Absolute pitch: Encyclopedia II - Absolute pitch - Definition

Absolute pitch - Definition

Absolute pitch has been defined as "the ability to attach labels to isolated auditory stimuli on the basis of pitch alone" (Ward and Burns, 1982). A person with absolute pitch will be able to, at minimum, know when a piece is not played in its original key.

Persons who have absolute pitch, but who do not have strong musical training, may seem annoyed or unnerved when a piece is transposed to a different key (or played in nonstandard pitch), and can have difficulty transposing music without manually calculating intervals between known pitches (Miyazaki, 1993). They may feel that such a piece does not have the intrinsic beauty of music, and in some cases will be physically uncomfortable; cases are known of musicians who had to tune every instrument or they would actually feel sick. They may have a harder time developing relative pitch than others when following standard curricula, and for many musical tasks like transposition, lack of training in relative skills can trip up a musician with absolute pitch, who will attempt to use their absolute knowledge for what is clearly a relative task. Also, because their comprehension of musical pitch is categorical rather than spectral (Harris, 1974), poorly-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 Hz, e.g. "authentic" baroque ensembles that play in "chamber tuning" A4 = 415 Hz, about a semitone below modern concert pitch. They may also have trouble when learning to play certain instruments, such as the trombone and the violin family of stringed instruments, if they find that playing out of tune is initially uncomfortable. It has been proven possible to learn the ability of naming musical tones, although the skill is arguably not absolute pitch. However, with practice and dedication, the serious person with good ears could improve in pitch identification.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Definition", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki