By LEONARDO HABERKORN,
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Jun 10,
2016, 9:33 AM ET
The Associated Press
Born blind, Juan Pablo Culasso
has never seen a bird. But through his gifted sense of hearing, he can identify
more than 3,000 different bird sounds and differentiate more than 720 species.
The 29-year-old said he realized
he had perfect, or absolute pitch, when he was a boy. Tossing stones in a
river, he was able to tell his father exactly the note each one made when it
hit the water.
Absolute pitch, the rare ability
to hear a tone and immediately know it's a C-sharp, for example, is so unusual
that only one of every 10,000 people has it, Culasso said, adding that Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart was among them.
Culasso said his dad later read
to him about birds from an encyclopedia that came with an audio cassette of
their calls.
"That's when I realized that
I could memorize birds by their sounds," he said.
He said he discovered his calling
as a teenager, when he joined an ornithologist on a 2003 field visit, inspired
by his love of birds. The bird expert gave him a recorder, and he was hooked.
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