Absolute pitch

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Absolute pitch (AP), widely referred to as perfect pitch, is the ability of a person to identify or sing a musical note without the benefit of a known reference.

Contents 1 Definition 1.1 Distinctions 1.1.1 "Passive" absolute pitch 1.1.2 "Active" absolute pitch 2 Scientific studies related to absolute pitch 2.1 Absolute pitch as a difference in cognition, not elementary sensation 2.2 Absolute judgment influenced by music experience 2.3 Absolute pitch and linguistics 2.4 Absolute pitch and perception 2.5 Nature or nurture? 2.6 Potential problems 3 Correlation with musical talent 3.1 Relative pitch 4 References 5 External links 6 Further reading 7 See also

[edit] Definition

Absolute pitch, or perfect pitch, is "the ability to attach labels to isolated auditory stimuli on the basis of pitch alone" without external reference.^[1] Possessors of absolute pitch exhibit the ability in varying degrees. Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of the following abilities:

• Identify and name individual pitches played on various instruments
• Name the key of a given piece of tonal music
• Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass
• Sing a given pitch without an external reference
• Name the pitches of common everyday occurrences such as car horns

Individuals may possess both absolute pitch and relative pitch ability in varying degrees. Both relative and absolute pitch work together in actual musical listening and practice, although individuals exhibit preferred strategies in using each skill.^[2]

[edit] Distinctions

The musicologist Richard Parncutt and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin introduced the following distinctions in their entry on absolute pitch in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

[edit] "Passive" absolute pitch

Persons with passive absolute pitch are able to identify individual notes that they hear, and can identify the key of a composition (assuming some degree of musical knowledge). Some may be able to identify several notes played simultaneously, and therefore identify complex chords. Those with passive absolute pitch are not always capable of singing a given note on command.

[edit] "Active" absolute pitch

Persons with active absolute pitch are able to sing any given note on cue, without prior pitch references. Active absolute pitch possessors number about 1 in 10,000 in the United States.^[3]

Not all people with active absolute pitch are musicians. However, musical training is necessary for full development of the auditory potential of a person with absolute pitch.

Among autistics and savants, the incidence of absolute pitch rises considerably. Absolute pitch is common among those with Williams syndrome.^[3]

[edit] Scientific studies related to absolute pitch

[edit] Absolute pitch as a difference in cognition, not elementary sensation

Physically and functionally, the auditory system of an absolute listener does not appear to be measurably different from a non-absolute listener.^[4] Rather, "AP perception is not dependent on a special kind of ear; it reflects a particular ability to analyze frequency information, presumably involving high-level cortical processing."^[5] Absolute pitch is an act of cognition, needing memory of the frequency, a label for the frequency (such as "B-flat"), and exposure to the range of sound encompassed by that categorical label. Absolute pitch may be directly analogous to recognizing colours, phonemes (speech sounds) or other categorical perception of sensory stimuli. Even as most people have learned to recognize and name the colour blue by its frequency, it is possible that those who have had early (somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6)^[6] and meaningful exposure to the names of musical tones will be likely to identify, for example, middle C. Absolute pitch, however, may be genetic, possibly an autosomal dominant genetic trait,^[7][8] though it "might be nothing more than a general human capacity whose expression is strongly biased by the level and type of exposure to music that people experience in a given culture."^{[citations needed]}

[edit] Absolute judgment influenced by music experience

Absolute pitch sense appears to be influenced by cultural exposure to music, especially in the familiarization of the equal-tempered C-major scale. Most of the absolute listeners that were tested in this respect identified the C-major tones more reliably and, except for B, more quickly than the five "black key" tones,^[9] which corresponds to the higher prevalence of these tones in ordinary musical experience. One study of Dutch non-musicians also demonstrated a bias toward using C-major tones in ordinary speech, especially on syllables related to emphasis.^[10]

[edit] Absolute pitch and linguistics

Absolute pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, which depend heavily on pitch for lexical meaning. "Tone deafness" is unusual among native speakers of these languages^{[citations needed]}. Speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages have been reported to speak a word in the same absolute pitch (within a quarter-tone) on different days; it has therefore been suggested that absolute pitch may be acquired by infants when they learn to speak in a tonal language^[11] (and possibly also by infants when they learn to speak in a pitch stress language). However, the brains of tonal-language speakers do not naturally process musical sound as language;^[12] perhaps such individuals may be more likely to acquire absolute pitch for musical tones when they later receive musical training.

