Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. [1] [2] AP may be demonstrated using linguistic labelling ("naming" a note), associating mental imagery with the note, or sensorimotor responses. For example, an AP possessor can accurately reproduce a heard tone on a musical instrument without "hunting" for the correct pitch. [3] [4] [5]
The frequency of AP in the general population is not known. A proportion of 1 in 10,000 is widely reported, but not supported by evidence; [6] a 2019 review indicated a prevalence of at least 4% amongst music students. [7]
Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of these abilities, achieved without a reference tone: [8]
Absolute pitch is distinct from relative pitch. While the ability to name specific pitches can be used to infer intervals, relative pitch identifies an interval directly by its sound. Absolute pitch may complement relative pitch in musical listening and practice, but it may also influence its development. [9]
Adults who possess relative pitch but do not already have absolute pitch can learn "pseudo-absolute pitch" and become able to identify notes in a way that superficially resembles absolute pitch. [10] Some people have been able to develop accurate pitch identification in adulthood through training. [11]
Scientific studies of absolute pitch commenced in the 19th century, focusing on the phenomenon of musical pitch and methods of measuring it. [12] It would have been difficult for the notion of absolute pitch to have formed earlier because pitch references were not consistent. For example, the note known as 'A' varied in different local or national musical traditions between what is considered as G sharp and B flat before the standardisation of the late 19th century. While the term absolute pitch, or absolute ear, was in use by the late 19th century by both British [13] and German researchers, [14] its application was not universal; other terms such as musical ear, [12] absolute tone consciousness, [15] or positive pitch [16] referred to the same ability. The skill is not exclusively musical.
Physically and functionally, the auditory system of an absolute listener evidently does not differ from that of a non-absolute listener. [17] Rather, "it reflects a particular ability to analyze frequency information, presumably involving high-level cortical processing." [18] 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 colors, phonemes (speech sounds), or other categorical perception of sensory stimuli. For example, most people have learned to recognize and name the color blue by the range of frequencies of the electromagnetic radiation that are perceived as light; those who have been exposed to musical notes together with their names early in life may be more likely to identify the note C. [19] Although it was once thought that 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", [20] absolute pitch may be influenced by genetic variation, possibly an autosomal dominant genetic trait. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25]
Evidence suggests that absolute pitch sense is 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, [26] which corresponds to the higher prevalence of these tones in ordinary musical experiences. One study of Dutch non-musicians also demonstrated a bias toward using C-major tones in ordinary speech, especially on syllables related to emphasis. [27]
Absolute pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages, such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, which depend on pitch variation to distinguish words that otherwise sound the same—e.g., Mandarin with four possible tonal variations, Cantonese with nine, Southern Min with seven or eight (depending on dialect), and Vietnamese with six. [28] [29] 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 a tonal language [30] (and possibly also by infants when they learn to speak a pitch-accent language). However, the brains of tonal-language speakers do not naturally process musical sound as language; [31] such speakers may be more likely to acquire absolute pitch for musical tones when they later receive musical training. Many native speakers of a tone language, even those with little musical training, are observed to sing a given song with consistent pitch. Among music students of East Asian ethnic heritage, those who speak a tone language fluently have a higher prevalence of absolute pitch than those who do not speak a tone language. [32] [33] [34]
African level-tone languages—such as Yoruba, [35] with three pitch levels, and Mambila, [36] with four—may be better suited to study the role of absolute pitch in speech than the pitch and contour tone languages of East Asia.
Speakers of European languages make subconscious use of an absolute pitch memory when speaking. [37]
Absolute pitch is the ability to perceive pitch class and to mentally categorize sounds according to perceived pitch class. [38] A pitch class is the set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart. While the boundaries of musical pitch categories vary among human cultures, the recognition of octave relationships is a natural characteristic of the mammalian auditory system. [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] Accordingly, absolute pitch is not the ability to estimate a pitch value from the dimension of pitch-evoking frequency (30–5000 Hz), [19] but to identify a pitch class category within the dimension of pitch class (e.g., C-C♯-D ... B-C).
An absolute listener's sense of hearing is typically no keener than that of a non-absolute ("normal") listener. [45] Absolute pitch does not depend upon a refined ability to perceive and discriminate gradations of sound frequencies, [46] but upon detecting and categorizing a subjective perceptual quality typically referred to as "chroma". [47] [ clarification needed ] The two tasks— of identification (recognizing and naming a pitch) and discrimination (detecting changes or differences in rate of vibration)— are accomplished with different brain mechanisms. [48]
The prevalence of absolute pitch is higher among those who are blind from birth as a result of optic nerve hypoplasia.
