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ACOUST V2 4 Ebook:ECHOES Fall 04 Final THE ENIGMA OF ABSOLUTE PITCH Diana Deutsch Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093 Introduction well-known melodies when they hear them; yet the amount n the summer of 1763, the Mozart family embarked on of information required to do this is vastly greater than is the famous tour of Europe that established the young required to name a single note. A lack of absolute pitch, Icomposer’s reputation as a musical prodigy (front cover). viewed from this perspective, appears akin to the syndrome Just before they left, an anonymous letter appeared in the of color anomia, in which the person can recognize and dis- Augsburgischer Intelligenz-Zettel describing seven year old criminate between colors, yet cannot associate them with Wolfgang’s extraordinary abilities. The letter included the verbal labels.3 So the real mystery of absolute pitch is not following: why some people possess this ability, but instead why it is so “Furthermore, I saw and heard how, when he was made rare. to listen in another room, they would give him notes, now high, now low, not only on the pianoforte but on every other Background imaginable instrument as well, and he came out with the let- Although absolute pitch is most prevalent among highly ter of the name of the note in an instant. Indeed, on hearing accomplished musicians, it is not necessarily associated with a bell toll, or a clock or even a pocket watch strike, he was able superior performance on other musical processing tasks. For at the same moment to name the note of the bell or time example, people with absolute pitch do not necessarily out- piece.1” perform others in judging the octave in which a note occurs,4 This passage provides a good characterization of or in judging musical intervals,5,6 or on tasks involving short absolute pitch—the ability to name or produce a note of a term memory for pitch when verbal labels cannot be used as given pitch in the absence of a reference note. This ability, cues.7 Most importantly, nonpossessors have been shown to which is also known as “perfect pitch,” is very rare in our possess an implicit form of absolute pitch, even though they culture, with an estimated overall prevalence of less than cannot label the notes they are judging. one in ten thousand.2 People with absolute pitch name The tritone paradox8,9 provides a good example of musical notes as rapidly and effortlessly as most people implicit absolute pitch. The basic pattern that produces this name colors. Yet absolute pitch is often regarded as a mys- illusion consists of two successively presented tones that are terious endowment that is available only to a few gifted individuals. This impression is strengthened by the fact that most famous musicians, such as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Menuhin, Toscanini, Boulez, and so on, were known to pos- sess this ability. In contrast with the rarity of absolute pitch, the ability to judge one musical note in relation to another is very common. So, for example, most musicians, when presented with the note F and given its name, have no difficulty in naming the note two semitones higher as G, the note four semitones tones higher as A; and so on. (A semitone is the pitch relation formed by two adjacent notes on a keyboard, and corresponds to a frequency ratio of approximately 18:17.) What most people, including most musicians, can- not do is name a note when they hear it out of context. As someone with absolute pitch, it has always seemed puzzling to me that this ability should be so rare. When we name a color, for example as green, we do not do this by viewing a different color, determining its name, and com- paring the relationship between the two colors. Instead, the labeling process is direct and immediate. Consider, also, Fig. 1. The pitch class circle. The notes of the traditional Western musi- that note naming involves choosing between only 12 possi- cal scale are produced by dividing the octave into 12 semitone steps. A bilities; namely the 12 notes within the octave (termed pitch semitone is the pitch relation formed by two adjacent notes on a key- classes) shown in Figure 1. Such a task should not be diffi- board, and corresponds to a frequency ratio of approximately 18:17. cult; indeed, it should be trivial for professional musicians, Each of the twelve notes within the octave is assigned a name: C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, and B. The entire scale is generated by repeat- who spend many thousands of hours reading musical ing this series of note names (or ‘pitch classes’) across octaves. When scores, playing the notes they read, and hearing the notes people with absolute pitch identify notes by name, they are identifying the they play. As another point, most people can easily identify positions of the tones along the pitch class circle. Enigma of Absolute Pitch 11 related by a half-octave (an interval comprised of “if we assume that early in teners. Since their judgments six semitones, known as a tritone). The composi- varied systematically depending tion of the tones is such that their note names are human history absolute pitch on the positions of the tones clearly defined, but they are ambiguous with along the pitch class circle, the respect to which octave they are in. So, for exam- developed as a feature of listeners must have been ple, one tone might clearly be a C, but in principle employing an implicit form of it could be Middle C, or the C an octave above, or speech, and that the circuitry absolute pitch in making these the C an octave below. So when listeners are asked judgments. to determine whether a pair of such tones forms responsible for its processing It has been found that the an ascending or descending pattern, there is liter- way the pitch class circle is ori- ally no correct answer. (Tones such as these were can also be applied to musical ented with respect to height is used by Roger Shepard and Jean-Claude Risset to related to the language or produce illusions of endlessly ascending scales tones, we have a viable dialect to which the listener and glides.10) has been exposed,11 particular- Surprisingly, when one such tone pair is framework for understanding ly in childhood,12 and also to played (say, D followed by G#) some listeners the pitch range of his or her clearly hear an ascending pattern, whereas other absolute pitch and its speaking voice.12,13 Such find- listeners clearly hear a descending one. Yet when a ings have led to the conjecture different tone pair is played (say, F# followed by C) characteristics, particularly that the implicit form of the first group of listeners now hears a descending absolute pitch that is reflected pattern whereas the second group now hears an its rarity in our culture.” in judgments of the tritone ascending one. Furthermore, for any given listener, paradox originally evolved to the pitch classes generally arrange themselves per- sub-serve speech.14 This ceptually with respect to height in a systematic way: hypothesis is bolstered by find- Tones in one region of the pitch class circle are heard as higher ings that the pitch range of an individual’s speaking voice is and those in the opposite region as lower. This is illustrated in related to his or her linguistic community, and not to physi- Fig. 2, which displays the judgments made by four different lis- ological features such as height, weight, chest size, length of vocal tract, and so on.15 There is other evidence that people who do not possess absolute pitch as con- ventionally defined nevertheless possess the ability in implicit form. In one study, musically trained listeners were presented with excerpts of Bach preludes, and 30% of those without absolute pitch were able to differentiate the correct version from one that had been pitch-shifted by a semitone.16 Other research has shown that people without absolute pitch tend to be fairly consistent in the pitches with which they hum or sing familiar songs on different occasions;17 further, when asked to sing a popular song that had been recorded in only one key, they produce pitches that are close to those in the recorded version.18 Given the evidence for implicit absolute pitch, the inability of most people to label isolated notes is indeed baffling. The evidence strongly indicates that the problem is not one of long term memory, but is instead related to verbal labeling, and so to speech processing. We shall be exam- ining this conjecture in detail below. Fig. 2. Judgments of the tritone paradox made by four different listeners. To produce this illusion, pairs of tones The genesis of absolute pitch are played that are in opposite positions along the pitch class circle (see Fig. 1). For example, C is played fol- lowed by F#, or D followed by G#. Listeners judge whether each pair of tones forms an ascending or a descend- Given the rarity of absolute pitch, ing pattern. The judgments of most listeners vary in an orderly fashion depending on the positions of the tones there has been considerable speculation along the pitch class circle, showing that the listeners employ an implicit form of absolute pitch in making concerning its genesis. One view, which these judgments. (Data taken by the author.) has been championed for over a century,19 12 Acoustics Today, October 2006 is that this ability is available only to rare people who have a points to a critical period.
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