Page 13 - Fall 2006

THE ENIGMA OF ABSOLUTE PITCH
Diana Deutsch
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093
Introduction
In the summer of 1763, the Mozart family embarked on the famous tour of Europe that established the young composer’s reputation as a musical prodigy (front cover). Just before they left, an anonymous letter appeared in the Augsburgischer Intelligenz-Zettel describing seven year old Wolfgang’s extraordinary abilities. The letter included the following:
“Furthermore, I saw and heard how, when he was made to listen in another room, they would give him notes, now high, now low, not only on the pianoforte but on every other imaginable instrument as well, and he came out with the let- ter of the name of the note in an instant. Indeed, on hearing a bell toll, or a clock or even a pocket watch strike, he was able at the same moment to name the note of the bell or time piece.1”
This passage provides a good characterization of absolute pitch—the ability to name or produce a note of a given pitch in the absence of a reference note. This ability, which is also known as “perfect pitch,” is very rare in our culture, with an estimated overall prevalence of less than
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one in ten thousand. People with absolute pitch name
musical notes as rapidly and effortlessly as most people name colors. Yet absolute pitch is often regarded as a mys- terious endowment that is available only to a few gifted individuals. This impression is strengthened by the fact that most famous musicians, such as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Menuhin, Toscanini, Boulez, and so on, were known to pos- sess this ability.
In contrast with the rarity of absolute pitch, the ability to judge one musical note in relation to another is very common. So, for example, most musicians, when presented with the note F and given its name, have no difficulty in naming the note two semitones higher as G, the note four semitones tones higher as A; and so on. (A semitone is the pitch relation formed by two adjacent notes on a keyboard, and corresponds to a frequency ratio of approximately 18:17.) What most people, including most musicians, can- not do is name a note when they hear it out of context.
As someone with absolute pitch, it has always seemed puzzling to me that this ability should be so rare. When we name a color, for example as green, we do not do this by viewing a different color, determining its name, and com- paring the relationship between the two colors. Instead, the labeling process is direct and immediate. Consider, also, that note naming involves choosing between only 12 possi- bilities; namely the 12 notes within the octave (termed pitch classes) shown in Figure 1. Such a task should not be diffi- cult; indeed, it should be trivial for professional musicians, who spend many thousands of hours reading musical scores, playing the notes they read, and hearing the notes they play. As another point, most people can easily identify
well-known melodies when they hear them; yet the amount
of information required to do this is vastly greater than is
required to name a single note. A lack of absolute pitch,
viewed from this perspective, appears akin to the syndrome
of color anomia, in which the person can recognize and dis-
criminate between colors, yet cannot associate them with
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verbal labels. So the real mystery of absolute pitch is not
why some people possess this ability, but instead why it is so rare.
Background
Although absolute pitch is most prevalent among highly
accomplished musicians, it is not necessarily associated with
superior performance on other musical processing tasks. For
example, people with absolute pitch do not necessarily out-
perform others in judging the octave in which a note occurs,4
or in judging musical intervals,5,6 or on tasks involving short
term memory for pitch when verbal labels cannot be used as
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cues. Most importantly, nonpossessors have been shown to
possess an implicit form of absolute pitch, even though they cannot label the notes they are judging.
The tritone paradox8,9 provides a good example of implicit absolute pitch. The basic pattern that produces this illusion consists of two successively presented tones that are
Fig. 1. The pitch class circle. The notes of the traditional Western musi- cal scale are produced by dividing the octave into 12 semitone steps. A semitone is the pitch relation formed by two adjacent notes on a key- board, and corresponds to a frequency ratio of approximately 18:17. Each of the twelve notes within the octave is assigned a name: C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, and B. The entire scale is generated by repeat- ing this series of note names (or ‘pitch classes’) across octaves. When people with absolute pitch identify notes by name, they are identifying the positions of the tones along the pitch class circle.
Enigma of Absolute Pitch 11