I'll be adding to it chronologically as I proceed. I don't always notify of updates to this page, so keep an eye out!
I also have a comments section for ideas which occur to me along the way.
This page is for 19th and 20th century research. 21st century stuff is on the next page.
Please note that all English translations are the exclusive copyright of Acoustic Learning Inc and are not in the public domain.
Ellis, A.J. (1876). On the sensitivities of the ear to pitch and change of pitch in music. Royal Musical Association Proceedings, 3, 1-32.
A product of its time which asks the question, "how well can people discriminate tones and intervals?" There's a story at its conclusion which gives anecdotal support to current research: the case of two tuning forks, which are tuned to the same pitch, but one of which is of slightly thinner metal. That fork produced a slightly "sharper" sound, even though it was the same pitch, and people hearing both forks would judge it to be the higher. Yet people with absolute pitch were not so fooled. Anecdotally, this seems to support the idea that there are infinite variations of "height" for any given pitch, as well as the observation that absolute listeners attend to the fundamental frequency.
Von Kries, J. (1892). Über das absolute Gehör. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 3, 257-79.
Von Kries, J. (1892). About absolute hearing. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 3, 257-79. Translated by Aruffo, C.
Naubert, A. (1898). Das Tonbewußtsein, seine Entwicklung und seine Pflege. Der Klavierlehrer, 21, 117-8, 129-31. [I]
Jadassohn, S. A Practical Course in Ear Training or A Guide for Acquiring Relative and Absolute Pitch. (2nd edition, Campbell, L.R.B., ed. and trans.) Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel. (Translation published 1905)
A simple ear training method based on intervals and chords. The author suggests that the origins of absolute pitch were in early childhood, when "impressions... are stronger and more lasting than those formed at any time of life," but that it could be learned in adulthood by memorizing one "fundamental" tone and relating all other tones to it.
Meyer, M. (1899). Is the memory of absolute pitch capable of development by training? Psychological Review, 6, 514-516.
Abraham, O. (1901). Das absolute tonbewußtsein. Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 3, 1-86.
Abraham, O. (1901). Absolute tone consciousness. Translated by Aruffo, C.Whipple, G.M. (1901). An analytic study of the memory image and the process of judgment in the discrimination of clangs and tones. American Journal of Psychology, 12, 410-57.
This, combined with its 1902 conclusion, is the prequel to "Studies in pitch discrimination." In this article, Whipple "...endeavored to present an exhaustive analytical investigation... of the mental processes involved in the discrimination of simple tones and clangs as conditioned by time-interval and by the mental constitution of the observer."
Whipple, G.M. (1902). An analytic study of the memory image and the process of judgment in the discrimination of clangs and tones (concluded). American Journal of Psychology, 13, 219-68.
See above.
Whipple, G.M. (1903). Studies in pitch discrimination. American Journal of Psychology, 14, 289-309.
Auerbach, F. (1906). Das absolute Tonbewußtsein und die Musik. Sammelbände des Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 8, 105-12.
Auerbach, F. (1906). Absolute tone consciousness and music. Sammelbände des Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 8, 105-12. Translated by Aruffo, C.
Abraham, O. (1907). Das absolute Tonbewußtsein und die Musik. Sammelbände des Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 8, 486-91.
Abraham, O. (1907). Absolute tone consciousness and music. Sammelbände des Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 8, 486-91. Translated by Aruffo, C.Boggs, L.P. (1907). Studies in absolute pitch. American Journal of Psychology, 18, 194-205.
Altmann, G. (1908). Das absolut Gehör. Neue Musik-Zeitung, 29, 493-94.
Liebscher, A. (1908). Zur Diskussion über das Thema "Absolutes Gehör". Neue Musik-Zeitung, 29, 494-5.
Müller, F. (1908). Das absolut Gehör. Neue Musik-Zeitung, 30, 57-8.
Reimann, L. (1908). Das absolut Gehör. Neue Musik-Zeitung, 29, 515-6.
Urbach, O. (1908). Das absolut Gehör. Neue Musik-Zeitung, 29, 425-8.
Urbach, O. (1908). Schlußwort zum "Absoluten Gehör". Neue Musik-Zeitung, 30, 58-9.
Wilson, C.W. (1911). The gift of absolute pitch. Musical Opinion & Music Trade Review, 34, 753-4.
A non-scientific article by an author who has absolute pitch and thinks that no one else can learn it. He illustrates the exact same situations that will be echoed in future decades: absolute pitch is convenient as a pitch pipe, it makes transposition difficult, and hearing something out of tune is irritating. He does describe one unusual example, in which he and a friend (also with absolute pitch) heard a piano which seemed to be playing in the key of G, but which they felt was an out-of-tune Ab.
Riemann, H. (1912). Tonhöhenbewußtsein und Intervallurteil. Zeitschrift Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 13, 269-72.
Riemann, H. (1912). Tone consciousness and interval judgment. Zeitschrift Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 13, 269-72. Translated by Aruffo, C.I found this short article very difficult to translate-- and the translation may yet be highly inaccurate-- because the author has completely misunderstood Révész's description of "Quality" and "Height", and therefore his arguments seem to me to be complete nonsense.
Révész, G. (1913). Über die beiden Arten des absoluten Gehörs. Zeitschrift International Musikgesellschaft, 14, 130-7.
Révész, G. (1913). About the two kinds of absolute hearing. Zeitschrift International Musikgesellschaft, 14, 130-7. Translated by Aruffo, C.
Smith, F.O. (1914). The effect of training in pitch discrimination. Psychological Monographs, 16(3), (Whole No. 69), 67-103.
Köhler, W. (1915). Akustische Untersuchungen III. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 72, 1-192.
Copp, E.F. (1916). Musical ability. Journal of Heredity, 7, 297-305.
From her experience in teaching small children, Copp argues that musical ability is not a genetic gift, but that it can be developed in any child through proper training.
Kramer, A.W. (1916). To teach absolute pitch by color sense. Musical America, 25(1), 19.
A fellow named Maryon developed a method of learning absolute pitch by association with colors. Kramer's article is a non-scientific essay-- practically an advertisement-- in which the author claims that because the "great English chemist" Sir William Crookes has scientifically demonstrated that auditory tone and visual color were actually the same thing, association of color and pitch will naturally lead to absolute pitch.
Baird, J.W. (1917). Memory for absolute pitch. In Studies in Psychology, Titchner commemorative volume. Wilson: Worcester, 43-78.
Cameron, E.H. (1917). Effects of practice in the discrimination and singing of tones. Psychological Monographs, 23(3) (Whole #100), 159-180.
Perfield, E.E. (1917). Absolute pitch. The Musician, 22, 413.
A music teacher expresses her anger at the existence of absolute pitch.
Rich, G.J. (1919). A study of tonal attributes. American Journal of Psychology, 30, 121-64.
Kobelt, J. (1920). Das Dauergednächtis für absoluten Tonhöhen. Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 2, 144-74.
Seashore, C.E. (1920). The inheritance of musical talent. The Musical Quarterly, 6, 586-98.
Gough, E. (1922). The effects of practice on judgments of absolute pitch. Archives of Psychology, 7(47), 1-93.
Mal'tseva, E.A. (1925). Absoliutnyi slukh i metody evo razvitiia (absolute pitch and the methods of its development). In: Sbornik rabot, Gosudarstvennyi institut muzykal'noi nauki, Fiziologopsikhologicheskaia sektsia, Moskva, 33-55.
Maltzew, C. (1925). Absolutes Tonbewußtsein und die Methoden seiner Entwicklung. Moskau 1925 (Russ. Sbornik Gimu, Nr. 1.)
Mull, H.K. (1925). The acquisition of absolute pitch. American Journal of Psychology, 36, 469-93.
Bartholomew, W. (1925). A study of absolute pitch ability. MA thesis, George Washington University.
Harris, C.A. (1926). Can I develop absolute pitch? The Etude, 44, 721-2.
The author suggests that absolute pitch can be developed by memorizing tones' physical positions on the piano keyboard.
Wellek, A. (1927). Das absolute Gehör und der Charakter der Töne und Tonarten. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 8, 267-70.
Wellek, A. (1927). Absolute hearing and the character of tones and keys. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 8, 267-70. Translated by Aruffo, C.Wellek, A. (1927). Drei Typen des Absoluten Gehörs. Monatsblätten des Anbruchs, 10.
Maltzew, C.v. (1928). Das absolute Tonbewußtsein. Psychotechnische Zeitschrift, 3, 108-11.
Maltzew, C.v. (1928). Absolute tone consciousness. Psychotechnische Zeitschrift, 3, 108-11. Translated by Aruffo, C.Triepel, H. (1928). Falsche Beurteilung Gehörter Töne. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 66, 497-500.
Triepel, H. (1928). Incorrect judgment of perceived tones. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 66, 497-500. Translated by Aruffo, C.Truman, S.R. and Wever, E.G. (1928). The judgment of pitch as a function of the series. University of California Publications in Psychology, 3, 215-23.
These authors were mainly interested in the question, can pitch be judged absolutely? Their premise was that, if a person was unable to hold a relative standard in memory, then they would have to start making absolute judgments as a matter of course. Their conclusion? Yes, pitch can be judged absolutely.
Ward, W.E. (1928). Absolute pitch. Musical Times, 69(1025), 642.
Wever, E.G. and Zener, K.E. (1928). The method of absolute judgment in psychophysics. Psychological Review, 35, 466-93.
Gebhardt, M. (1929). Beitrag zur Eforschung des absoluten Gehörs im vorschulpflichtigen Kindesalter. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 68, 273-94.
Gebhardt, M. (1929). The contribution of absolute pitch research to compulsory preschool training. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 68, 273-94. (Translated by Aruffo, C.)Hein, H. (1929). Über dei Möglichkeit eines allgemeinen latenten absoluten Tonbewußtsein. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 14, 414-9.
Ruckmick, C.A. (1929). A new classification of tonal qualities. Psychological Review, 36, 172-80.
