MIYAZAKI Ken'ichi
Perception & Psychophysics, 57, 962-970 (1995)
Two experiments were conducted to examine what effect absolute pitch possession has on relative pitch processing. Listeners attempted to identify melodic intervals ranging from a semitone to an octave with different reference tones. Listeners with absolute pitch showed declined performance when the reference was deviated C, F#, or out-of-tune E (lowered by a quarter-tone) as compared to when the reference was C. In contrast, listeners who had no absolute pitch maintained relatively high performance in all reference conditions. These results suggest that generally absolute-pitch listeners are weak in relative-pitch processing and sometimes show an inveterate tendency to rely on absolute pitch in relative-pitch tasks. They may give typical responses in pitch tasks which are considerably different from those who have no absolute pitch.