Blindness no obstacle for a man who listens
Print Edition
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.
The 29-year-old realized he had perfect pitch when he was a boy. Tossing stones in a river, he was able to tell his father the note each one made when it hit the water.
Perfect 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 Mozart was among them.
Culasso said his father later read to him about birds from a book that came with an audio cassette of their calls.
“That’s when I realized that I could memorize birds by their sounds.”
He discovered his calling as a teenager, when he joined an ornithologist on a 2003 field visit. The bird expert gave him a recorder, and he was hooked.
“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.
Culasso’s passion now is to record and learn from the sounds of nature. He recently completed a two-month journey to Antarctica, where he recorded sounds from the Earth’s coldest continent.
“I keep adding sounds to my list,” he said. “In Antarctica, I recorded sea lions, seals and a melting iceberg.”
Although Culasso can distinguish light, allowing him to differentiate night from day, he cannot register shapes. His ears have always been his way of connecting with the world.
His ability to recognize and record nature’s sounds has landed him jobs working for documentary soundtracks. Culasso now lives in his native Montevideo after more than a decade in Brazil, where he studied bioacoustics and nature sounds.
Carrying a professional recorder, Culasso recently visited the shores of the Santa Lucia river on Montevideo’s outskirts. As he walked and listened, he called out the names of birds before anyone else saw them.
Culasso has always pushed boundaries. As a young boy, he rode his bicycle with friends, following the sounds of the other children. He didn’t mind falling occasionally then and he doesn’t mind risking it now as he recently rode a horse at an equestrian center.
“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.
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