What’s the difference between Mozart and Pavarotti? Well, one was a child prodigy and composer who systematically learned the rules of music at an early age — the other, a pitch-perfect expert at mimicry.
Singers have a knack for foreign languages, most notably when it comes to pronunciation and accent because, like parrots, they mimic what they hear. It’s something that Pavarotti, who couldn’t read sheet music, did with his operatic singing.
“The singer is the best with the accent,” says Susanne Reiterer, a neurolinguistics researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria. “A foreign accent is a piece of cake for them.”
Studies reveal that Heschl’s gyrus, a type of ridge on the brain’s surface that contains the primary auditory cortex, plays a significant role in musical aptitude and language aptitude, especially when there are a higher number of gyri. So some researchers believe that, based on the structure of the brain, some are simply born to be musicians. “Talking uses the same biological makeup as singing, so it must be related biologically and neurobiologically,” Reiterer says. “It’s almost like two sides of one coin.”
