Absolute pitch in Costa Rica: Distribution of pitch identification ability and implications for its genetic basis

Abstract

Absolute pitch is the unusual ability to recognize a pitch without an external reference. The current view is that both environmental and genetic factors are involved in the acquisition of the trait. In the present study, 127 adult musicians were subjected to a musical tone identification test. Subjects were university music students and volunteers who responded to a newspaper article. The test consisted of the identification of 40 piano and 40 pure tones. Subjects were classified in three categories according to their pitch naming ability: absolute pitch (AP), high accuracy of tone identification (HA), and non-absolute pitch (non-AP). Both the percentage of correct responses and the mean absolute deviation showed a statistically significant variation between categories. A very clear pattern of higher accuracy for white than for black key notes was observed for the HA and the non-AP groups. Meanwhile, the AP group had an almost perfect pitch naming accuracy for both kinds of tones. Each category presented a very different pattern of deviation around the correct response. The age at the beginning of musical training did not differ between categories. The distribution of pitch identification ability in this study suggests a complex inheritance of the trait.

Investigating the Relationship Between Childhood Music Practice and Pitch-Naming Ability in Professional Musicians and a Population-Based Twin Sample

“…The task used in this study is comparable to other lab-based and web-based pitch-naming studies in terms of stimulus length and response interval (Athos et al, 2007;Bermudez & Zatorre, 2009;Chavarria-Soley, 2016;Deutsch et al, 2006;Miyazaki et al, 2012;Oechslin et al, 2010;Wilson et al, 2009), so increased task difficulty is unlikely to account for the low overall performance. More nuanced profiles of intermediate performance could have been gained with an increased number of trials, as increased accuracy for some notes over others would have been evident, but highly accurate AP can be detected with a small number of trials Pair number Practice (h, 12−17yrs) Figure 3.…”

Auditory temporal resolution and backward masking in musicians with absolute pitch

“…This results in pronounced methodological heterogeneity and difficulty comparing studies ( Sergeant and Vraka, 2014 ; Germano et al, 2016 ; Bairnsfather et al, 2022b ). Others reject that notion and place AP in the “continuum feature” category ( Schellenberg and Trehub, 2003 ; Vitouch, 2003 ; Gußmack et al, 2006 ; Chavarria-Soley, 2016 ; Leite et al, 2016 ; Jakubowski et al, 2017 ).…”

Use of explicit priming to phenotype absolute pitch ability

“…This skill is known as perfect or absolute pitch (AP), and has been linked to differences in brain structure and function (for a recent review, see [1][2][3][4][5][6]). Although AP is commonly conceptualised as a binary trait [7][8][9][10][11], variability in pitch-naming ability has been widely reported [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], prompting speculation that AP skill lies on a continuum rather than constituting a distinct categorical trait.…”