One to watch tonight?.The musical genius..

[Boomy]

Channel Five 9PM.

http://www.five.tv/programmes/extraordinarypeople/musicalgenius/

They just had this guy who was brain damaged and blind from birth on the TV and what he can do on a piano is just incredible.

Think of those autistic people who can remember amazing facts and figures, draw in perfect detail images/landmarks etc they have seen or work out mathematical calculations with perfect accuracy and you are on the right lines.They say he can hear anything once and play it perfectly in almost any style you want.

I'm not what you would call a lover of piano music by any means, but i couldn't help but be impressed.

Jules Holland also stars.

"a group of sceptical music scholars test his musical brain by playing him a Basque lullaby which he has never heard before. Of course, Derek amazes his audience by instantly playing the whole song perfectly; Derek remembers every single piece of music he’s ever heard".

"Derek has the rare gift of universal perfect pitch, but the experts want to know exactly how many notes his brain can process. He is presented with a sequence of chords he has never heard before, played by an orchestra of 50 instruments; he still manages to repeat the sound by arpeggiating the chords."

Genius or just a copy cat?.Either way what he just did on the TV was superb.He even lobbed in the Britney Spears tune 'hit me baby one more time' - a song that i assumed would sound rather crap just played on a piano - and made it sound amazing.

[pistonbroke]

Thanks for the heads up Boomy ,  will watch out for that  

[melt]

Just watched this, incredible what the guy was capable of!  Very interesting bit of telly (for a change).

Mel

[studbuckle]

I agree.

I'm glad that they were able to show he was capable of emotion through his music and not purely his note analytics.

[pistonbroke]

Watched some of it last night , my intension was to record this while I watched the nurembourg trials ont t'other side , channel switching  during the dull spots (as yer do) , but found myself captivated and watching most of it  

What an incredible gift,  wish I had just 10% of it  

[Boomy]

My mates Mum used to look after an autistic kid when i was growing up, when i met him it was the first time i had seen first hand just what such people can be capable of.

He was sitting in front of their TV glued to it and he looked round now and again to chat to us.

At that point, due to his totaly normal behaviour i only knew he was autistic because i was told he was.

I would have assumed he was totaly normal otherwise and was just engrossed in what was on.

It was only after a short while he started showing various symptoms due to the way he spoke or rocked back and forwards etc.

I felt sorry for the young lad, but he seemed quite happy though.

It was only a short while later after me asking my friends Mum questions about autism that she told me what an incredible memory he had.

She said i could ask him anything i wanted to about about TV programs and he would know the answer.

He could remember every single name and what they did of the people that appear in the credits at the end of each and every show he watched for example.

His other speciality was horse racing.

She said you can ask him anything you like about a rider, horse or racing event and he would give you names, locations, times, dates, results etc etc and if you bothered to check they would all be correct.

This wasn't just based on what he had seen that day either, it went back as far as the first time he watched TV.

Randomly she asked him something like "who was the sound engineer in neighbours last Friday?" and he replied without thinking.

Much the same with the horses.When asked something along the lines of "who won the 3.30 at chepstow on the 5th July 1989?", assuming a race had been run, he would tell you the jockey, horse name and trainer etc if you wanted to know.

She said if you were to go and check that out, he will be 100% correct because they had tested him many times before once it dawned on them just what he was capable of.

Truly amazing.