Weinert, L. Unterschungen Über das absolute Gehör. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 73, 1-128.
Weinert, L. Analysis of absolute pitch. Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 73, 1-128. (Gisted translation.)Wellek, A. (1929). Das Farbenhören im Lichte der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 11, 470-97.
Willgoose, F.L. (1929). Absolutely pitch and its attainment. The Etude, 47, 144.
The author suggests that absolute pitch can be learned by first memorizing one tone and then attending to sounds in your environment, such as a clock tower, car horn, or mosquito buzz. (No, that's not a typo-- the article is titled "absolutely pitch.")
Chiloff, C.L. (1930). Des éléments de l'ouie absolue. Acta Oto-laryngologica, 14, 382-92.
Chiloff, C.L. (1930). The elements of absolute pitch. Acta Oto-laryngologica, 14, 382-92. Translated by Aruffo, C.Pratt, C.C. (1930). The spatial character of high and low tones. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 13, 278-85.
The authors asked their subjects to listen to tones and decide where those tones would be spatially located. The subjects consistently identified "high" and "low" tones as high or low on the imaginary ruler provided, so the authors concluded that tones are perceived as having a spatial character. However, as Dimmick (1934) would later demonstrate, this characteristic is not actually associated with physical space but with an arbitrary spectrum which can be mapped, analogously, to spatial representation.
Slonimsky, N. (1930). Absolute pitch. The American Mercury, 21, 244-7.
A non-scientific article which says the same things that articles today would say: absolute listeners can recognize pitches; they don't like out-of-tune songs; they have difficulty transposing.
Wellek, A. (1930). Zur Typologie des Gehörs und des Musikerlebens überhaupt: neuestes über das absolute Gehör. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 13, 21-8.
Wellek, A. (1930). The typology of hearing and general musical experience: the latest on absolute pitch. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 13, 21-8. Translated by Aruffo, C.
Petran, L.A. (1932). An experimental study of pitch recognition. Psychological Monographs, 6, 1-124.
A thorough review of the existing literature of absolute pitch, plus a couple of experiments (one on hearing tones, one on production of tones).
Cheslock, L. (1934). Some notes on perfect pitch. The American Mercury, 31, 459-60.
A non-scientific article similar in style and content to Slonimsky's from 1930-- but more strongly emphasizing the non-musical nature of absolute pitch.
Dimmick, F.L. and Gaylord, E. (1934). The dependence of auditory localization on pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17, 593-9.
The experimenters played "high" and "low" tones for their subjects, at high and low positions in a room, by using speakers that moved on noiseless pulleys. They found that the subjects were indifferent to the vertical position of the tones, and thus did not consistently judge "high" tones to be physically "high" or "low" tones to be physically "low". This experiment contradicts the hypothesis that tones are spatially "high" or "low", and strongly supports the notion that "high" and "low" are entirely arbitrary orientations.
Ekdahl, A.G. and Boring, E.G. (1934). The pitch of tonal masses. American Journal of Psychology, 46, 452-5.
The authors played multitonal clusters to their subjects and observed that the subjects were confidently able to assign a single pitch value to the sound, even though the cluster was nonetheless perceived as a cluster and not a single tone. The pitch value assigned was approximately the mean of the frequencies of all the tones being played.
Kelly, E.L. (1934). An experimental attempt to produce artificial chromesthesia by the technique of the conditioned response. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17, 315-41.
The author attempted to teach subjects to associate colors and tones by playing tones and showing colors to passive observers. At the conclusion of the experiment, "there was simply no observable evidence of any kind that the subjects had engaged in the experiment for the past seven weeks... Without question, the results turned out negative. They are so distinctly so that the writer has no hesitancy in concluding that it is impossible to produce chromesthesis in normally non-synaesthetic adults by the technique of the conditioned response." I would add that this is a methodical issue, and restate his conclusion by saying that trying to teach note-naming by color association is an entirely ineffective procedure. (This, of course, has not stopped people from trying.)
Stevens, S.S. (1934). Tonal density. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17, 585-92.
The author wants to show that "density" is a separate, recognizable aspect of tonal sound. You can imagine what he's talking about if you think of a low piano tone and its loose, wide quality, versus a high piano tone with its tight, narrow feeling. He spends eight pages describing his subjects' ability to perceive this "density" attribute-- verifying, in his view, that the attribute does exist-- but he doesn't know what the significance of this attribute might be.
Stevens, S.S. (1934). The attributes of tones. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20, 457-9.
The author claims that tones possess the attributes of "pitch, loudness, volume, and density," each of which he explores in his other papers from this same year. In this particular paper, he observers that the apparent pitch of a tone will shift when its intensity is increased-- low tones get lower and high tones get higher-- and through experimentation determined that "the frequency at which pitch remains constant for all values of energy was found to lie between 3100 and 3300 cycles [musically, F7-G7]... It is significant that in this range of frequencies the sensitivity of the ear is maximal. In other words, the pitch of a tone is shifted away from the region of greatest sensitivity when the intensity of the tone is increased and toward the the region of greatest sensitivity when the intensity is decreased."
Stevens, S.S. (1934). Are tones spatial? American Journal of Psychology, 46, 145-7.
The author wondered if tones would be perceived as "larger" or "smaller" based on their apparent "volume". By all reports, they weren't. The author suggests from his observations that tones do not represent spatial figures.
Turner, W.D. and DeSilva, H.R. (1934). The perception of color and contour: An unusual abnormal case. American Journal of Psychology, 46, 537-57.
A detailed case study of a young man with color anomia.
Wedell, C.H. (1934). The nature of absolute judgment of pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17, 485-503.
Wedell wondered if previous absolute-pitch training experiments were causing their subjects to memorize individual sounds, or if the subjects were using those sounds as absolute reference points for knowledge of the entire sound scale. He devised a training experiment in which subjects used numbers to identify pitches (specifically, the number of the pitches' frequencies), and decided that they are learning a referent scale rather than isolated sensory experiences. Here are his conclusions:
1. Relatively unmusical observers can learn to increase their accuracy in assigning pitch numbers to pure tones.
2. The greatest increase in ability takes place during the first few practice sessions.
3. The limit of ability reached in this experiment was an average error of about three semitones.
4. The course of the learning process is very irregular, and there are large individual differences.
5. Unmusical observers can learn accurately and easily to recognize tones that are eight and one third semitones apart, but they fail to learn to judge the tones correctly when the interval is decreased to five and one half semitones or less.
6. Observers build up a subjective scale in which they can place unfamiliar tones as accurately as familiar ones.
7. Contrary to previous experimental results, the greatest average error was made in identifying tones from the middle of the scale, the size of the error gradually decreasing toward the ends.
Boring, E.G. and Stevens, S.S. (1936). The nature of tonal brightness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22, 514-21.
Stevens spent a couple years exploring subjective attributes of tones-- one of them "brightness." In this paper, they test observers' ability to perceive this attribute; they conclude that it is essentially identical to "density", and assert that "density" is a more appropriate term.
Snow, W.B. (1936). Change of pitch with loudness at low frequencies. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 8(1), 14-19.
The author observed that, although there is a general downward shift in perceived pitch when a low tone's volume is increased, there was a significant difference between observers in the amount of shift. This provides further support for the apparent fact that frequency is physical and pitch is psychological.
Bachem, A. (1937). Various types of absolute pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 9(2), 146-151.
Bachem here makes a distinction between "genuine" absolute pitch, which is an immediate and accurate judgment of "tone chroma", and "pseudo" absolute pitch, which relies on other characteristics or factors such as tone height, relative association, or kinesthetic feeling (such as throat placement). Within each group he makes further divisions indicative of the quality and speed of judgment. He further speculates about ways that the ear's cochlear mechanism might cause absolute pitch. This paper may represent the first usage of the term "chroma" to refer to absolute pitch sensation.
Wellek, A. (1938). Das absolute Gehör und seine Typen. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde-Beihefte, 83, 1-368.
Lewis, D. (1939). Pitch as a psychological phenomenon. Volume of Proceedings of the Music Teachers' National Association, 14, 121-33.
"My main purpose, throughout this discussion, has been to emphasize the fact that pitch is an attribute of auditory experience and that it is not determined in any simple manner by frequency or any other single characteristic of acoustic waves."
Bachem, A. (1940). The genesis of absolute pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 11(4), 434-9.
A skeptical Bachem recreated the previous experiments by Meyer and Mull. He claimed that, although the subjects became able to recognize and name tones, the subjects' ability to do so was slow and inefficient, and thus was clearly not comparable to those people who naturally possessed the ability. Consequently, Bachem claimed that the ability could not be taught to adults and was, instead, purely hereditary.
Boring, E.G. (1940). The size of the differential limen for pitch. American Journal of Psychology, 53, 450-5.
How many licks does it take to the center of a Tootsie pop? Well, obviously, it depends on your methodology. Boring wonders into how many pitch categories the human ear is capable of segmenting the musical pitch range, and discovers that it's also a matter of method-- who your subjects are, how you present tones to them, and how the judgments are solicited and processed, among other possible factors. Boring suggests that the limit is more than a scientifically-demonstrated 1500 but considerably less than a physically-postulated 11,000.
Jeffress, L.A. (1940). The pitch of complex tones. American Journal of Psychology, 53, 240-50.
That's "complex" as opposed to "sinusoidal"-- that is, a tone composed of various partials. The authors wanted to find out if the "missing fundamental" effect was due to a pattern-completion effect, such as in vision when you see three L's and your mind turns them into a triangle. Their results did not support this hypothesis, but did provide further support for the idea that pitch is not determined by the "pattern of stimulation of the basilar membrane."
Komatsu, A. (1940). Experiment on training of discrimination in absolute pitch. Kyoiku Shinri Kenkyu, 15, 203-5.
Petran, L.A. (1940). The nature and meaning of absolute pitch. Volume of Proceedings of the Music Teachers' National Association, 3, 144-52. [I]Seashore, C.E. (1940). Acquired pitch vs. absolute pitch. Music Educators Journal, 26(6), 18.
