Can Speaking A Tonal Language Make You A Better Musician?

“If you heard a pair of melodies that differ by just one note, could you tell the difference? If you heard three musical notes, one of which was a tad sharper than the other two, could you pick out the odd one? These are precisely the sorts of tasks that trained classical musicians are very good at. And it turns out that speakers of Cantonese, a language with a built-in series of musical-like tones, are pretty darn good at it, too – better it seems than speakers of English.”