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Absolute pitch

Absolute pitch: Encyclopedia - Absolute pitch

Absolute pitch, widely referred to as perfect pitch, refers to the ability to identify a note by name without the benefit of a reference note, or to be able to produce a note (as in singing) that is the correct pitch without reference. 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 ...

Including:

Absolute pitch - Definition

Absolute pitch - Distinctions

Absolute pitch - Passive absolute pitch

Absolute pitch - Active absolute pitch

Absolute pitch - Correlation with musical genius

Absolute pitch - Scientific studies related to absolute pitch

Absolute pitch - Absolute pitch as a special case of sensation

Absolute pitch - Absolute pitch and linguistics

Absolute pitch - Nature or Nurture?

Absolute pitch - Famous possessors of absolute pitch

Absolute pitch, Absolute pitch - Absolute pitch and linguistics, Absolute pitch - Absolute pitch as a special case of sensation, Absolute pitch - Active absolute pitch, Absolute pitch - Correlation with musical genius, Absolute pitch - Definition, Absolute pitch - Distinctions, Absolute pitch - Famous possessors of absolute pitch, Absolute pitch - Nature or Nurture?, Absolute pitch - Passive absolute pitch, Absolute pitch - Scientific studies related to absolute pitch

Absolute pitch: Encyclopedia - Absolute pitch

Absolute pitch

Absolute pitch, widely referred to as perfect pitch, refers to the ability to identify a note by name without the benefit of a reference note, or to be able to produce a note (as in singing) that is the correct pitch without reference.

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.

Absolute pitch - 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.

Absolute pitch - Passive absolute pitch

Persons with passive absolute pitch are able to identify individual notes which they hear, and can identify the key of a composition (assuming some degree of musical knowledge). Not all of them are always capable of singing a given note on command. Those who can are known to possess "active" absolute pitch.

Absolute pitch - Active absolute pitch

Persons with active absolute pitch will be able to sing any given note when asked. Usually, people with active absolute pitch will not only be able to identify a note, but recognize when that note is slightly sharp or flat. Active absolute pitch possessors in the United States number about 1 in every 10,000. However, it has been measured to about 1/20 in other locations.

It cannot be assumed that all of these people with the gift of active absolute pitch are musicians. If one was to factor that in, the number of musicians with "active" absolute pitch is very, very small. However, musical training is necessary for full development of the auditory potential of a person with perfect pitch.

Absolute pitch - Correlation with musical genius

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leonard Bernstein, Phil Spector and Paul Shaffer are four musicians who had perfect pitch; Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, and Richard Wagner are among those who did not. There is no necessary correlation between absolute pitch and musical genius: many with absolute pitch do not work in music, and it can be a liability when attempting to play an instrument without having had prior musical training (especially for those for whom out-of-tune music is uncomfortable). Absolute pitch alone does not make a great musician.

Absolute pitch - Scientific studies related to absolute pitch

Absolute pitch - Absolute pitch as a special case of sensation

Absolute pitch is not limited to the realm of music, or even to humans. Songbirds and wolves have exhibited the ability. In fact, studies indicate that absolute pitch is more a linguistic ability than a musical one. 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 common range considered a note. (A note in modern tuning can vary in its exact frequency.) It may be directly analogous to recognizing colours, phonemes (speech sounds) or other categorical perception of sensory stimuli. And while most people have been trained to recognize and name the colour blue by its frequency, it is possible only those who have had early, somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6 (reviewed in Takeuchi and Hulse 1993), and deliberate exposure to the names of musical tones—usually musicians—will be likely to identify a middle C. Absolute pitch, may, however, be genetic, possibly an autosomal dominant genetic trait (Profita and Bidder 1988; Baharloo et al. 1998), though, "Absolute pitch 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."

Absolute pitch - Absolute pitch and linguistics

In addition, perfect pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, which depend heavily on pitch for meaning. "Tone deafness" is unusual among native speakers of these languages. In addition, there are a number of Japanese speakers who have perfect pitch; Japanese is a pitch accent language, in which pitch is also involved in conveying the meaning of words (though less heavily than in tone languages). Speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages have been reported to speak a word in the same absolute pitch (within a quarter-tone) on various days (Deutsch, Henthorn and Dolson, 2004). It has therefore been suggested that absolute pitch may be acquired by infants when they learn to speak in a tone language (and possibly also by infants when they learn to speak in a pitch stress language). Such individuals may be more likely to acquire absolute pitch for musical tones when they later receive musical training .

Absolute pitch - Nature or Nurture?

Until the middle of the 20th century, most people believed that musical ability itself was an inborn talent. Some scientists believe absolute pitch is due to genetics and are trying to map the gene for it; others believe most humans do not typically develop this ability because there is no social use for it, and are trying to teach adults how to develop it. The debate is not yet settled, as data on this highly specialized ability are quite scarce. It is nevertheless becoming increasingly apparent that people can acquire perfect pitch (at least for single instruments) through learning. It has also become apparent that a critical period in early childhood is involved in the acquisition of absolute pitch; this critical period may be related to that for acquisition of speech. Pitch recognition is now taught at the Eastman School of music and various "perfect pitch" courses have been offered since the early 1980s.

Many musicians, and most jazz musicians, have quite good relative pitch, a skill which can certainly 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. Unlike true perfect pitch, this skill is dependent on a recently-perceived tonal center.