Is Absolute Pitch Associated With Musical Tension Processing?

Jun Jiang,Tang Hai,Dongrui Man,Linshu Zhou

doi:10.1177/2041669520971655

Abstract

Absolute pitch (AP) is a superior ability to identify or produce musical tones without a reference tone. Although a few studies have investigated the relationship between AP and high-level music processing such as tonality and syntactic processing, very little is known about whether AP is related to musical tension processing. To address this issue, 20 AP possessors and 20 matched non-AP possessors listened to major and minor melodies and rated the levels of perceived and felt musical tension using a continuous response digital interface dial. Results indicated that the major melodies were perceived and felt as less tense than the minor ones by AP and non-AP possessors. However, there was weak evidence for no differences between AP and non-AP possessors in the perception and experience of musical tension, suggesting that AP may be independent of the processing of musical tension. The implications of these ﬁndings are discussed.

Highlights

Absolute pitch (AP) is a superior ability to identify or produce musical tones without a reference tone
To investigate whether AP is correlated with different musical tension processing, we tested AP and non-AP possessors on perceived and felt musical tension, an aspect of affective response to music
These findings suggest that AP may be unrelated to the perception and experience of musical tension

Summary

Introduction

Absolute pitch (AP) is a superior ability to identify or produce musical tones without a reference tone. Jiang et al (2010) found that AP possessors performed better than non-AP possessors on the tasks of melodic and harmonic syntax, while Coll et al (2019) demonstrated that AP possessors did not have increased sensitivity to harmonic syntax compared with non-AP possessors These contradictory results may be attributed to the fact that the low-level pitch naming strategy (i.e., AP or relative pitch) can be directly used to recognize the key or ending tone of the music (e.g., Coll et al, 2019; Marvin & Brinkman, 2000). To exclude the effect of low-level musical processing, tasks unrelated to pitch naming should be adopted when investigating the association between AP and higher level musical processing

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Conclusion