Mais la Provence est en province. 
@chillies - I suppose this is the sort of thing you are talking about? : http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh10/runfast800/captioning2.jpg
Odie, ROFL!!! Thank you for sharing that.
Vonk raises a good point. I was wondering if a person with perfect pitch or who can hear a melody once and then reproduce it, or can sight sing very well would have a hard time with tonal languages.
I think to write well in English is very difficult. I’ve taught English composition at two US universities and shall we just say that there is a great variety in ability among native speakers and there is a lot to learn. That is why I don’t want to attempt to write in French now although I was required to write in French for high school and university classes. I assume that all the subtleties of tone, diction, syntax, rhetorical devices, etc. that exist in English are there in French. Not to mention my fear of the dreaded literary tenses stemming from age 16.
In contrast I was comparatively uninhibited to write in Japanese. I focused on getting the right character, the right grammar and the right formality. Beyond that I did not concern myself with the subtleties of the Japanese language of which I was unaware. If no Japanese person instructed me in the subtleties of writing, there was no way for me to know as I was formally schooled in the Western literary canon.
I have never observed a relationship between musicality, perfect pitch or whatever, and language skills, including the ability to pronounce well. On the other hand I have noticed a correlation between an outgoing personality, a willingness to connect with people of different cultures and a willingness to invest a lot of time and effort, and language learning success.
I know of musical people who pronounce poorly, and relatively unmusical people who pronounce well. I have not noticed any correlation.
Content Edited.
@Steve–There must be a correlation between classically-trained vocalists and the ability to pronounce well. This is not a correlation with musical ability but with training. From my own experience, if I didn’t sing the correct sound whether in English, French, Italian, German or Latin, my teacher would stop and work on that one sound until it was correct, telling me how to move my mouth around if necessary. The pronunciation wouldn’t be exactly the same as when speaking, but it did force one to become acutely aware of what was going on inside one’s mouth.
When I was in France I briefly joined a student choir. The director told me to sing something and when I sang “tu” the lazy English “u” slipped out and he went ballistic and started yelling (but in a joking not a violent way). After that time I really made an effort to say everything in French correctly, and I think my accent became pretty good thanks to him.
@Imy–I’m jealous.
I have had musical ear training and can categorically state that, when I hear Serge in one of his French LingQ podcasts, he starts every conversation on B-flat. Now, Marianne, I would say D, since it sounds like a major third above (to my refined musical ear). But none of this has made any impact on my language skills. In fact, noticing the intervals has made it more difficult to understand what they are actually saying.
So, stay away from perfect/relative pitch and your language skills will improve dramatically.
I, too, am jealous Imy.
“In results to be presented at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego on November 17, the scientists found that the Mandarin speakers were much more likely to have absolute pitch than were English speakers who had started musical training at the same age. For example, 60 percent of Beijing students who had begun studying music between the ages of four and five years old passed a test for absolute pitch, whereas only 14 percent of the American students did.”
“They tested 203 music students for perfect pitch asking them to identify all 36 notes from three octaves played in haphazard order.
Those tested included 27 ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese students who had different levels of fluency in the tonal language learned from their parents.
The Asian students scored no better than white students if they weren’t fluent in their parents’ language but very fluent students scored highly, getting about 90 per cent of the notes correct on average.”