Seashore says that "acquired pitch"-- that is, "a serviceable memory for the tones of the musical scale"-- is a fairly common ability which is not the same as "absolute pitch." He briefly describes the difference between the two abilities.
Stevens, S.S. and Volkmann, J. (1940). The relation of pitch to frequency: A revised scale. American Journal of Psychology, 53, 329-353.
An experiment designed to illustrate and support the principles of the mel scale.
Werner, H. (1940). Musical "micro-scales" and "micro-melodies." Journal of Psychology, 10, 149-56.
Visual objects are recognizably the same when they are displaced in space or adjusted in size. The author compares visual displacement to musical transposition, and wonders if (in terms of size) the contour of a visual object is comparable to the contour of a melodic form. To test this, he "shrank" melodies into microtonal steps-- .12 of a semitone each-- and trained his subjects in this new scale. After the training, the subjects did indeed adapt to the microscale, to the extent that they even seemed to perceive octave equivalence and typical major/minor patterns in the new scale.
Howells, T.H. (1944). The experimental development of color-tone synesthesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 34, 87-103.
The author wondered if Lowell's 1934 study was influenced by the fact that the subjects were passive, and constructed an experiment in which the subjects actively made pitch-color judgments. He did seem to find improvement in pitch-color associations, but also discovered that (once the associations had been made) the perceived color was affected by the tone being played.
Jeffress, L.A. (1944). Variations in pitch. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 63-76.
This study is a product of its time and its context-- that is, the author wanted to prove something about the place theory of pitch, but he makes assumptions about what he's arguing against and what he's attempting to support, and those assumptions make his publication confusing for a modern reader. Suffice to say his results demonstrated that, by presenting the same frequencies to different ears at different times under different conditions, different pitches were perceived.
Turnbull, W.W. (1944). Pitch discrimination as a function of tonal duration. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 34, 302-14.
The author attempts to develop and test a mathematical formula which describes "the relationship between the duration of a tone and the ease with which its pitch can be distinguished." All we need to know is that when duration or intensity decreases, the tones become more difficult to tell apart, but tones of only half a cycle can nonetheless be distinguished.
Wyatt, R.F. (1945). Improvability of pitch discrimination. Psychological Monographs, 58(2), (Whole No. 267), 1-58.
In some respects this is yet another study which shows that adults who are trained in pitch discrimination become better at it-- although the study seems to make no distinction between pitch discrimination and pitch identification, and appears to consider pitch sensitivity to be measured by ability to notice small differences of pitch. Where this study seems to differ from other musical-training studies is in its explanation of why certain subjects don't do as well as others-- rather than postulate physiological or psychological limits on human ability, Wyatt says instead that the training method is probably at fault, and that "remedial methods" should be developed for the subjects who show less capability with the standard method. As far as I've seen, Wyatt is the first person to have explicitly suggested this.
Riker, B.L. (1946). The ability to judge pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 36, 331-46.
The author tested both musical and unmusical observers to see how well they'd be able to recognize piano and pure-tone sounds. The musical listeners, unsurprisingly, were better at it. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this study is the consistent observation that musical observers found it easier to recognize middle-range tones and non-musical observers found it easier to recognize the highest and lowest tones. [The last few pages of this article were torn out of the copy I had.]
Neu, D.M. (1947). A critical review of the literature on "absolute pitch". Psychological Bulletin, 44, 249-266.
After exhaustively examining the literature to date, Neu concludes that absolute pitch can be learned in childhood, and further asserts that the ability is "nothing more than a fine degree of accuracy of pitch discrimination."
Bachem, A. (1948). Chroma fixation at the ends of the musical frequency scale. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 20(5), 704-705.
Bachem conducted tests to discover that people with absolute pitch have trouble detecting the chroma of tones above 4000Hz (approximately C8), and that at 5000Hz the chroma "becomes stationary", although tone height is still perceptibly changing. The data did not indicate a lower limit, but Bachem suggested this could be due to a "lack of proper equipment for filtering."
Bachem, A. (1948). Note on Neu's review of the literature on absolute pitch. Psychological Bulletin, 45, 161-2.
Bachem points out that Neu has completely overlooked tone chroma and height as tonal attributes; he also reiterates his belief that absolute pitch is genetic, not learned.
Harris, J.D. (1948). Pitch discrimination and absolute pitch. USN Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Research Report, Project NM 003 026, 30 January.
Neu, D.M. (1948). Absolute pitch: A reply to Bachem. Psychological Bulletin, 45, 534-5.
Although Neu responds by claiming that tone chroma and height are physical properties of a tone and are therefore irrelevant-- an argument which I find uncompelling-- Neu also makes some important logical points which remain relevant:
"I have found no evidence for saying that two types of pitch [perception] are learned and the third is a gift."
"Failure to train an individual to have absolute pitch does not mean that it is inherited."
Bachem, A. (1950). Tone height and tone chroma as two different pitch qualities. Acta Psychologica, 7, 80-88.
The author makes the case by describing different situations in which one of these qualities is perceptible (but not the other).
Brammer, L.M. (1951). Certain aspects of violinists' absolute pitch. Volume of Proceedings of the Music Teachers' National Association, 43, 153-7.
Essentially a restatement of his other publication (and of the same experiment). In this writing, though, he advances the notion that neither "absolute" nor "perfect" is a good term, because someone with the ability is no better at discriminating tones; in its place, he recommends the term "positive pitch".
Brammer, L.M. (1951). Sensory cues in pitch judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 41, 336-40.
How do people make pitch judgments? By asking his subjects to tune a string to A440, Brammer got the following responses: absolute listeners used chroma, and non-absolute listeners used "reference tones, auditory imagery, and kinesthetic cues... the more accurate the [subject], the less he seemed to depend on these extraneous cues."
Carpenter, A. (1951). A case of absolute pitch. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3, 92-3.
In testing a "research student in zoology and a keen amateur pianist and singer", Carpenter discovered that the subject named the pitch class immediately, but volunteered the octave only after some hesitation. Although the subject made no octave errors, the subject's behavior suggests to Carpenter a support for Bachem's view of chroma and height as two distinct tonal qualities.
Oakes, W.F. (1951). An alternative interpretation of "absolute pitch". Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Sciences, 54, 396-406.
The "alternative interpretation" is that absolute pitch is a behavioral response to environment, rather than a "musical ability" or some genetic predisposition. The author explains how, in his view, pitch-naming appears no different from other behavioral responses. He also spends a good part of the paper dissecting the genetics argument, with this splendid little quote in the middle of it to illustrate the geneticists' reasoning: "Why did the event occur? Because the organism had a predisposition. How do you know the organism had a predisposition? Because the event occurred."
Rossman, I.L. and Goss, A.E. (1951). The acquired distinctiveness of cues: The role of discriminative verbal responses in facilitating the acquisition of discriminative motor responses. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42, 173-82.
If the title of this article sounds to you like learning to play the piano, then you see why this article intrigues me. In it, the authors asked five groups of subjects to learn specific unique movements for each 12 different sounds (nonsense syllables) that had been paired with visual figures. Those who were trained to know the verbal sound for each visual figure (phonemes and graphemes) learned the motor response significantly faster than those who did not. It seems probable to me that-- whether the stimulus sound is a pitch or a letter-- these findings would very probably inform piano training methods.
van Krevelen, A. (1951). The ability to make absolute judgments of pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42, 207-15.
In two separate procedures, the author asked absolute listeners to recognize and produce certain musical tones. The subjects were "more consistent" in recognizing than they were in production; if you accept that the subjects are categorizing tones rather than specifying a particular frequency, this result makes perfect sense.
Bachem, A. (1954). Time factors in relative and absolute pitch determination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 26(5), 751-3.
Bachem asked his subjects to remember a target tone for time intervals of one second to one week. For the shorter time intervals, there was little performance difference between subjects with or without absolute pitch; for the longer intervals, there was a marked difference, which Bachem attributes to different memory strategies (relative comparison versus chroma identification).
Christman, R.J. (1954). Shifts in pitch as a function of prolonged stimulation with pure tones. American Journal of Psychology, 67, 484-91.
The author determined that playing a tone for a subject would change the subject's perception of any tone that followed. Low tones made the next tone seem higher; high tones made the next tone seem lower. The amount of shift depended on the intensity and duration of the first tone.
Cohen, J., Hansel, C.E.M., and Sylvester, J.D. (1954). Interdependence of temporal and auditory judgments. Nature, 174, 642-4.
The authors simultaneously demonstrated that listeners altered their judgment of a pitch sound based on its temporal presentation (relative to other tones) but didn't alter their judgment based on its spatial presentation (again, relative to other tones). The general thrust of the article's title represents what is, I think, support of the model of music as a wholly temporal structure.
Deutsch, M. (1954). Acquiring absolute pitch. The Instrumentalist, 8(9), 16-17.
A non-scientific article in which the author recommends memorizing the sounds of tuning forks.
Hartman, E.B. (1954). The influence of practice and pitch distance between tones on the absolute identification of pitch. American Journal of Psychology, 67, 1-14.
Using a tone-memorization strategy over an eight-week period, Hartman discovered that subjects were better at remembering the tones if the tones were spaced further apart.
Bachem, A. (1955). Absolute pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27(6), 1180-1185.
A reflection on Bachem's 1937 study. This paper reiterates Bachem's main definitions (pseudo, quasi, and genuine absolute pitch), reasserts that tone chroma is the basis of absolute pitch ability, and reiterates his insistence that past "absolute pitch" training successes have taught pseudo-pitch and not the real thing. The new feature here is that Bachem seems to have backed off from his insistence that the ability is solely a genetic endowment, as he acknowledges that early musical experience can be a factor.
Oakes, W.F. (1955). An experimental study of pitch naming and pitch discrimination reactions. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 86, 237-59.