Absolute pitch is considerably more common among those whose early childhood was spent in East Asia. [49] [50] [51] [52] This might seem to be a genetic difference; [53] however, people of East Asian ancestry who are reared in North America are significantly less likely to develop absolute pitch than those raised in East Asia, [52] so the difference is more probably explained by experience. The language that is spoken may be an important factor; many East Asians speak tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Thai, while others (such as those in Japan and certain provinces of Korea) speak pitch-accent languages, and the prevalence of absolute pitch may be partly explained by exposure to pitches together with meaningful musical labels very early in life. [50] [51] [52] [54]
Absolute pitch ability has higher prevalence among those with Williams syndrome [55] and those with an autism spectrum disorder, with claims estimating that up to 30% of autistic people have absolute pitch. [56] [57] [58] A non-verbal piano-matching method resulted in a correlation of 97% between[ clarification needed ] autism and absolute pitch, with a 53% correlation in non-autistic observers.[ clarification needed ] [59] However, the converse is not indicated by research which found no difference between those with absolute pitch and those without on measures of social and communication skills, which are core deficits in autistic spectrum disorders. Additionally, the absolute pitch group's autism-spectrum quotient was "way below clinical thresholds". [60]
Absolute pitch might be achievable by any human being during a critical period of auditory development, [61] [62] after which period cognitive strategies favor global and relational processing. Proponents of the critical-period theory agree that the presence of absolute pitch ability is dependent on learning, but there is disagreement about whether training causes absolute skills to occur [63] [64] [65] [66] or lack of training causes absolute perception to be overwhelmed and obliterated by relative perception of musical intervals. [67] [68]
One or more genetic loci could affect absolute pitch ability, a predisposition for learning the ability or signal the likelihood of its spontaneous occurrence. [23] [25] [24]
Researchers have been trying to teach absolute pitch ability in laboratory settings for more than a century, [69] and various commercial absolute-pitch training courses have been offered to the public since the early 1900s. [70] In 2013, experimenters reported that adult men who took the antiseizure drug valproate (VPA) "learned to identify pitch significantly better than those taking placebo—evidence that VPA facilitated critical-period learning in the adult human brain". [71] However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability, [72] because all adults who have been formally tested after AP training have failed to demonstrate "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors". [73]
While very few people have the ability to name a pitch with no external reference, pitch memory can be activated by repeated exposure. [74] People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular songs in the correct key, [75] and can usually recognize when TV themes have been shifted into the wrong key. [76] Members of the Venda culture in South Africa also sing familiar children's songs in the key in which the songs were learned. [77]
This phenomenon is apparently unrelated to musical training. The skill may be associated more closely with vocal production. Violin students learning the Suzuki method are required to memorize each composition in a fixed key and play it from memory on their instrument, but they are not required to sing. When tested, these students did not succeed in singing the memorized Suzuki songs in the original, fixed key. [78]
Musicians with absolute perception may experience difficulties which do not exist for other musicians. Because absolute listeners are capable of recognizing that a musical composition has been transposed from its original key, or that a pitch is being produced at a nonstandard frequency (either sharp or flat), a musician with absolute pitch may become confused upon perceiving tones believed to be "wrong" or hearing a piece of music "in the wrong key". The relative pitch of the notes may be in tune to each other, but out of tune to the standard pitch or pitches the musician is familiar with or perceives as correct. This can especially apply to Baroque music, as many Baroque orchestras tune to A = 415 Hz as opposed to 440 Hz (i.e., roughly one standard semitone lower than the ISO standard for concert A), [56] while other recordings of Baroque pieces (especially those of French Baroque music) are performed at 392 Hz. Historically, tuning forks for concert A used on keyboard instruments (which ensembles tune to when present), have varied widely in frequency, often between 415 Hz to 456.7 Hz. [79]
Variances in the sizes of intervals for different keys and the method of tuning instruments also can affect musicians in their perception of correct pitch, especially with music synthesized digitally using alternative tunings (e.g., unequal well temperaments and alternative meantone tunings such as 19-tone equal temperament and 31-tone equal temperament) as opposed to 12-tone equal temperament.[ citation needed ] An absolute listener may also use absolute strategies for tasks which are more efficiently accomplished with relative strategies, such as transposition [80] or producing harmony that is microtonal or whose frequencies do not match standard 12-tone equal temperament. [81] It is also possible for some musicians to have displaced absolute pitch, where all notes are slightly flat or slightly sharp of their respective pitch as defined by a given convention.[ citation needed ] This may arise from learning the pitch names from an instrument that was tuned to a concert pitch convention other than the one in use (e.g., A = 435 Hz, the Paris Opera convention of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as opposed to the modern Euro-American convention for concert A = 442 Hz). Concert pitches have shifted higher for a brighter sound. When playing in groups with other musicians, this may lead to playing in a tonality that is slightly different from that of the rest of the group, such as when soloists tune slightly sharp of the rest of the ensemble to stand out or to compensate for loosening strings during longer performances.[ citation needed ]
Absolute pitch shows a genetic overlap with music-related and non-music-related synesthesia/ideasthesia. [25] They may associate certain notes or keys with different colors, enabling them to tell what any note or key is. In this study, about 20% of people with absolute pitch are also synesthetes.
