What the [bleep]? Enhanced absolute pitch memory for a 1000Hz sine tone

An early perceptual locus of absolute pitch

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the naming of musical tone without external reference. The influential two-component model states that AP is limited by the late-emerging pitch labeling process only and not the earlier perceptual and memory processes. Over the years, however, support for this model at the neural level has been mixed with various methodological limitations. Here, the electroencephalography responses of 27 AP possessors and 27 non-AP possessors were recorded. During both name verification and passive listening, event-related potential analyses showed a difference between AP and non-AP possessors at about 200 ms in their response toward tones compared with noise stimuli. Multivariate pattern analyses suggested that pitch naming was subserved by a series of transient processes for the first 250 ms, followed by a stage-like process for both AP and non-AP possessors with no group differences between them. These findings are inconsistent with the predictions of the two-component model, and instead suggest the existence of an early perceptual locus of AP.

Use of explicit priming to phenotype absolute pitch ability

Musicians with absolute pitch (AP) can name the pitch of a musical note in isolation. Expression of this unusual ability is thought to be influenced by heritability, early music training and current practice. However, our understanding of factors shaping its expression is hampered by testing and scoring methods that treat AP as dichotomous. These fail to capture the observed variability in pitch-naming accuracy among reported AP possessors. The aim of this study was to trial a novel explicit priming paradigm to explore phenotypic variability of AP. Thirty-five musically experienced individuals (M_age = 29 years, range 18–68; 14 males) with varying AP ability completed a standard AP task and the explicit priming AP task. Results showed: 1) phenotypic variability of AP ability, including high-accuracy AP, heterogeneous intermediate performers, and chance-level performers; 2) intermediate performance profiles that were either reliant on or independent of relative pitch strategies, as identified by the priming task; and 3) the emergence of a bimodal distribution of AP performance when adopting scoring criteria that assign credit to semitone errors. These findings show the importance of methods in studying behavioural traits, and are a key step towards identifying AP phenotypes. Replication of our results in larger samples will further establish the usefulness of this priming paradigm in AP research.

Voice disadvantage effects in absolute and relative pitch judgments

Absolute pitch (AP) possessors can identify musical notes without an external reference. Most AP studies have used musical instruments and pure tones for testing, rather than the human voice. However, the voice is crucial for human communication in both speech and music, and evidence for voice-specific neural processing mechanisms and brain regions suggests that AP processing of voice may be different. Here, musicians with AP or relative pitch (RP) completed online AP or RP note-naming tasks, respectively. Four synthetic sound categories were tested: voice, viola, simplified voice, and simplified viola. Simplified sounds had the same long-term spectral information but no temporal fluctuations (such as vibrato). The AP group was less accurate in judging the note names for voice than for viola in both the original and simplified conditions. A smaller, marginally significant effect was observed in the RP group. A voice disadvantage effect was also observed in a simple pitch discrimination task, even with simplified stimuli. To reconcile these results with voice-advantage effects in other domains, it is proposed that voices are processed in a way that voice- or speech-relevant features are facilitated at the expense of features that are less relevant to voice processing, such as fine-grained pitch information.

Revisiting discrete versus continuous models of human behavior: The case of absolute pitch

Many human behaviors are discussed in terms of discrete categories. Quantizing behavior in this fashion may provide important traction for understanding the complexities of human experience, but it also may bias understanding of phenomena and associated mechanisms. One example of this is absolute pitch (AP), which is often treated as a discrete trait that is either present or absent (i.e., with easily identifiable near-perfect "genuine" AP possessors and at-chance non-AP possessors) despite emerging evidence that pitch-labeling ability is not all-or-nothing. We used a large-scale online assessment to test the discrete model of AP, specifically by measuring how intermediate performers related to the typically defined "non-AP" and "genuine AP" populations. Consistent with prior research, individuals who performed at-chance (non-AP) reported beginning musical instruction much later than the near-perfect AP participants, and the highest performers were more likely to speak a tonal language than were the lowest performers (though this effect was not as statistically robust as one would expect from prior research). Critically, however, these developmental factors did not differentiate the near-perfect AP performers from the intermediate AP performers. Gaussian mixture modeling supported the existence of two performance distributions-the first distribution encompassed both the intermediate and near-perfect AP possessors, whereas the second distribution encompassed only the at-chance participants. Overall, these results provide support for conceptualizing intermediate levels of pitch-labeling ability along the same continuum as genuine AP-level pitch labeling ability-in other words, a continuous distribution of AP skill among all above-chance performers rather than discrete categories of ability. Expanding the inclusion criteria for AP makes it possible to test hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie this ability and relate this ability to more general cognitive mechanisms involved in other abilities.

Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults

Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to name any musical note without the aid of a reference note, is thought to depend on an early critical period of development. Although recent research has shown that adults can improve AP performance in a single training session, the best learners still did not achieve note classification levels comparable to performance of a typical, "genuine" AP possessor. Here, we demonstrate that these "genuine" levels of AP performance can be achieved within eight weeks of training for at least some adults, with the best learner passing all measures of AP ability after training and retaining this knowledge for at least four months after training. Alternative explanations of these positive results, such as improving accuracy through adopting a slower, relative pitch strategy, are not supported based on joint analyses of response time and accuracy. The results also did not appear to be driven by extreme familiarity with a single instrument or octave range, as the post-training AP assessments used eight different timbres and spanned over seven octaves. Yet, it is also important to note that a majority of the participants only exhibited modest improvements in performance, suggesting that adult AP learning is difficult and that near-perfect levels of AP may only be achievable by subset of adults. Overall, these results demonstrate that explicit perceptual training in some adults can lead to AP performance that is behaviorally indistinguishable from AP that manifests within a critical period of development. Implications for theories of AP acquisition are discussed.

Long-term pitch memory for music recordings is related to auditory working memory precision

Most individuals have reliable long-term memories for the pitch of familiar music recordings. This pitch memory (1) appears to be normally distributed in the population, (2) does not depend on explicit musical training and (3) only seems to be weakly related to differences in listening frequency estimates. The present experiment was designed to assess whether individual differences in auditory working memory could explain variance in long-term pitch memory for music recordings. In Experiment 1, participants first completed a musical note adjustment task that has been previously used to assess working memory of musical pitch. Afterward, participants were asked to judge the pitch of well-known music recordings, which either had or had not been shifted in pitch. We found that performance on the pitch working memory task was significantly related to performance in the pitch memory task using well-known recordings, even when controlling for overall musical experience and familiarity with each recording. In Experiment 2, we replicated these findings in a separate group of participants while additionally controlling for fluid intelligence and non-pitch-based components of auditory working memory. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that participants could not accurately judge the pitch of unfamiliar recordings, suggesting that our method of pitch shifting did not result in unwanted acoustic cues that could have aided participants in Experiments 1 and 2. These results, taken together, suggest that the ability to maintain pitch information in working memory might lead to more accurate long-term pitch memory.

On the Perceptual Subprocess of Absolute Pitch

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability of musicians to identify the pitch of tonal sound without external reference. While there have been behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the characteristics of AP, how the AP is implemented in human brains remains largely unknown. AP can be viewed as comprising of two subprocesses: perceptual (processing auditory input to extract a pitch chroma) and associative (linking an auditory representation of pitch chroma with a verbal/non-verbal label). In this review, we focus on the nature of the perceptual subprocess of AP. Two different models on how the perceptual subprocess works have been proposed: either via absolute pitch categorization (APC) or based on absolute pitch memory (APM). A major distinction between the two views is that whether the AP uses unique auditory processing (i.e., APC) that exists only in musicians with AP or it is rooted in a common phenomenon (i.e., APM), only with heightened efficiency. We review relevant behavioral and neuroimaging evidence that supports each notion. Lastly, we list open questions and potential ideas to address them.