Absolute pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe; this rarity has so far been unexplained. This paper reports a substantial difference in the prevalence of absolute pitch in two normal populations, in a large-scale study employing an on-site test, without self-selection from within the target populations. Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training. The findings suggest that the potential for acquiring absolute pitch may be universal, and may be realized by enabling infants to associate pitches with verbal labels during the critical period for acquisition of features of their native language.

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THIS STUDY EXAMINES THE DISTRIBUTIONAL VIEW OFkey-finding, which holds that listeners identify key by monitoring the distribution of pitch-classes in a piece and comparing this to an ideal distribution for each key. In our experiment, participants judged the key of melodies generated randomly from pitch-class distributions characteristic of tonal music. Slightly more than half of listeners' judgments matched the generating keys, on both the untimed and the timed conditions. While this performance is much better than chance, it also indicates that the distributional view is far from a complete explanation of human key identification. No difference was found between participants with regard to absolute pitch ability, either in the speed or accuracy of their key judgments. Several key-finding models were tested on the melodies to see which yielded the best match to participants' responses. FIGURE 7. Data for the melodies shown in Figure 6A (above) and Figure 6B (below). The solid line shows the number of votes for each key; the dotted line shows the probabilistic model's score for that key, log(P(key | melody). (The model's scores have been normalized to allow comparison with participant responses.)