Pitch Possessors Research Articles

Absolute pitch—electrophysiological evidence

People who have the ability to label or to produce notes without any reference are considered to possess Absolute Pitch (AP). Others, who need a reference in order to identify the notes, possess Relative Pitch (RP). The AP ability is assumed to reflect a unique, language-like representation of non-lexical musical notes in memory. The purpose of this study was to examine this assumption by comparing Event Related Potentials (ERP) of musicians with and without AP, to lexical and non-lexical representation of musical material. Subjects were eighteen young adult musicians. Seven were AP and eleven RP. Auditory stimuli, presented through earphones, were piano notes (non-lexical) or a voice saying the note's name (lexical). Visual stimuli, presented on a computer display were note symbols (non-lexical) or letters (lexical). Subjects performed a number of tasks, combining the two modalities (visual and auditory) and stimulus types (lexical and non-lexical), and reaction times (RT), performance accuracy and evoked potentials were recorded. The tasks forced the subjects to transfer mental representations of musical material from one mode to another. Our most important findings were the differences, between groups, in the scalp distribution of P300 amplitudes. We conclude that absolute pitch possessors use the same internal language as relative pitch possessors, when possible, but the distribution of the underlying brain activity is different between AP and RP subjects.

The interdependence of pitch and temporal judgments by absolute pitch possessors.

The auditory tau and the kappa effects show that there is time-pitch interdependence in our perception. Our judgments of pitch separation between two tones depend on the temporal interval between them (the auditory tau effect), and our judgments of the tones' temporal interval depend on their pitch separation (the kappa effect). The mechanisms underlying this interdependence were investigated by studying the auditory tau and the kappa effect in three experiments. Comparisons were made between results obtained from subjects with absolute pitch and those who did not have absolute pitch, and two frequency ranges of pure tones (octave and whole-tone conditions) were selected. The procedures had been used in previous experiments (Shigeno, 1986), in which the auditory tau and the kappa effects were compared in speech and nonspeech stimuli. The present results demonstrate that the auditory tau effect does not occur when possessors of absolute pitch judge the closeness of stimuli in pitch, except when the stimulus continuum consists of tones that do not correspond to musical notes in the whole-tone condition. The kappa effect was obtained in the judgment of possessors of absolute pitch in both the octave and the whole-tone conditions. These findings suggest that the interaction between temporal interval and pitch judgment might be explained in terms of the two different memory modes for retaining the pitch of tones, and that these effects occur at the precategorical level.

Absolute Pitch and Event-Related Brain Potentials

An event-related brain potential (ERP) component called mismatch negativity (MMN) is elicited by physically deviant auditory stimuli presented among repetitive, "standard," stimuli. MMN reflects a mismatch process between sensory input from the deviant stimulus and a shortduration neuronal representation developed by the standard stimulus. The MMN amplitude is known to correlate with pitch-discrimination performance. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the MMN is different in absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors. ERPs were recorded from AP and non-AP groups, which were matched with regard to musical training. It was found that deviant stimuli differing from standard tones by a quartertone or a semitone elicited an MMN irrespective of whether the stimulus was located on (white key/black key) or off the Western musical scale. These results were obtained with both sinusoidal and piano tones. The MMN was larger and earlier when the stimuli were piano tones than when they were sinusoidal tones and when the standard-deviant difference amounted to a semitone rather than a quartertone. However, differences between the groups were not found in auditory information processing reflected by the MMN component of the ERP. In the light of the earlier MMN results showing a close correlation between the MMN and pitch- discrimination accuracy, it might be concluded that pitch discrimination and identification are based on different brain mechanisms. In addition, the differences in the MMN amplitude and latency between sinusoidal and piano tones might be interpreted as suggesting that sensory memory traces, as reflected by the MMN, are capable of storing information of very complex sound structures also.

Perception of Musical Intervals by Absolute Pitch Possessors

Previous studies have demonstrated that absolute pitch (AP) possessors can directly perceive the musical pitch quality (pitch class) of a tone presented in isolation. However, an isolated tone without musical context has no relevance to music, and AP ability should be examined in musically meaningful situations. In this study, AP possessors tried to identify the musical intervals between pairs of successive tones. The first tone (a reference) was either in-tune C according to the conventional pitch standard or out-of-tune C (a quarter-tone higher than standard C). The identification performance was less accurate and slower in the out-of-tune reference condition than in the in-tune condition. In contrast, AP nonpossessors showed no significant difference in performance in the two conditions, as predicted by the principle of equality under transposition. These results suggest that AP subjects tend to adhere to AP in relative pitch tasks, and that at least some AP listeners may have developed a strong dependence on AP at the sacrifice of relative pitch. AP may not have any advantage in music, in which relative pitch, not AP, is essential. Rather, AP may conflict with relative pitch and, in some cases, harm musical pitch processing.

