Recognition of transposed melodies by absolute-pitch possessors

Miyazaki, K.
(In Review)

Melody recognition experiments were performed to investigate how absolute-pitch listeners deal with musical pitch in tonal context. In each trial, a short standard melody was presented auditorily with piano sounds in Experiment 1 and visually in the format of musical notation in Experiment 2, and a comparison melody followed always with piano sounds. Listeners were required to determine whether the two melodies were the same or different with respect to relative pitch. The listeners having absolute pitch performed more poorly in comparing transposed melodies than in comparing untransposed melodies and their performance for transposed melodies was significantly poorer than the listeners having no absolute pitch. These results suggest that absolute pitch may work to a serious disadvantage to musicians in dealing with melodies in different tonal contexts.