Absolute pitch is correlated with high performance on relative pitch tasks.

Abstract

Absolute pitch (AP)—the ability to name a musical note without a reference note—has been shown to be associated with an advantage in pitch identification tasks; however, its usefulness in contexts involving relative pitch has so far been unclear. To explore this issue, 36 trained musicians—18 AP possessors and 18 non-possessors with equivalent age of onset of musical training and duration of musical training—were tested on several different interval naming tasks requiring only relative pitch. AP possession was highly positively correlated with performance on these tasks; r=0.72, p less than 0.001. Furthermore, the advantage of AP possession in performing these tasks was not dependent on musical key, interval size, or musical context. These findings support the hypothesis that AP may be beneficial in performing musical tasks including those that primarily require the processing of relative pitch.