In this experiment, Oakes is responding mainly to Neu's 1947 assertion that absolute pitch seems to be a refined ability of pitch discrimination. Oakes' experiment appears to adequately demonstrate that although pitch discrimination and pitch naming may be related skills, they are not the same skill (in that one is not a function of on the other). Additionally, he finds this result: "...the relationship between octave error incidence and accuracy at [pitch naming] is closer than that between half-step error incidence and accuracy at [pitch naming]. However, a relationship was found between both types of error and accuracy at [pitch naming]."
Brown, F.G. and Archer, E.J. (1956). Concept identification as a function of task complexity and distribution of practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 5, 316-21.
Subjects were asked to categorize random geometric shapes according to certain rules. I noticed this article because one of its conclusions supports my assertion about absolute pitch learning: an increase in irrelevant stimulus information makes the task more difficult. However, I notice two other observations which, if applicable, are intriguing-- that "positional" and "shade" qualities were the most difficult to judge. This was particularly interesting to me, considering that relative pitch is traditionally taught as qualities of position and of "height" (which has been repeatedly demonstrated to be psychologically analogous to shade).
Meyer, M. (1956). On memorizing absolute pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 28(4), 718-719.
This is the same Meyer who conducted the 1899 study, now responding to Bachem's 1955 publication. In this short letter to the editor, Meyer says that Bachem is an idiot for proposing that "'genuine' absolute pitch memory... is not a memory of tone height at all but rather memory of 'a pitch quality common to all c's, all d's, etc.'" About his own 1899 study, Meyer says "We never noticed any 'tone chroma', but perhaps we were just too dull for that." Although Meyer meant this sarcastically, the irony is apparent.
Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
Simpson, R.H., Quinn, M., and Ausubel, D.P. (1956). Synesthesia in children: Association of colors with pure tone frequencies. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 88, 95-103.
Approximately 900 children were used as subjects. Tones were played for the children, and the children were asked to name the colors which the tones made them think of. Consistently, the children chose yellow and green for high tones, red and orange for middle tones, and blue and violet for low tones. The association between "bright" colors and tones or "dark" colors and tones is evident.
Corso, J.F. (1957). Absolute judgments of musical tonality. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 29(1), 138-44.
Subjects at the college level were asked to identify the key signature of three different patterns: an ascending scale, the same eight scale degrees played out of order, and I-IV-V-I chords. The subjects, including one with absolute pitch, performed best with the ascending scale and worst with the randomized scale. The results seem to imply some kind of structural cueing, rather than pitch choice, as that which establishes tonality.
Cramer, E.M. and Huggins, W.H. (1958). Creation of pitch through binaural interaction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 30, 413-7.
Aizawa, M. (1961). An investigation of the judgment of absolute pitch by the group test. Tohoku Psychologica Folia, 20, 1-12.
The authors wondered how absolute pitch ability could be tested when nobody is really sure how to define the ability. They gamely ran groups of children, of different ages, through tone-naming tests; although they didn't reach any monumental conclusions, they noticed that pitch identification seemed to be different than pitch discrimination, and that across all categories girls were better than boys at naming tones.
Beck, J. and Shaw, W.A. (1961). The scaling of pitch by the method of magnitude estimation. American Journal of Psychology, 74, 242-51.
Caroll, J.B. and Greenberg, J.H. (1961). Two cases of synesthesia for color and musical tonality associated with absolute pitch ability. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 13, 48.
Jeffress, L.A. (1962). Absolute pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 34(7), 987.
A brief note arguing against the genetic theory of absolute pitch acquisition; Jeffress compares this ability to the imprinting shown in ducklings, and carries it through to this conclusion (which is essentially the same as Levitin's, nearly four decades later): "The very circumstances which have caused people to believe the trait to be inherited are those which would bring about its 'imprinting'. The children of people having absolute pitch are sure to be examined early for the existence of the trait and their first fumbling steps rewarded."
Lundin, R.W. and Allen, J.D. (1962). A technique for training perfect pitch. Psychological Record, 12, 139-46.
The technique was that of playing recorded piano tones and asking the subject to press buttons corresponding to the letter name of the tone. Subjects showed improvement in their identification ability.
Salzer, F. Structural Hearing. Dover, NY.
Bekesy, G. (1963). Three experiments concerned with pitch perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 35(4), 602-6.
Although all three experiments were designed to support place theory (pitch perception as a localized excitation of the basilar membrane), the experiments did demonstrate (with sound filters and other effects) that "pitch" is more than just the fundamental spectral frequency of a sound.
Campbell, R.A. and Small, A.M. (1963). Effect of practice and feedback on frequency discrimination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 35(10), 1511-1514.
The frequency discrimination was a same/different task: was the variable tone the same as the standard? The authors had two groups of subjects; one group was given feedback in their initial session, and the other group received it starting with their second session. The first group's performance was worse than the second group's. This is in accordance with Gibson's observations of perceptual learning-- feedback is not necessary, she noticed, because the subject self-corrects based on the evidence from further trials; the main consequence of overt feedback is its effect on the learner's morale.
Lundin, R.W. (1963). Can perfect pitch be learned? Music Educators Journal, 49(5), 49-51.
A non-scientific description of his 1962 procedure.
Ward, W.D. (1963). Absolute pitch. Sound: Its Uses and Control, 2(3), 14-21; 2(4), 33-41.
A review of the literature to date.
Shepard, R.N. (1964). Circularity in judgments of relative pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 36(12), 2346-53.
See October 26.
Bergan, J.R. (1965). Pitch perception, imagery, and regression in the service of the ego. Journal of Research in Music Education, 13(1), 15-6.
The main experiment here demonstrates that people who have more vivid imaginations have better recall for musical tones. I'm more intrigued by his statement about a sound image continuum: "as more and more qualities were subtracted from [an auditory] image, it would tend to stand less and less for a particular sound and in this respect become more general or abstract."
Fisher, F. (1965). Perfect pitch can be learned. Piano Teacher, 8, 17-20.
In this non-scientific article, the author describes how, when he was a child, his father deliberately taught him to have absolute pitch. First he was taught middle C by gold stars placed on the piano, and then his father drilled him in identifying different notes. The author had fully learned absolute pitch by the time he was six years old. The author goes on to suggest that any person should be able to learn absolute pitch by first memorizing a single tone, then another, then another.
Korpell, H.S. (1965). On the mechanism of tonal chroma in absolute pitch. American Journal of Psychology, 78, 298-300.
If an absolute listener is recognizing "tone chroma"... well, then, what is "tone chroma"? Korpell asked absolute listeners to identify tones which had fundamental frequencies that did not match their overtone structure. The subjects made judgments based on the spectral frequency rather than the tonal structure. Korpell thus concluded that "tone chroma" arises from the spectral frequency of a sound.
Talley, H. (1965). The question of absolute pitch. Clavier, 4(1), 52.
An unscientific article that says the usual things: might be inborn, but possibly learned, and relative pitch is more important to music.
Terman, M. (1965). Improvement of absolute pitch naming. Psychonomic Science, 3, 243-4.
Using a variation of Lundin's 1962 method-- introducing periods of silence to minimize relative judgments-- Terman reproduced the result that adult subjects could indeed improve their pitch-naming abilities.
Aiken, E.G. and Lau, A.W. Memory for the pitch of a tone. Perception and Psychophysics, 1, 231-3.
Geschwind, N. and Fusillo, M. (1966). Color-naming defects in association with alexia. Archives of Neurology, 15, 137-46.
A case study of a man with color anomia. The man was able to perceive colors perfectly well, but had no connection between the colors and their names. His behavior in visual matching and identification tests was similar to a non-absolute listener performing auditory matching and identification tests.
Slonimsky, N. (1966). Colors and keys. Medical Opinion & Review, 2(1), 24-31.
The author asserts that different key signatures are evocative of particular colors, and proceeds to make assignations.
Slonimsky, N. (1966). The perfect pitch. Medical Opinion & Review, 1(6), 92-96.
A non-scientific article with the author's comments about what the ability is and how it's used. Same old stuff, for the most part, except that he does ask the question, why do people with absolute pitch become musicians when people who have absolute color don't become artists-- and why do those same people start out as "prodigies" and then fail to become masters? I'd answer him that people with absolute pitch learn to think in music, and they learn an instrument for the sake of expressing those thoughts; an initial competence does not translate to masterful performance developed over time. Slow and steady wins that race.
Sutcliffe, J.P and Bristow, R.A. (1966). Do rank order and scale properties remain invariant under changes in the set of scaled stimuli? Australian Journal of Psychology, 18, 26-40.
Although I'm skeptical of the authors' choice of evaluated stimuli-- photographs of men, which were to be ranked according to their "attractiveness"-- their abstracted conclusions seem, nonetheless, to be valid. Most pointedly, they describe how "if a series of different stimuli are presented, the judge's attention may be drawn to those dimensions in respect of which the stimuli vary. Over a series of presentations he may build up inductively a dimensional reference frame.. [which] can serve as a basis for the judgment of stimuli which are presented subsequently." Their experiment showed, additionally, that "the choice of criteria for judgment varies with context"-- an observation which directly supports my suggestion that note-memorization strategies may be drawing a listener's attention to the wrong criteria.
Wickelgren, W.A. (1966). Consolidation and retroactive interference in short-term recognition memory for pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72, 250-9.
A simple experiment: play a target tone of x seconds duration, followed by an interference tone of y seconds duration, followed by a comparison tone of z seconds duration. Two results did occur just as you might expect:
- When x is longer, the "memory trace" is stronger and the comparison tone is more accurately identified.
- When y is longer, the interference is stronger and the comparison tone is harder to identify.
The "consolidation" referred to in the title is this: comparison tones within 10 Hz (cycles per second) were generally judged to be identical to the target, while comparison tones of 15Hz or greater were generally recognized as different.
Bergan, J.R. (1967). The relationships among pitch identification, imagery for musical sounds, and musical memory. Journal of Research in Music Education, 15(2), 99-109.