It is possible that level-tone languages which are found in Africa—such as Yoruba,^[13] with three pitch levels, and Mambila,^[14] with four—may be better suited to study the role of absolute pitch in speech than the contour-tone languages of East Asia.

Further, speakers of European languages have been found to make use of an absolute, though subconscious, pitch memory when speaking.^[15]

[edit] Absolute pitch and perception

Although absolute pitch is predicated on the ability to perceive and identify "tone chroma"^[16] — where "tone chroma" is a psychological interpretation of a fundamental vibratory frequency^[17] — absolute pitch is not a heightened ability to perceive and discriminate fine gradations of sound frequencies,^[18] but rather the ability to mentally categorize sounds into predefined pitch areas.^[19] An absolute listener's sense of hearing is no keener than that of a non-absolute ("normal") listener;^[20] furthermore, the tasks of identification (recognizing and naming a pitch) and discrimination (detecting changes or differences in rate of vibration) are accomplished with different brain mechanisms.^[21]

[edit] Nature or nurture?

Many people have believed that musical ability itself is an inborn talent.^[22] Some scientists currently believe absolute pitch may have an underlying genetic basis and are trying to locate genetic correlates;^[23] most believe that the acquisition of absolute pitch requires early training during a critical period of development, regardless of whether or not a genetic predisposition toward development exists.^[24] The "unlearning theory," first proposed by Abraham,^[25] has recently been revived by developmental psychologists who argue that every person possesses absolute pitch (as a mode of perceptual processing) when they are infants, but that a shift in cognitive processing styles (from local, absolute processing to global, relational processing) causes most people to unlearn it; or, at least, causes children with musical training to discard absolute pitch as they learn to identify musical intervals.^[26] Additionally, any nascent absolute pitch may be lost simply by the lack of reinforcement or lack of clear advantages in most activities in which the developing child is involved. An unequivocal resolution to the ongoing debate would require controlled experiments, which are both impractical and unethical.

Researchers have been trying to teach absolute pitch ability for more than a century,^[27] and various commercial absolute-pitch training courses have been offered to the public since the early 1900s.^[28] It has been shown possible to learn the naming of tones later in life, although some consider this skill not to be true absolute pitch.^[29] No training method for adults has yet been shown to produce abilities comparable to naturally-occurring absolute pitch.^[30]

For children aged 2-4, however, recent observations have shown a certain method of music education^[31] to apparently be successful in training absolute pitch,^[32] but the same method has also been shown to fail with students 5 years and older, suggesting that a developmental change in perception occurs which favors relative learning over absolute and thus supporting the theory of the "critical period" for learning absolute pitch.^[33]

[edit] Potential problems

Persons who have absolute pitch may feel irritated when a piece is transposed to a different key or played at a nonstandard pitch.^[34] They may fail to develop strong relative pitch when following standard curricula, despite the fact that maintaining absolute strategies can make simple relative tasks more difficult. For instance, transposition of music from one key to another may prove more difficult to some individuals with absolute pitch, because they perceive music as a fixed sequence of absolute notes, rather than the relative intervals between the notes. Inadequately trained absolute pitch possessors can find it quite difficult to play in tune with an orchestra which is not tuned to standard concert pitch A4 = 440 hertz (442 Hz in some countries), possibly because their comprehension of musical pitch may be categorical rather than spectral.^[35]

[edit] Correlation with musical talent

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, John Philip Sousa, and Vincent Persichetti are some of the classical composers/musicians who had absolute pitch;^{[citation needed]} Joseph Haydn, Johannes Brahms, Maurice Ravel, Richard Wagner, and Igor Stravinsky are among those who did not. Absolute pitch is not a prerequisite for developing a high level of talent as a musician or composer, and musicians may disagree about the overall value and relevance of absolute pitch ability to musical experience.

[edit] Relative pitch

Many musicians have quite good relative pitch, a skill which can be learned. With practice, it is possible to listen to a single known pitch once (from a pitch pipe or a tuning fork) and then have stable, reliable pitch identification by comparing the notes heard to the stored memory of the tonic pitch.^[36] Unlike absolute pitch, this skill is dependent on a recently-perceived tonal center.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Ongoing research on genetics of absolute pitch

[edit] Further reading

• Comprehensive historical bibliography of absolute pitch research, 1876-present

[edit] See also

• Ear training
• Tonal memory