Juan Pablo Culasso has never seen a bird. But he can identify more than 720 species and 3,000 bird calls.
Juan was born blind. He was also given a particular gift. Many blind people experience sharpened senses, such as above-average hearing or touch. But the Montevideo, Uruguay, native has more than just good hearing. He also has perfect pitch.
Perfect, or absolute, pitch is a rare trait. Only one out of 10,000 people has it. As a boy, tossing stones into a river, Juan could tell his father exactly each musical note that the stones made upon hitting the water. He hears a tone and immediately knows that it’s a C-sharp, for example.
Culasso’s dad read to his son about birds from an encyclopedia. It came with an audiocassette of various bird calls. “That’s when I realized that I could memorize birds by their sounds,” he says. As a teen, the now-29-year-old joined an ornithologist on a field visit. The bird expert gave Juan a recorder, and Juan found his calling. “I fell in love with that task,” he says.
Culasso studied bioacoustics and nature sounds for a decade in Brazil. He has worked on documentary soundtracks, and he won a $45,000 prize from a National Geographic television show. Asked to identify the sounds of 15 birds picked at random from a group of 250, Juan recognized every one.
With the prize money, he invested in audio equipment. He records and learns from the sounds of nature. On a two-month trip to Antarctica, he recorded the Earth’s coldest and most mysterious continent. He added sea lions, seals, and the sound of a melting iceberg to his collection of audible imprints.
Perfect pitch is more about the brain than the ears. Alicia Munyo leads the phonology department at Uruguay’s Republica University. She says of people possessing perfect pitch, “They hear the same as anyone else,” but their brains have a greater “capacity to interpret sounds and their nuances, much more than normal people do.”
That ability has served Culasso well as he attempts activities other blind people might not. As a young boy, he rode a bicycle with friends, following the sounds the others made. He didn’t mind falling occasionally. The experience was worth the risk, he says. "Most blind people move within the confines of the blind world, and never leave that comfort zone, but I was never that way.”