An extension of his 1965 study; this time, he tests not only imagery but musical memory as well. Again, people who had better capacity for imagery were better able to remember tones. He argues that pitch identification is critical to musicianship because that's what allows a musician to generate his performances; more practically, he states that being able to identify tones must involve being able to imagine them in some way.
Gibson, E. J. Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development. New York: Meredith Corporation.
Cuddy, L.L. (1968). Practice effects in the absolute judgment of pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 43(5), 1069-1076.
The author conducted experiments to determine if, through repetitive exercises, adult listeners would be able to improve their ability to remember certain tones. She discovered that yes, it was possible. Additionally, it seemed that listeners with musical training improved more than those without, and piano students improved more readily than those who played other instruments.
Gardner, M. (1968). More on perfect pitch. The Instrumentalist, 23(5), 26.
A non-scientific article with the usual stuff about what perfect pitch is. Essentially the same as the American Mercury articles from the 30s (or any articles that still appear today).
Geschwind, N. and Levitzky, W. (1968). Human brain: Left-right asymmetries in temporal speech region. Science, 161(3837), 186-7.
An observation that the left planum temporale is usually one-third larger than the right.
Killian, R. (1968). Perfect pitch-- inherent or acquired? The Instrumentalist, 23(3), 34-36.
A non-scientific article in which a music instructor recommends listening to a tuning fork to memorize pitches.
Vianello, M.A.B. and Evans, S.H. (1968). Note on pitch discrimination learning. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 26, 576.
The authors conducted a note-memorization study and confirmed three hypotheses:
1. Absolute pitch discrimination improves as a function of experience even without knowledge of results
2. Once this improvement has occurred, feedback will cause further improvement
3. Performance differs across subjects.
Sergeant, D. (1969). Pitch perception and absolute pitch: Some aspects of musical development. Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading.
Sergeant, D. (1969). Experimental investigation of absolute pitch. Journal of Research in Music Education, 17(1), 135-143.
This paper is cited in most modern treatments of absolute pitch. In it, Sergeant asserts that although many people have debated whether absolute pitch is learned or genetic in origin, and have argued about whether or not absolute pitch can be learned, nobody has actually attempted to understand its "true nature." Sergeant devised experiments to test the most prominent theories of the time.
- To determine the onset of absolute pitch, Sergeant sent questionnaires to musicians and analyzed their self-reports. This analysis might have been the first direct evidence of the strong relationship between early musical training and absolute pitch ability. Furthermore, this data provided "no evidence... to support hereditarian theories," but people continue to debate the genetic/training issue all the same.
- He tested the "chroma" theory-- the listener's sensitivity to the harmonics of the musical sound (not the sensory quality of the pitch frequency)-- and determined that chroma, by this definition, "is not a decisive cue in the making of an absolute judgment of pitch."
- He tested the theory that the absolute listener has a superior physical mechanism for hearing, and discovered no significant difference in hearing sensitivity between absolute and non-absolute listeners.
- He tested the theory that absolute pitch is actually a relative pitch judgment, in which the listener compares each tone to an internalized standard (such as A440). Although he does not detail the precise method, he says that he engaged subjects in either a discrimination (relative) task or a denomination (naming) task, and the scores were uncorrelated; he took this to mean that relative and absolute skills are indeed separate.
- He asked absolute listeners to name tones, and learned that they were better at naming tones from the instruments that they used as children, even if they later switched to different instruments. They were also better at identifying tones within their own vocal ranges. He concluded that early experience of hearing and producing tonal music was the most influential in developing absolute pitch.
- He asked musicians (absolute and non-absolute listeners) to indicate whether familiar pieces were being played in the correct key. Their responses indicated that, unless absolute interpretation is explicitly applied, "...the attention of the mature musician's mind is centered upon other aspects of the music which have greater relevance for him." This, I think, is reflected in Foxton et al (2003), in that aural perception is either global or local but not both; Sergeant simply points out that the mature musician does not use absolute pitch, implying that the immature (child) musician would.
- Altogether, Sergeant concludes that there appears to be a strong connection between early musical training and absolute pitch development-- and that its existence "...can be accounted for by factors within the normal frontiers of the developmental processes of childhood."
Brady, P.T. (1970). Fixed-scale mechanism of absolute pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 48(4B), 883-887.
The author trained himself to identify pitches by memorizing a middle C and the harmonic scale-degree sounds based on middle C. As long as he was able to retain his sense of key signature, he was able to name pitches with high accuracy, but when distracting sounds were played his ability disappeared. His process, results, and experience suggest to me that he did not teach himself absolute pitch; rather, he learned what can be termed "harmonic relative pitch."
Cuddy, L.L. (1970). Training the absolute identification of pitch. Perception & Psychophysics, 8, 265-269.
Cuddy used two different tone-memorization strategies: one which trained all nine scale tones (tonic and octave both included) with equal attention, and another in which three reference tones were directly trained with the rest of the scale to be inferred. This reflects Cuddy's opinion that absolute pitch is a relative, structural judgment based on internal references. She found that although all listeners did improve in the equal-weight training, musicians improved more readily and more completely in the referent training. She concluded that this meant absolute-pitch training should focus on structural comprehension.
Deutsch, D. (1970). Tones and numbers: specificity of interference in immediate memory. Science, 168(3939), 1604-5.
Subjects were asked to remember a single pitch sound. They were then played either six musical tones or six phonemic language sounds, followed by a musical tone, and asked to judge whether the final musical tone was the same or different. The language sounds caused little interference; the musical sounds caused severe interference. The author concludes that the musical tones "obliterates memory of musical pitch". I seem to recall that this effect does not occur in subjects with absolute pitch, nor does it occur when I conduct the same experiment on myself but attempting to remember phonemic or interval sounds, so I'd append that the question of what is being remembered is significant to these experimental results.
Deutsch, M. (1970). Elements of Solfeggio: Sight Singing and Absolute Pitch. New York: Malru Music Publishers. [I]
Gainza, V.H. de. (1970). Absolute and relative hearing as innate complementary functions of man's musical ear. Council for Research in Music Education Bulletin, 22, 13-16.
A non-scientific article by a music teacher with absolute pitch. She has observed her own children and noted that the young listener is attracted by isolated sounds; she hypothesizes that there is a transition from isolated sounds to sound relationships, and suggests that all people have "rudiments" of both absolute and relative pitch.
Stanaway, R.G., Morely, T., and Anstis, S.M. (1970). Tinnitus not a reference signal in judgments of absolute pitch. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 22, 230-38.
The conclusion stated in the title is based on the authors' assessment of one subject who had both tinnitus (a constant ringing in his ears) and absolute pitch. The results indicated that the subject was not using his tinnitus as a reference tone; it is possible to use these results to support the idea that absolute pitch judgements are not based on reference to a single internalized standard tone.
Attneave, F. and Olson, R.K. (1971). Pitch as medium: a new approach to psychophysical scaling. American Journal of Psychology, 84, 147-166.
The main point of this article is to illustrate how the musical scale is indeed a legitimate scale, in the sense that each span of measurement can be considered "the same" at any point along the spectrum of values. By analogy: if you think of a yardstick, you would perceive that the distance between the markings "42 inches" and "50 inches" is the same as the distance between "2 inches" and "10 inches." Likewise, the "distance" between any two pitches of the musical scale would seem to be identical. The authors argue that this scaling is what makes transposition possible, and specifically describe this effect as the "morphophoric function of pitch."
Cuddy, L.L. (1971). Absolute judgment of musically-related pure tones. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 25, 42-55.
Cuddy asked musicians and non-musicians to make absolute judgments of sine waves. She discovered that when the tones were in musical structures (such as a triad) the musicians enjoyed an advantage in identification, but the non-musicians performed the same way regardless of how the tones were presented.
Siegel, J.A. (1971). The nature of absolute pitch. Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan.
A treatment of four hypotheses of absolute pitch ability:
- "Super discrimination", meaning an ability to make fine distinctions between any musical frequencies
- "Local discrimination", meaning an ability to make fine distinctions between certain chunks of musical frequency
- "Pitch memory", meaning an ability to remember tones in long-term storage
- "Subjective standard", meaning a handful of tones are memorized, and other tones are related to them.
Siegel conducted an experiment to test the subjective standard. Although the experimental data failed to support the hypothesis, Siegel maintained that subjective standard was still the most likely explanation. (Current research appears to indicate that all four of these hypotheses are unlikely.)Wynn, V.T. (1971). "Absolute" pitch a bimensual rhythm. Nature, 230(5292), 337.
This researcher believes that the chemical changes of the menstruation cycle have an effect on women's absolute pitch perception.
Cuddy, L.L. (1972). Comment on "Practice effects in the absolute judgment of frequency" by Heller and Auerbach. Psychonomic Science, 28, 68.
Cuddy defends her support of a method which emphasizes a reference tone; she cites Brady's 1970 experiment and asserts that "It is becoming increasingly apparent that the development of a subjective reference standard is critical for accurate pitch judgment."
Deutsch, D. (1972). Octave generalization and tune recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 11, 411-12.
The example used in this article is currently found as the "mysterious melody" on Deutsch's website. She discovered that, when a familiar tune was played in different octaves, people recognized it easily; but when the individual tones were selected from random octaves, the melody became unrecognizable. Once they were told what melody they were listening to, they were able to use octave generalization to confirm the song's identity.
Fullard, W., Snelbecker, G.E., and Wolk, S. (1972). Absolute judgments as a function of stimulus uncertainty and temporal effects: Methodological note. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 34, 379-82.
This study is more like a Simon game: subjects hear 4-6 different tones and press light-up buttons in response. The research aimed to discover how many different tones the subjects could competently juggle.
Heller, M.A. and Auerbach, C. (1972). Practice effects in the absolute judgment of frequency. Psychonomic Science, 26, 222-4.
