Juan Pablo Culasso was born blind and could never have set his eyes on a bird. How then can he identify more than 3,000 different bird sounds, apart from differentiating over 720 species?
At one point, when he was a boy, he understood that he had "perfect, or absolute pitch." When he threw stones in a river, he could identify the note that every stone made when it impacted the pond.
Hence, he had the gift of "absolute pitch." This is a rare, unique skill of being able to hear a tone and understand immediately that it is a particular pitch, like a C-sharp. The ability is so rare that just one out of every 10,000 people is gifted with it, said Culasso.
And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart shares this ability with him!
Later, Culasso's father read to him the names of birds from an encyclopedia that was accompanied with audio cassettes of their calls.
"That's when I realized that I could memorize birds by their sounds," Culasso said.
When he was a teenager, he joined an ornithologist on a 2003 field visit. He was drawn by his love for birds. Getting a recorded collection made him addicted to the profession.
"At that moment, I felt as if I had been doing this forever without knowing it. I fell in love with that task," he said.
Hence, Culasso wants to record and learn from nature's sounds. Recently, he finished a two-month journey to Antarctica and recorded sounds from there.
"I keep adding sounds to my list," he said. "In Antarctica, I recorded sea lions, seals and a melting iceberg."
Unfortunately, though he can differentiate between night and day, as he can make out light, he is not able to register shapes, forms, or even the colors of birds. He has managed to connect with the world mainly through his ears.
"Most blind people move within the confines of the blind world, and never leave that comfort zone, but I was never that way," he said.
Hence, he has been able to work in jobs that call for documentary soundtracks. He currently lives in his native Montevideo after spending a decade in Brazil studying bioacoustics and nature sounds.
In 2014, he won a top prize of $45,000 on a Nat Geo TV program. In the final test, he could identify the sounds of 15 birds from a group of 250.
Alicia Munyo, who heads the phonology department at Uruguay's Republica University, explains that "perfect pitch" has more to do with the brain than the ear.
"It's not that these people hear more, they hear the same as anyone else," said Munyo. "It's that their brain has a great capacity to interpret sounds and their nuances, much more than normal people do."
YouTube/BBC News
