsch, a professor specializing in the psychology of music, who could extract song out even the most monotonous of drones. (Think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller. Bueller … Bueller …)

For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news—the problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out, speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute—aka ‘perfect’—pitch. And, nope, English isn’t one of them.