Using a method similar to Cuddy's (1968), the authors trained adults to identify tones. From the subjects' responses, they concluded that the subjects were not memorizing tones, but were developing a relative range into which the tones could be placed and evaluated. Furthermore, the authors challenged Cuddy's suggestion that subjects who receive feedback when learning random tones (as opposed to learning only a single tone) would not improve.
MacNamara, J. (1972). Cognitive basis of language learning in infants. Psychological Review, 79, 1-13.
"The main point of the paper is that infants learn their language by first determining, independent of language, the meaning which a speaker intends to convey to them, and then by working out the relationship between the meaning and the expression they heard."
Rakowski, A. (1972). Direct comparison of absolute and relative pitch. In Bilsen, F.A. (ed), Symposium on hearing theory 105-108. Eindhoven, The Netherlands: Instituut voor Perceptie Underzoek.
The author asked subjects with and without absolute pitch to listen to a tone and then, after some delay, tune a sound to the same pitch they had previously heard. Predictably, the absolute listeners were better at this task than the non-absolute listeners, and used a consistent strategy where the non-absolute listeners did not. He makes the additional observation, though, that even when explicitly instructed to try to remember the exact tone, absolute listeners persisted in remembering the nearest pitch class and providing a response that was relative to that class (e.g. "a little higher than B").
Santa, J.L. and Ranken, H.B. (1972). Effects of verbal coding on recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 93, 268-78.
Their data show that verbal labels make it easier to recognize abstract shapes (such as graphemes). Combined with Siegel and Siegel's publication from this same year, I suspect this implies a virtuous cycle in which the existence of a set of graphemes allows absolute judgment of auditory pitch to occur, and then continued recognition of the graphemes allows the ability to develop.
Siegel, J.A. (1972). The nature of absolute pitch. In I.E. Gordon (ed.), Studies in the Psychology of Music, Vol. 8. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
A condensed version of her doctoral dissertation from the previous year.
Siegel, J.A. and Siegel, W. (1972). Absolute judgment and paired-associate learning: Kissing cousins or identical twins? Psychological Review, 79, 300-316.
"Paired-associate learning" is, well, the learning of associated pairs-- such as the letter name of a pitch sound. Absolute judgment of any kind is a paired-associate task, according to the authors, because it involves the association of some absolute value with a descriptive indicator. The authors show that absolute judgment can be improved by "chunking" (organizational strategies), and point to other studies which show how people are better able to make pitch judgments when the pitches they learn are spaced further apart.
Wynn, V.T. (1972). Measurements of small variations in "absolute" pitch. Journal of Physiology, 220, 627-37.
Wynn believes that absolute pitch perception can be influenced by chemical cycles in the body-- particularly the women's menstruation cycle. This publication presents and comments on such data.
Corliss, E.L. (1973). Remark on "Fixed-scale mechanism of absolute pitch." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 53(6), 1737-9.
Corliss has absolute pitch. This letter to the editor comments both on Brady's 1970 paper and on conversations that Corliss had with Brady. Corliss says that Brady's experience and understanding of "absolute pitch" is not the same as hers, and she illustrates various differences. (I believe Brady's training to be harmonic relative pitch, so this does not surprise me.)
Cuddy, L.L., Pinn, J., and Simons, E. (1973). Anchor effects with biased probability in absolute judgment of pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 100, 218-20.
Cuddy repeated her tone-memorization training task with new subjects; this time, although she trained them with all tones of the scale, she played one more frequently than the others. Her data appeared to indicate that the emphasized tone became a perceptual "anchor" which became a reference tone for the other tone judgments.
Elliott, L. (1973). Imagery versus repetition encoding in short- and long-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 100(2), 270-6.
Imagery is better. This has clear implications for remembering musical pieces, because it's easier to remember a musical idea than it is to remember a series of individual notes.
Sergeant, D. and Roche, S. (1973). Perceptual shifts in the auditory information processing of young children. Psychology of Music, 1(2), 39-48.
The authors asked differently-aged groups of children, from 3 to 6 years old, to remember and sing melodies, measuring the children's accuracy in melodic shape, interval size, tonality, and "pitching" (singing in the original key). These criteria were selected because they are either conceptual, relational, or sensorial. From the resultant data, "it must be concluded there there is a close inverse relationship" between a child's ability to think conceptually and their ability to retain or reproduce accurate pitch information. That is, the older a child got, the worse they became at "pitching" in favor of retaining the conceptual components of a tune.
Van Lancker, D. and Fromkin, V. (1973). Hemispheric specialization for pitch and "tone": evidence from Thai. Journal of Phonetics, 1, 101-9.
These authors don't need no fancy brain-scans-- they presented sounds to left and right ears and recorded which ear showed an advantage for processing particular sounds. Their data shows the same result as Gandour's brain scans would thirty years following: "...pitch discrimination is lateralized to the left hemisphere when the pitch differences are linguistically processed."
Witelson, S.F. and Pallie, W. (1973). Left hemisphere specialization for language in the newborn: Neuroanatomical evidence of asymmetry. Brain, 96(3), 641-6.
Back in the days when scientists had to cut up dead brains instead of scanning live ones, these authors examined the brains of deceased infants who had died of natural causes, prior to any linguistic experience; they discovered that the left side of the planum temporale was already significantly larger than the right.
Wynn, V.T. (1973). Absolute pitch in humans: Its variations and possible connections with other known rhythmic phenomena. Progress in Neurobiology, 1(2), 111-50.
The "rhythmic phenomena" he's referring to are human hormonal and chemical cycles-- mainly the female menstrual cycle. Fortunately, this publication seems to be the last word on this particular subject.
Baggaley, J. (1974). Measurement of absolute pitch. Psychology of Music, 2(2), 11-17.
The author suggests that in order to distinguish between real and "pseudo" absolute pitch ability, a test should analyze not only the subject's accuracy but also their swiftness of response.
Deutsch, D. and Roll, P.L. (1974). Error patterns in delayed pitch comparison as a function of relational context. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 103(5), 1027-34.
The subjects were played a standard tone and a comparison tone; however, there were some extra tones thrown in before the comparison tone. Sometimes the extra tones reoriented the listener to a different key signature, and sometimes they didn't; in every case, there was a significant tendency to judge the tones by their scale degree quality rather than their absolute sound.
Harris, Georgina Bernice. (1974). Categorical perception and absolute pitch. Master's thesis, University of Western Ontario, Canada.
The author speculated that if absolute listeners were listening categorically, then the function of their responses to a magnitude-judgment task would take on a step appearance instead of a curved one. And it did. One of the more interesting results is that when she explicitly instructed the absolute listeners to remember a tone only by its exact magnitude, they nonetheless persisted in remembering it as being slightly sharp or flat versus a standard musical tone.
Leshowitz, B., and Green, D.M. (1974). Comments on "Absolute judgment and paired-associate learning: Kissing cousins or identical twins?" by J.A. Siegel and W. Siegel. Psychological Review, 81, 177-9.
The authors argue that Siegel is promoting a misconception of memory for sensory stimuli.
Siegel, J.A. (1974). Sensory and verbal coding strategies in subjects with absolute pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 103, 37-44.
Subjects with and without absolute pitch were asked to remember and compare tones which were within or across specific pitch categories. That is, the two comparison tones were either 1/10 of a semitone apart or were a full pitch class different. When presented with two different tones within the same pitch class, absolute listeners used a sensory memory strategy, and their performance declined to match that of the non-absolute subjects.
Siegel, W. and Siegel, J.A. (1974). The role of memory in stimulus identification: A reply to B. Leshowitz and D.M. Green. Psychological Review, 81, 180-2.
A defense of their earlier paper, asserting that their hypotheses and conclusions are valid.
Siegel, W., Siegel, J.A., Harris, G., and Sopo, R. (1974). Categorical perception of pitch by musicians with relative and absolute pitch. (Research Bulletin No. 305). University of Western Ontario: London, Ontario.
Carroll, J.B. (1975). Speed and accuracy of absolute pitch judgments: Some latter day results. Educational Testing Service Research Bulletin (RB-75-35). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Fulgosi, A., Bacun, D., and Zaja, B. (1975). Absolute identification of two-dimensional tones. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 6, 484-6.
The authors began with the statement "...it seems reasonable to expect that the ability of subjects to identify two-dimensional tones (tones differing in pitch and loudness) should be better than their ability to identify one-dimensional tones." The authors expected that, by adding a second dimension, their subjects would become able to recognize more tones. But the authors hadn't counted on the result that the subjects recognized tones that differed only in loudness (and not pitch) as different tones. So the subjects may have been able to recognize a greater quantity of tones, but the loudness variable gave them more tones in the same pitch classes, so recognition of pitch chroma was not improved.
Fulgosi, A. and Zaja, B. (1975). Information transmission of 3.1 bits in absolute identification of auditory pitch. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 6, 379-80.
The term "bits" is a measurement of the quantity of information that the listener can remember. The normal level is 2.3 "bits", which equates to remembering five tones. At the beginning of this experiment, subjects were at this level, but by its end, they were able to identify nine different tones (3.1 "bits") and a couple had reached 11 tones (3.4 "bits"). However, despite the improvement thus noted, the conclusion may be questionable: were the tones truly separated into nine different categories, or were there five categories of contrasting pairs? This question may be irrelevant; I only mention it because the authors seem to be advancing the notion that tone memory has an unusual ability to retain multiple categories.
Eaton, K.E. and Siegel, M.H. (1976). Strategies of absolute pitch possessors in the learning of an unfamiliar scale. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 8, 289-91.
The authors wondered what would happen if they asked absolute and non-absolute listeners to identify the pitches of a non-traditional scale, so they divided an octave into unusual steps and gave the tones new letter labels (K through W). All subjects, in both groups, improved with practice; however, the absolute listeners learned the tones by comparing the new tones with their familiar categories while the other listeners learned the tones by straight memorization. Interestingly, "[n]one of the AP subjects realized that three of the tones (K, O, and W) were precisely in tune with the musical scale with which they were highly familiar."
