Recognition of melodies by music students with absolute pitch
MIYAZAKI Ken'ichi, ISHII Reiko, and Ohgushi Kengo
Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan, 50, 780-788 (1994)
Music students tried to recognize melodies in three different key contexts. In each trial, a standard melody was presented visually in notation always in the C major key, and a comparison melody was presented auditorily in the C major, out-of-tune E major (with the tonic set at E lowered by a quarter-tone), or the F sharp major. The subjects were required to answer whether the two melodies were the same or not. The subjects were classified into three groups of different absolute pitch (AP) level on the basis of the performance in an absolute-pitch test. All of the three groups showed a decline in accuracy in the out-of-tuned E major and in the F sharp major contexts compared with the C major context. Subjects with accurate absolute pitch tended to use absolute pitch and apply various sophisticated strategies in recognizing melodies when the comparison melody was presented in different keys from the standard melody. Possible problems absolute pitch may have in processing of musical pitch are discussed.