A reevaluation of the electrophysiological correlates of absolute pitch and relative pitch: No evidence for an absolute pitch-specific negativity.

Abstract

Musicians with absolute pitch effortlessly identify the pitch of a sound without an external reference.Previous neuroscientific studies on absolute pitch have typically had small samples sizes and low statistical power, making them susceptible for false positive findings. In a seminal study, Itoh et al. (2005) reported the elicitation of an absolute pitch-specific event-related potential component during tone listening -the AP negativity. Additionally, they identified several components as correlates of relative pitch, the ability to identify relations between pitches. Here, we attempted to replicate the main findings of Itoh et al.'s study in a large sample of musicians (n = 104) using both frequentist and Bayesian inference. We were not able to replicate the presence of an AP negativity during tone listening in individuals with high levels of absolute pitch, but we partially replicated the findings concerning the correlates of relative pitch. Our results are consistent with several previous studies reporting an absence of differences between musicians with and without absolute pitch in early auditory evoked potential components. We conclude that replication studies form a crucial part in assessing extraordinary findings, even more so in small fields where a single finding can have a large impact on further research.

Auditory aversion in absolute pitch possessors

“…In EEG, this interference is reflected by a negative-going deflection around 400 ms after target-onset, which is referred to as the N400 (Kutas and Hillyard 1980;Zhang et al 2010). EEG has an excellent time resolution and has been insightful in capturing the early perceptual and cognitive processes underlying AP (Elmer et al 2013;Rogenmoser et al 2015;Greber et al 2018;Burkhard et al 2019;Leipold, Oderbolz, et al 2019). In the present study, the participants were instructed to judge as quickly and accurately as possible whether pictures (targets) were either pleasant or unpleasant by pressing one of two response buttons.…”

An early perceptual locus of absolute pitch

“…Also, if AP possessors achieved much higher naming accuracy than non‐possessors, the observed neural differences between AP and non‐AP possessors may be alternatively explained by their different levels of attentional engagement (Liu et al, 2016; Philiastides et al, 2006). Finally, some studies did not include any control stimulus category to control for potential group differences in general auditory processing, and therefore the observed neural differences could reflect differences in auditory processing between AP and non‐AP possessors that were non‐specific to AP (e.g., Barnea et al, 1994; Hirose et al, 2003, 2004; Itoh et al, 2005; Leipold, Oderbolz, et al, 2019; Wu et al, 2008). To clarify the neural mechanisms of AP, it is important to adopt an experimental design that can adequately address these methodological issues.…”

“…However, a larger N1 among AP possessors was not found in other studies that also employed listening and labeling conditions, such as (Hirose et al, 2003) for children and (Elmer et al, 2013) for adult musicians. Itoh et al (2005) identified a negative component at 150 ms right after the N1 that was unique to AP possessors, but Leipold, Oderbolz, et al (2019) failed to find it in a direct replication. For the P2, larger P2 activation in AP possessors was observed in response to vocal pitch deviation (Behroozmand et al, 2014) and passive listening (Wengenroth et al, 2014).…”