Chang, H. and Trehub, S.E. (1977). Infants' perception of temporal grouping in auditory patterns. Child Development, 48, 1666-70.
The authors played melodies for infants and measured the infants' heart rates to achieve "same" or "different" responses (the head-turning response, which these same authors used in 1984, was not yet standard). Although they couldn't be sure of why they got the results they did-- overall temporal patterning or simple recognition of a pause-- the authors did confirm that infants were definitely able to detect temporal differences in melodies which were otherwise identical.
Chang, H. and Trehub, S.E. (1977). Auditory processing of relational information by young infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 24(2), 324-31.
Like their other study in this same year, the authors played melodies for 5-month-old infants to achieve same/different judgments. This time, though, they were assessing transposition rather than temporal differences. It turns out that the infants did recognize a transposed melody as "same", while another melody with the same pitches was considered "different". (I confess some relief that the term "relative pitch" appears nowhere in this report.)
Chi, J.G., Dooling, E.C., and Gilles, F.H. (1977). Left-right asymmetries of the temporal speech areas in the human fetus. Archives of Neurology, 34, 346-8.
By cutting up fetuses (stillborns and other unfortunates) the scientists discovered that, in 54% of their brains, there was "[g]reater size and number of the right transverse temporal gyri and a longer temporal plane on the left..." Although this does mean that 46% of them didn't have this particular asymmetry, and 18% of them were actually reversed, there is nonetheless evidence for inborn asymmetry of the linguistic areas of the brain.
House, W.J. (1977). Octave generalization and the identification of distorted melodies. Perception & Psychophysics, 21, 586-9.
In response and in contrast to Deutsch's 1972 "mysterious melody" article, House conducted an experiment which seemed to suggest that subjects were able to use octave generalization to recognize a scrambled tune.
Siegel, J.A. and Siegel, W. (1977). Absolute identification of notes and intervals by musicians. Perception & Psychophysics, 21, 143-152.
Musicians identified musical sounds categorically, without being overpowered by context effects, "...and the resulting identification functions were similar to those which have been previously obtained for speech." Non-musicians' identification of the same stimuli was unreliable and greatly influenced by context. "These findings suggest that musicians acquire categories for pitch that are functionally similar to phonemic categories for speech."
Vernon, P.E. (1977). Absolute pitch: a case study. British Journal of Psychology, 68, 485-9.
The case study here is the author himself. Vernon is 71 years old at the time of writing, and he perceived that his absolute pitch ability had drifted upwards by a whole tone. The study exists to evaluate the author's perceptual drift, statistically as well as anecdotally. Based on his own experience, Vernon states that a perceived pitch may not necessarily be the same as the pitch received at the cochlea, and he speculates that this may be because of a stiffening of the basilar membrane.
Deutsch, D. (1978). Octave generalization and melody identification. Perception & Psychophysics, 23(1), 91-2.
Deutsch points out that Hull's experiment of the previous year made one error: the subjects were given too strong a clue in the names the tunes they could be hearing. Deutsch argues that the subjects used octave generalization to confirm, but not recognize, the melodies.
Deutsch, D. (1978). Pitch memory: An advantage for the left-handed. Science, 199(4328), 559-60.
Deutsch has conducted almost a dozen studies on various permutations of the same task: play a standard tone, play a bunch of interfering tones, and play a comparison tone. Most of the other studies (which are generally not included on this page) test different types of interference, but this one paid attention to different types of subjects. The left-handed subjects were markedly better than the right-handed; furthermore, among ambidextrous subjects, those who favored the left hand were also better than those who favored the right. This naturally suggests a difference in brain-processing organization for musical pitch that is somehow correlated with handedness.
Dowling, W.J. (1978). Scale and contour: Two components of a theory of memory for melodies. Psychological Review, 85, 341-54.
Through direct experiment and reference to other experiments, Dowling illustrates how contour and scale are perceptually independent but functionally interdependent.
Gandour, J. and Harshman, R. (1978). Crosslanguage differences in tone perception: A multidimensional scaling investigation. Language and Speech, 21(1), 1-33.
Gregory, Andrew H. (1978). Perception of clicks in music. Perception & Psychophysics, 24, 171-4.
Listeners consistently misjudged when a click occurred in music. Based on phrase boundaries or to which ear it was presented, the click usually appeared to the listener to occur somewhere other than where it was actually presented. This provides additional evidence for the inference of pitch and phoneme sounds based on structural perception.
Idson, W.L. and Massaro, D.W. (1978). A bidimensional model of pitch in the recognition of melodies. Perception & Psychophysics, 24, 551-65.
The authors found that, as long as contour was preserved, melodies were recognizable even if the octaves of the individual tones were scrambled. They suggest that perhaps the tone chroma allows "tagging" of each tone to a particular position which then becomes a reference for the rest of the melodic tones; the effect of contour subsequently suggests which direction one travels around the pitch circle.
Christensen, I.P. and Huang, Y.L. (1979). The auditory tau effect and memory for pitch. Perception & Psychophysics, 26, 489-94.
Subjects listened to three tones in order: 1000Hz, a middle tone, and 3000Hz. The subjects were told to adjust the middle tone until it was precisely in the middle of the other two (in terms of pitch height). The researchers found that when the second tone was played sooner-- nearer in time to the first tone-- subjects adjusted the second tone to be too high, and when the second tone was played later, it was adjusted to be too low. A possible explanation for this is that each note has a certain "energy" that degrades in memory over time (this is what the researchers suggested). I wonder if there are tonal orientation and rhythmic effects which are unaccounted for.
Kallman, H.J. and Massaro, D.W. (1979). Tone chroma is functional in melody recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 26(1), 32-36.
Following Deutsch's "mysterious melody", the authors confirmed that octave-generalized melodies were nonetheless recognizable. They concluded that their subjects used octave-generalized tone chroma to judge intervals and reinterpret melodic contour.
Krumhansl, C.L. (1979). The psychological representation of musical pitch in a tonal context. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 346-374.
An exploration of the observation that, in a tonal context, there are many characteristics of a musical tone which are perceived as "pitch". The author subsequently argues for a more complex definition of "pitch", because she has shown that pitch in a tonal context is defined by more than height and chroma. Although I agree that there is great value in detailing the effects of tonal context on pitch perception, I suspect that in from absolute perspective it may be more appropriate to discuss these effects as separate from rather than incorporated with pitch. On the other hand, this might be indicative of the appropriateness of the term "pitch" for the overall sensation of tone while "chroma" refers to the objective pitch class.
Morais, J., Cary, L., Alegria, J., and Bertelson, P. (1979). Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phonemes arise spontaneously? Cognition, 7, 323-31.
No, it doesn't. People appear to gain phonemic awareness by learning to read. This study contains the experiment with the Portuguese illiterates which I refer to occasionally.
Bever, T.G. Broca and Lashley were right: Cerebral dominance is an accident of growth. In Caplan, D (ed.) Biological Studies of Mental Processes, 186-230. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The authors write generally about the left side's "relational" processing skills and the right side's "holistic" processing skills. They explain that the use of either side is not dependent on the quality of a sensory input but the processing task which is applied to it. This implies the hypothesis that, in any sensory modality, there is a right-to-left shift as learning occurs-- and the authors did find that musically naive listeners demonstrated a left-ear advantage for melody recognition, while trained musicians showed the opposite.
Massaro, D.W., Kallman, H.J., and Kelly, J. (1980). The role of tone height, melodic contour, and tone chroma in melody recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 77-90.
The authors taught their subjects to recognize certain melodies, and then they applied different transformations of height, contour, and chroma to those melodies. They concluded that all three components contribute to melody recognition, with contour and height being the most significant.
Woods, B.T. Observations on the neurological basis for initial language acquisition. In Caplan, D (ed.) Biological Studies of Mental Processes, 149-58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
I picked out this article for the following quote: "While our studies fail to support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere... has an early active role in speech, they have shown a time-of-lesion-dependent effect of right-hemisphere lesions on language..." That is, the earlier that the right-brain is damaged, the more likely it is to affect language functions. This would seem to support the hypothesis that the right brain transforms sound sensation into time-invariant information before handing it over to the left side; it would also support the speculation that sensation is initially processed by the right side, which then recruits the left side to make sense of it, so that sensory learning proceeds from the right to the left side.
Bertoncini, J. and Mehler, J. (1981). Syllables as units in infant speech perception. Infant Behavior and Development, 4, 247-60.
This article provides evidence that "the syllable is the natural unit of speech segmentation and processing."
Costall, A., Platt, S., and MacRae, A. (1981). Memory strategies in absolute identification of "circular" pitch. Perception & Psychophysics, 29, 589-93.
How would people be able to identify absolute tones if, by using Shepard tones, there were no "highest" or "lowest" pitches? Answer: by attempting to count the number of pitch categories between the tones.
Deutsch, D. (1981). The internal representation of pitch sequences in tonal music. Psychological Review, 88, 503-22.
The author's work supports a model of hierarchical organization for tonal music, from global structure to individual component.
Goldberg, E. and Costa, L.D. (1981). Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems. Brain and Language, 14(1), 144-73.
I may come back to this study for further detail-- in the meantime, here is its conclusion: "In the process of acquisition of a new descriptive system, the right hemisphere plays a critical role in initial stages of acquisition, whereas the left hemisphere is superior at utilizing well-routinized codes. This leads to a right-to-left shift of hemisphere superiority as a function of increased competence with respect to a particular type of processing."
Lockhead, G.R. and Byrd, R. (1981). Practically perfect pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 70(2), 387-9.
Musicians with absolute pitch were shown to accurately name 99% of piano tones when tested; when listening to sine waves, the same listeners achieved only 58% success. They reported using a two-step process, first identifying the tone's pitch class and then its octave.
MacRae, A. (1981). Memory strategies in absolute identification of "circular" pitch. Perception and Psychophysics, 29, 589-93.