There is evidence of a higher rate of absolute pitch in the autistic population. [82] Many studies have examined pitch abilities in autism, but not rigidly perfect pitch, which makes them controversial. It is unclear just how many people with autism have perfect pitch because of this. In a 2009 study, researchers studied 72 teenagers with autism and found that 20 percent of the teenagers had a significant ability to detect pitches. Children with autism are especially sensitive to changes in pitch. [83]
Absolute pitch is not a prerequisite for skilled musical performance or composition. However, there is evidence that musicians with absolute pitch tend to perform better on musical transcription tasks (controlling for age of onset and amount of musical training) compared to those without absolute pitch. [84] It was previously argued that musicians with absolute pitch perform worse than those without absolute pitch on recognition of musical intervals; [85] however, experiments on which this conclusion was based contained an artifact and, when this artifact was removed, absolute pitch possessors were found to perform better than nonpossessors on recognition of musical intervals. [86]
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds together in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harmonic objects such as chords, textures and tonalities are identified, defined, and categorized in the development of these theories. Harmony is broadly understood to involve both a "vertical" dimension (frequency-space) and a "horizontal" dimension (time-space), and often overlaps with related musical concepts such as melody, timbre, and form.
A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower.
Pitch is a perceptual property that allows sounds to be ordered on a frequency-related scale, or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre.
Auditory illusions are illusions of real sound or outside stimulus. These false perceptions are the equivalent of an optical illusion: the listener hears either sounds which are not present in the stimulus, or sounds that should not be possible given the circumstance on how they were created.
The cent is a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals. Twelve-tone equal temperament divides the octave into 12 semitones of 100 cents each. Typically, cents are used to express small intervals, to check intonation, or to compare the sizes of comparable intervals in different tuning systems. For humans, a single cent is too small to be perceived between successive notes.
The pitch being perceived with the first harmonic being absent in the waveform is called the missing fundamental phenomenon.
The octave illusion is an auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1973. It is produced when two tones that are an octave apart are repeatedly played in alternation ("high-low-high-low") through stereo headphones. The same sequence is played to both ears simultaneously; however when the right ear receives the high tone, the left ear receives the low tone, and conversely. Instead of hearing two alternating pitches, most subjects instead hear a single tone that alternates between ears while at the same time its pitch alternates between high and low.
The tritone paradox is an auditory illusion in which a sequentially played pair of Shepard tones separated by an interval of a tritone, or half octave, is heard as ascending by some people and as descending by others. Different populations tend to favor one of a limited set of different spots around the chromatic circle as central to the set of "higher" tones. Roger Shepard in 1963 had argued that such tone pairs would be heard ambiguously as either ascending or descending. However, psychology of music researcher Diana Deutsch in 1986 discovered that when the judgments of individual listeners were considered separately, their judgments depended on the positions of the tones along the chromatic circle. For example, one listener would hear the tone pair C–F♯ as ascending and the tone pair G–C♯ as descending. Yet another listener would hear the tone pair C–F♯ as descending and the tone pair G–C♯ as ascending. Furthermore, the way these tone pairs were perceived varied depending on the listener's language or dialect.
Deutsch's scale illusion is an auditory illusion in which two series of unconnected notes appear to combine into a single recognisable melody, when played simultaneously into the left and right ears of a listener.
In the branch of experimental psychology focused on sense, sensation, and perception, which is called psychophysics, a just-noticeable difference or JND is the amount something must be changed in order for a difference to be noticeable, detectable at least half the time. This limen is also known as the difference limen, difference threshold, or least perceptible difference.
Diana Deutsch is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitches in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch, which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages. Deutsch is the author of Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain (2019), the editor for Psychology of Music, and also the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003).
Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Two main classifications of amusia exist: acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music-processing anomaly present since birth.
In music, tonal memory or "aural recall" is the ability to remember a specific tone after it has been heard. Tonal memory assists with staying in tune and may be developed through ear training. Extensive tonal memory may be recognized as an indication of potential compositional ability.
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and in foreign-language teaching.
Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from language and may constitute an independent part of the phonological loop. The use of this term is problematic, however, since it implies input from a verbal system, whereas music is in principle nonverbal.
The neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. Scientists working in this field may have training in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, neuroanatomy, psychology, music theory, computer science, and other relevant fields.
Pitch circularity is a fixed series of tones that are perceived to ascend or descend endlessly in pitch. It's an example of an auditory illusion.
Temporal envelope (ENV) and temporal fine structure (TFS) are changes in the amplitude and frequency of sound perceived by humans over time. These temporal changes are responsible for several aspects of auditory perception, including loudness, pitch and timbre perception and spatial hearing.
Brian C.J. Moore FMedSci, FRS is an Emeritus Professor of Auditory Perception in the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His research focuses on psychoacoustics, audiology, and the development and assessment of hearing aids.
The speech-to-song illusion is an auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1995. A spoken phrase is repeated several times, without altering it in any way, and without providing any context. This repetition causes the phrase to transform perceptually from speech into song. Though mostly notable with languages that are non-tone, like English and German, it is possible to happen with tone languages, like Thai and Mandarin.
AP and RP are actually very different modes of musical pitch processing, having incompatible features, and therefore it may be possible that one can interfere the development of the other, and vice versa.