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Notes on Absolute Pitch
02/01/1995Absolute pitch is the ability to identify a tone's pitch or produce a tone at a particular pitch without the use of an external reference tone. This recognition or reproduction of a tone may be as spontaneous, immediate and certain as the identification of a color, but while 98% of a population possess good absolute color recognition, only less than 1% possesses absolute pitch (AP). AP possessors vary in the accuracy with which they can identify pitches and produce pitches absolutely, but they are different from pseudo-AP, and Quasi-AP, as Bachem (1965) defined.
Pseudo-absolute pitch A normal person, with some training and practice, can indicate roughly the height of a note, but without any accurate pitch estimation. This is not AP.
About half of the people can sing popular songs within two semitones of the correct pitch. Levitin (1994) argued that it shows latent absolute pitch ability.
Quasi-absolute pitch Singers or other musicians can recognize a tone by singing or humming and comparing to their own—vocal or aural—standard. Revesz (1953) called it standard pitch.
Genuine absolute pitch The characteristics are: (1) the judgment is fast and certain; (2) the accuracy is very high; (3) the range is usually extended over the whole musical scale; (4) the errors are strongly octave, but not in the chroma of the note, i.e., AP possessors can identify the letter name of a note better than state the octave number.
Chroma of a note is the quality of the note, i.e., the letter name of a note. Chroma and tone height are two separate components of pitch. Some properties of chroma include: (1) near the threshold of hearing, chroma differences are much more noticeable than note-height; (2) in the very high and low ranges of tones, only tone height is still recognized, but not the chroma; (3) many noises have no chroma, but they posses tone height.
Electronic stimuli consisting of 60 different tones per octave were given to people (Miyazaki, 1988). AP possessors could categorize the tones by the chroma, though they didn’t respond to all tones uniformly; more accurate and quicker answers were given to some musically important tones (C, E, G, etc.)
It is usual for AP ability to show dependence on particular musical timbres, e.g., the piano. An experiment reported by Lockhead and Byrd (1981) found that AP possessors can identify piano pitch much more accurately than pure sine tone (90% vs. 58% in accuracy). Balzano (1984) conducted similar experiments and found that the difference was not that large. He showed that most errors were to call notes in the low octave one semitone too sharp and suggested it was due to the known fact that increasing the intensity of a low-frequency tone leads to a lowering of the perceived pitch (Stevens, 1935; Morgan et al., 1951; Cohen, 1961).
The estimate of a note by an AP possessor fluctuates during the day and with biological clock (Wynn, 1971). Illness, medication and age also have adverse effect on AP acuity.
There is evidence suggesting the existence of an hereditary factor to the faculty of AP. The faculty of developing AP can be inherited, but AP must be acquired by experience. Usually children have to be musically trained before the age of 6, and after that a general developmental shift from perceiving individual features to perceiving relations among features makes AP difficult or impossible to acquire.
No known adult has acquired AP by learning. People who were given systematic training that stressed the identification of a single reference standard showed improved recognition of the pitch, among whom those with musical training had better result than others (Cuddy, 1967). But this does not prove that AP can be trained. A larger percentage of blind persons have AP, but a careful study shows sometimes they just have very good relative pitch memories.
AP possessors may have difficulty when dealing with transposed music, because the tonal context is fixed and not transposable for them.
Reference:
- Bachem, A. (1955) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 27, 1180. Absolute pitch.
- Balzano, G.J. (1985) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 75, 623. Absolute pitch and pure tone identification.
- Cohen, A. (1961) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 33, 1363. Further investigation of the effects of intensity upon the pitch of pure tones.
- Cuddy, L.L. (1967) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 43, 1069. Practice effects in the absolute judgment of pitch.
- Levitin, D.J. (1994) Perception & Psychophysics 56, 414. Absolute memory for musical pitch—evidence from the production of learned melodies.
- Lockhead, G.R., and R. Byrd (1981) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 70, 387. Practically perfect pitch.
- Miyazaki, K. (1988) Psychonomic Society 44, 501. Musical pitch identification by absolute pitch possessors.
- Morgan, C.T., W.R. Garner, and R. Galambos (1951) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 23, 658. Pitch and intensity.
- Revesz G. (1953) Introduction to the psychology of music. pp. 99-111.
- Stevens, S.S. (1935) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 6, 150. The relation of pitch to intensity.
- Takeuchi, A. H. (1993) Psychological Bulletin 113, 345. Absolute pitch.
- Wynn, V.T. (1971) Nature 230, 337. Absolute pitch—a bimensual rhythm.