Tone Deaf

The ability to distinguish between sounds of varying pitch makes people capable of [producing:knowing] and understanding speech and music. And the way we are able to process pitch has been thought to be unique to our big-brained species. But now, there's evidence that a tiny monkey - the common marmoset from Brazil - can distinguish pitch the same way we do. That's according to a study in the [Proceedings:journal] of the National Academy of Sciences. Ten years ago, researchers identified a region of the marmoset brain that [appeared:showed] to process pitch. But they needed to confirm that the animals did indeed notice changes in pitch - which [presented:introduced] a challenge: they had to find a way to get the animal to indicate that it had heard something. So they trained the marmosets to respond to a change in pitch with a behavior - specifically, they would lick a waterspout.The [researchers:examiners] then had the animals listen to a series of notes with the same pitch.