Absolute-Pitch Judgments of Black and White-Key Pitches

Absolute-pitch possessors have been reported to identify black-key pitches less quickly and accurately than they identify white-key pitches. However, it is possible in these experiments that the greater speed of identifying white-compared with black-key pitches was due to a motor response bias because the motor requirements for indicating a black-key pitch were more difficult than those for indicating a white-key pitch. The greater accuracy in identifying white-compared with black-key pitches may have been due to a choice response bias favoring white-key pitch responses. We compared absolute- pitch judgments of black-and white-key pitches in a task free of motor response biases. Subjects compared the pitch of an auditory tone with a visually presented pitch name and responded Same or Different. The absolute- pitch possessors responded significantly more slowly to black- key auditory pitches, and to black- key visual pitch names, than to white-key pitches and pitch names. These differences may have been due to perceptual and retrieval processes associated with the frequencies with which black-and white-key pitches and pitch names occur in music literature. Another possible explanation is that absolute-pitch possessors may learn absolute pitch for only white-key pitches in development and may interpolate blackkey pitches from neighboring white-key pitches. Experiments to test these alternative accounts are proposed.

Categorical perception revisited, yet again: Frequency and frequency ratio resolution by “possessors” and other musicians

Macmillan et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 1262–1280 (1988)] recently demonstrated the advantages gained by applying experimental techniques and analyses derived from a model of intensity resolution to the phenomenon of categorical perception of speech. In this paper, the application of these techniques to both the perception of musical intervals (frequency ratios) by musicians with relative pitch, and the perception of frequency by musicians with absolute pitch is discussed. The results suggest that the perception of frequency ratios by musicians differs from perception along most unidimensional psychophysical continua (characterized by the “7 ± 2” principle) in two ways. First, identification resolution for frequency ratios is much better than for stimuli along 7 ± 2 continua. Second, musical interval perception seems to be a case of ideal categorical perception (as originally defined) in that musicians apparently can discriminate between two musical intervals only to the extent that they can differentially identify them. Although the identification resolution for frequency by absolute pitch possessors is much better than that of nonpossessors (whose identification resolution is consistent with the 7 ± 2 limitation), their discrimination resolution for frequency remains much better than their identification resolution. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

Absolute and relative pitch identification by absolute pitch possessors

The identification of absolute and relative pitch was investigated with absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors as subjects. In an AP experiment, isolated tones of different pitches (including microtonal pitches) were presented as stimuli in random order. Subjects were requested to select and press a key corresponding to each stimulus on a musical keyboard. While the responses of non‐AP subjects were widely dispersed, the AP subjects could categorize the presented tones quite consistently. Specifically, they identified white‐key notes more correctly and rapidly than black‐key notes. In a relative pitch experiment, isolated melodic ascending intervals from the minor second to the octave were randomly presented. The lower tone of an interval was either middle C, F♯, or a 50‐cent higher D♯. Then non‐AP subjects performed more or less successfully and almost equally regardless of transposition. On the other hand, the AP subjects made more errors and gave longer response times when the lower tone of an interval was F♯ or the higher D♯ than when it was C. These results suggest that at least some AP possessors have difficulty in dealing with musical intervals and tend to rely upon their AP sense in the face of a relative pitch task.

Musical pitch identification by absolute pitch possessors.

Musical pitch identification was investigated in two experiments in which absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors categorized tones presented in isolation into predetermined pitch classes. Stimuli consisted of 60 different tones per octave (at intervals of 20 cents). The experiments were designed to minimize the possibility that subjects could use strategies other than AP in performing the task. The results clearly differentiated AP possessors from nonpossessors in accuracy and speed of responding. Those subjects who had AP could categorize the tones quite consistently by using musical qualities of the tones (tone chroma). However, they did not respond uniformly to all stimuli; they responded more accurately and quickly to some musically important tones in a C-major mode (C, E, or G).On the other hand, those who had no AP showed almost random response patterns. In the absence of a tonal context, they could not use tone chroma, but onlytone height. It is argued that tone chroma should be defined as the musical characteristics of tones in a tonal context, and that AP possessors are unique in that they can perceive it absolutely in the absence of any musical context. Although AP was believed to be very rare, it was proved here that a phenomenally large proportion of the subjects tested had AP. The correlation was observed between AP possession and early musical training that started at the age of 3 to 5.

Strategies of absolute pitch possessors in the learning of an unfamiliar scale

Possessors of absolute pitch and control subjects were trained and later tested to identify pitches labeled with arbitrary note names. Although the absolute pitch subjects learned better than the controls, there was no difference in learning rate. Results are discussed in terms of sensory memory and category availability.