Haack, P.A., and Radocy, R.E. (1981). A case study of a chromasthetic. Journal of Research in Music Education, 29(2), 85-90.
Although chromesthesia has seemed decreasingly relevant to my studies, this article offers the unusual twist that while the woman's ability to provide verbal labels for each pitch deteriorated with age and lack of practice, the colors evoked by the pitches remained consistent and were strongly perceived.
Balzano, G.J. and Liesch, B.W. (1982). The role of chroma and scalestep in the recognition of musical intervals in and out of context. Psychomusicology, 2(2), 3-31.
Yet another blow to "distance" perception of intervals. The authors asked their subjects to identify intervals that were played both harmonically and melodically (that is, together or as separate tones. They found that the subjects made different kinds of errors depending on how the intervals were presented, and their data "...strongly indicate that the conception of musical intervals as one-dimensional perceptual objects varying only in width is inadequate."
Deutsch, D. (1982). The influence of melodic context on pitch recognition judgment. Perception & Psychophysics, 31(5), 407-10.
Basically, when people are presented with the same tones in different key contexts, they think that the tones are different. This suggests that they are perceiving scale-degree qualities as part of their perception of "pitch".
Hall, D.E. (1982). Practically perfect pitch: Some comments. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 71(3), 754-5.
Hall whines about the use of the term "perfect pitch" instead of "absolute pitch", and then complains that Lockhead and Byrd's tests made no attempts to confound relative pitch identification.
Lockhead, G.R. (1982). Practically perfect performance. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 71(3), 755-6.
In response to Hall's complaints, Lockhead says that "perfect" and "absolute" are interchangeable for his purposes; furthermore, the drop from 99% to 58% was significant regardless of whether the subjects were using absolute or relative strategies.
Oura, Y. and Eguchi, K. (1982). 幼児の絶対音感訓練プログラムと適用例. Ongaku Kyouiku Kenkyu (Music Education Research), 32, 162-171. (in Japanese)
Oura, Y. and Eguchi, K. (1982). Absolute pitch training program for children. Ongaku Kyouiku Kenkyu (Music Education Research), 32, 162-171 (Translated by Aruffo, C.)Shepard, R.N. (1982). Geometrical approximations to the structure of musical pitch. Psychological Review, 89, 305-33.
An explanation of various ways to conceive of pitch and pitch structure: helix, double helix, spiralled torus, chroma circles, and more.
Terhardt, E. and Ward, W.D. (1982). Recognition of musical key: Exploratory study. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 72(1), 26-33.
Non-absolute musicians were generally able to identify whether a sounded melody absolutely matched the printed score they were given. Terhardt and Ward fail to determine how the identifications were made.
Block, L. (1983). Comparative tone-color responses of college majors with absolute pitch and good relative pitch. Psychology of Music, 11(2), 59-66.
In weekly sessions, subjects were asked to assign colors to the 12 pitch classes. Absolute listeners were significantly more consistent in their assignments than were non-absolute listeners.
Fulgosi, A., Knezovic, Z., and Zarevski, P. (1983). Amount of information transmitted in absolute judgments of pitch calculated according to the majority rule. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 21, 193-4.
The authors claim that their study demonstrates how the "amount of information transmitted" is different from subject to subject-- or, in other words, that different people are better or worse at identifying tones after some training.
Terhardt, E. (1983). Absolute and relative pitch revisited on psychoacoustic grounds. Proceedings of the 11th International Congress on Acoustics, 4, Paris, 427-30.
Terhardt suggests that normal and absolute listeners are different "not [because] the former are completely ignorant of absolute pitch, but that they restrict their processing of absolute pitch to temporal periods of the order of one minute (short-term memory) and do not categorize pitches in order to retain them in long-term memory."
Terhardt, E. and Seewann, M. (1983). Aural key identification and its relationship to absolute pitch. Music Perception, 1, 63-83.
"It is thus concluded that both AP possessors and non-AP-possessors depend on absolute pitch information when identifying musical key; however, they employ different perceptual modes: AP possessors primarily identify individual notes, while non-AP-possessors unconsciously deduce from a series of notes a feeling of key."
Balzano, G.J. (1984). Absolute pitch and pure tone identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 75(2), 623-5.
Subjects with absolute pitch were able to identify sine tones. They aren't as good at it as with musical pitch, but they can do it, further supporting that the fundamental frequency is the "chroma" by which absolute listeners identify tones.
Demany, L., and Armand, F. (1984). The perceptual reality of tone chroma in early infancy. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 76(1), 57-66.
The authors played different melodies to infants; the melodies had the same pitches, but in different octaves. When contour was violated, the babies responded as though the melodies were novel; when contour was maintained, the babies judged the melodies to be the same (even in different octaves).
Deutsch, D., Moore, F.R., and Dolson, M. (1984). Pitch classes differ with respect to height. Music Perception, 2, 265-71.
The authors played Shepard tones for their subjects and discovered that different people have different "bottom notes" on their pitch (chroma) circle. That is, when you take out obvious octave clues, different pitch classes will be "higher" than others depending on who you ask. Deutsch has also illustrated this repeatedly with her tritone paradox.
Goldman, E.H. (1984). The effect of original and electronically altered oboe, clarinet, and French horn timbres on absolute pitch judgments. Doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon.
The author varied elements of timbre such as decay, peak, and clipping to see if these elements affected pitch judgments. They didn't. The author found no significant differences between the modified and the normal timbres.
Гребельник С.Г. (1984). Формирование у дошкольников абсолютного музыкального слуха. Вопросы психологии, 2, 90-8.
Grebelnik, S.G. (1984). Training preschoolers to develop absolute musical pitch. Psychology, 2, 90-8. (Translated by Christopher Aruffo).According to Cohen (1990), Grebelnik's procedure was to have his preschoolers memorize 11 different folk melodies, one for each scale tone. The training "transferred to identification of piano tones well above chance."
Klein, M., Coles, M., and Donchin, E. (1984). People with absolute pitch process tones without producing a P300. Science 223(4642), 1306-9.
The "P300" is better defined in Hantz's 1992 paper, as "a positive wave occurring approximately 300 msec after the onset of a task-relevant, infrequent, or surprising stimulus... [it is] invoked whenever there is a need to update a model of the environment in working memory." In other words, the P300 appears in response to an infrequent (or "oddball") event. The absolute listeners' lack of P300 in a note-naming task led the authors to suggest that "[s]everal accounts of the AP phenomenon suggest that subjects with this skill have access to permanently resident representations of the tones, so that they do not need, as the rest of us do, to fetch and compare representations for novel stimuli. Our data are consistent with the interpretation that the P300 is a manifestation of such comparisons."
Trehub, S.E., Bull, D., and Thorpe, L.A. (1984). Infants' perception of melodies: the role of melodic contour. Child Development, 55, 821-30.
To "extend previous research on infants' perception of melodies," the authors determine whether the head-turn testing method for infants is reliable (it is) and then present the infants with various melodies. Some melodies preserve contour; others break it; still others maintain the pitch information but in different octaves. The authors discovered that the infants judged melodies to be different when either the contour or the range was broken. When the contour was not broken, but pitches were changed, the infants thought the melodies to be the same.
Zakay, D., Roziner, I., and Ben-Arzi, S. (1984). On the nature of absolute pitch. Archive fur Psychologie, 136, 163-66.
A simple experiment with nine absolute listeners, confirming that there is a Stroop-like interference effect when word names do not match the pitches at which they are sung.
Clarkson, M.G. and Clifton, R.K. (1985). Infant pitch perception: Evidence for responding to pitch categories and the missing fundamental. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 77(4), 1521-8.
Apparently, 7-month-old infants are also subject to the missing fundamental effect.
Costall, A. (1985). The relativity of absolute pitch. In P. Howell, I. Goss, and R. West (eds.), Musical Structure and Cognition, pp. 189-209. London: Academic Press.
Cross, I., Howell, P., and West, R. (1985). Structural relationships in the perception of musical pitch. In P. Howell, I. Goss, and R. West (eds.), Musical Structure and Cognition, pp. 121-142. London: Academic Press.
Deutsch, M. Absolute pitch. Down Beat, 53(1), 54-55.
A reprint of his 1954 article.
Barkowsky, J.M. An investigation into pitch identification behavior of absolute pitch and relative pitch subjects. (1987). Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The author subjected both absolute and relative listeners to a note-naming task. The conditions of the tests were neither novel nor unusual, and the results were entirely unsurprising.
Galaburda, A.M., Corsiglia, J., Rosen, G.D., and Sherman, G.F. (1987). Planum temporale asymmetry, reappraisal since Geschwind and Levitsky. Neuropsychologia, 25(6), 853-68.
This paper offers an important developmental perspective: "Changes away from asymmetry... involve increase in the smaller side [of the planum temporale], rather than decrease in size of the larger." It's not insignificant that these authors have done additional research in dyslexia (I recognized Galaburda's name from Music & Dyslexia) because dyslexics typically have symmetrical plana. I see this raising a valuable question: does the dyslexic brain become dyslexic because its holistic processors (right) are too strong, allowing the symbolic processors (left) to become lazy, or does the right side grow to compensate for an anatomically weak (if physically larger) left side? And why, then, are people with absolute pitch possessed of an unusually large left side, if asymmetry occurs through the growth of the ordinarily smaller side?
McGeough, C.S.W. (1987). Absolute pitch and the perception of sequential musical intervals. Master's thesis, University of British Colombia (Canada).
The author noted that, in attempting to identify intervals, absolute listeners have the option of identifying the tones and inferring the intervals. Her data show that this does not generally happen-- absolute listeners did evaluate the intervals directly-- and the one of her subjects who did identify the tones instead did not do so consistently, but switched between strategies in no apparent pattern.
Rakowski, A. and Morawska-Büngeler, M. (1987). In search of the criteria for absolute pitch. Archives of Acoustics, 12, 75-87.
The authors asked subjects (with and without absolute pitch) to att