Absolute Pitch

Ward, W. Dixon; Burns, E. Bradford

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-213562-0.50018-8

Cited by 93 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Although it seems likely that early and intensive musical training is necessary to develop absolute pitch (AP), these do not seem to be sufficient conditions, and the factors, genetic or otherwise, that interact with this training to dispose the individual to the acquisition of AP are still very much in question (Takeuchi and Hulse, 1993;Baharloo et al, 1998;Zatorre, 2003). A considerable amount of research has delved into various behavioral aspects of AP (Takeuchi and Hulse, 1993;Ward, 1999), but relatively few studies have investigated its neural correlates (Klein et al, 1984;Hantz et al, 1992;Wayman et al, 1992;Zatorre et al, 1998;Keenan et al, 2001). Electrophysiological studies using eventrelated potential techniques Wayman et al, 1992), for instance, have mainly shown a reduced P300 component among AP musicians in auditory oddball paradigms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Absolute or, as it is commonly referred to, perfect pitch is generally defined as the ability to identify the names of musical pitches without reference to a standard (Bachem, 1937;Ward, 1999). Although it seems likely that early and intensive musical training is necessary to develop absolute pitch (AP), these do not seem to be sufficient conditions, and the factors, genetic or otherwise, that interact with this training to dispose the individual to the acquisition of AP are still very much in question (Takeuchi and Hulse, 1993;Baharloo et al, 1998;Zatorre, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conditional Associative Memory for Musical Stimuli in Nonmusicians: Implications for Absolute Pitch

Bermudez¹,

Zatorre²

2005

J. Neurosci.

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A previous positron emission tomography (PET) study of musicians with and without absolute pitch put forth the hypothesis that the posterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in the conditional associative aspect of the identification of a pitch. In the work presented here, we tested this hypothesis by training eight nonmusicians to associate each of four different complex musical sounds (triad chords) with an arbitrary number in a task designed to have limited analogy to absolute-pitch identification. Each subject underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning procedure both before and after training. Active condition (identification of chords)-control condition (amplitude-matched noise bursts) comparisons for the pretraining scan showed no significant activation maxima. The same comparison for the posttraining scan revealed significant peaks of activation in posterior dorsolateral prefrontal, ventrolateral prefrontal, and parietal areas. A conjunction analysis was performed to show that the posterior dorsolateral prefrontal activity in this study is similar to that observed in the aforementioned PET study. We conclude that the posterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is selectively involved in the conditional association aspect of our task, as it is in the attribution of a verbal label to a note by absolute-pitch musicians.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional Associative Memory for Musical Stimuli in Nonmusicians: Implications for Absolute Pitch

Bermudez¹,

Zatorre²

2005

J. Neurosci.

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“…If it happens that the internal tones have constant and stable pitch, they may be used as standards and as a point of departure for appropriate musical-interval operations. According to Ward (1999) such was the case of the eminent psychologist Carl Stumpf, whose partial absolute pitch was based on an internally generated pitch standard. As may be seen, the pseudo absolute pitch sometimes may be based not on auditory memory, but on auditory pathology.…”

Section: Various Kinds Of Absolute Pitchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This sort of ability, where attention is drawn to the characteristic subjective feeling associated with a character of particular key (e.g. calmness, bliss, aggression), is termed sometimes absolute tonality (Ward, 1999). …”

Section: Various Kinds Of Absolute Pitchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Absolute Pitch and Its Frequency Range

Rakowski¹,

Rogowski²

2011

Archives of Acoustics

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This paper has two distinct parts. Section 1 includes general discussion of the phenomenon of "absolute pitch" (AP), and presentation of various concepts concerning definitions of "full", "partial" and "pseudo" AP. Sections 2-4 include presentation of the experiment concerning frequency range in which absolute pitch appears, and discussion of the experimental results. The experiment was performed with participation of 9 AP experts selected from the population of 250 music students as best scoring in the pitch-naming piano-tone screening tests. Each subject had to recognize chromas of 108 pure tones representing the chromatic musical scale of nine octaves from E0 to D#9. The series of 108 tones was presented to each subject 60 times in random order, diotically, with loudness level about 65 phon. Percentage of correct recognitions (PC) for each tone was computed. The frequency range for the existence of absolute pitch in pure tones, perceived by sensitive AP possessors stretches usually over 5 octaves from about 130.6 Hz (C3) to about 3.951 Hz (B7). However, it was noted that in a single case, the upper boundary of AP was 9.397 Hz (D9). The split-halves method was applied to estimate the reliability of the obtained results.

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