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Absolute pitch is generally considered to reflect a rare musical endowment; however, its characteristics are puzzling and its genesis is unclear. We describe two experiments in which native speakers of tone languages——Mandarin and Vietnamese——were found to display a remarkably precise and stable form of absolute pitch in enunciating words. We further describe a third experiment in which speakers of English displayed less stability on an analogous task. Based on these findings, and considering the related literatures on critical periods in speech development, and the neurological underpinnings of lexical tone, we propose a framework for the genesis of absolute pitch. The framework assumes that absolute pitch originally evolved as a feature of speech, analogous to other features such as vowel quality, and that speakers of tone language naturally acquire this feature during the critical period for speech acquisition. We further propose that the acquisition of absolute pitch by rare individuals who speak an intonation language may be associated with a critical period of unusually long duration, so that it encompasses the age at which the child can take music lessons. We conclude that the potential to acquire absolute pitch is universally present at birth, and that it can be realized by enabling the infant to associate pitches with verbal labels during the critical period for speech acquisition.

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The phase-vocoder is usually presented as a high-quality solution for time-scale modification of signals, pitch-scale modifications usually being implemented as a combination of timescaling and sampling rate conversion [1]. In this paper, we present two new phase-vocoder-based techniques which allow direct manipulation of the signal in the frequency-domain, enabling such applications as pitch-shifting, chorusing, harmonizing, partial stretching and other exotic modifications which cannot be achieved by the standard time-scale samplingrate conversion scheme. The new techniques are based on a very simple peak-detection stage, followed by a peak-shifting stage. The very simplest one allows for 50% overlap but restricts the precision of the modifications, while the most flexible techniques requires a more expensive 75% overlap.

A recent series of experiments by Deutsch and co-workers has investigated the perception of musical patterns in which the tones are well defined in terms of pitch class, but poorly defined in terms of pitch height. One of these patterns is known as the "tritone paradox." It has been found that listeners' differing perceptions are significantly correlated both with the linguistic community in which the listener grew up and with the pitch range of the listener's spontaneous speaking voice. To explain these findings, Deutsch has hypothesized that listeners acquire an internal representation of pitch classes based on the prevailing pitch range of speech in their linguistic community and that this representation influences both their perception of the tritone paradox and their speech production. The present paper examines this hypothesis in the light of available data about the pitch of speech as a function of linguistic community. It is concluded that these data are surprisingly consistent with Deutsch's hypothesis.