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Reis said that implies that experience is probably involved in pitch recognition, since even people with self-reported perfect pitch weren’t “perfect” when the notes were produced in an unfamiliar way. Participants also tended to be better at naming notes played on a piano as compared to the computer-generated sine tones: Those with perfect pitch averaged 98% accuracy on piano and 77% for sine tones, while those without averaged 29% accuracy on piano and 25% for sine tones.Īccording to UChicago doctoral student John Veillette, who was also a co-author on the paper, this suggests that timbres-which are conferred by upper harmonics in sound frequencies and give instruments their unique, familiar rings-play an important role in pitch recognition. They found that in both groups, the FFR-which provides a snapshot of the integrity of a person’s ability to process sounds-predicted people’s performance on pitch identification better than any metric previously used in studies of perfect pitch, including musical training.
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In each trial, the scientists used electrodes attached non-invasively to people’s heads to monitor the way their brains and nervous systems reacted to sounds-a measure called the “frequency following response” (FFR)-and recorded their accuracy along with details about the participants’ backgrounds in music, including prior training. Thirty-one people participated in the study: 16 with perfect pitch and 15 who were accomplished musicians without perfect pitch. The task the researchers tested participants on required naming piano notes and naming “pure” sine tones generated by a computer (these represent exact frequencies without an instrument’s timbre). “The presumed rarity of absolute pitch should be striking, as it is comparable to only being able to classify colors by their relationship to other colors and not with consistent labels such as ‘blue,’” the authors wrote in a journal article describing their findings, which was published in July in Nature: Scientific Reports.
#FOCUS MUSIC SERIES#
Howard Nusbaum worked with other UChicago researchers to design a study comparing people with perfect pitch and people without perfect pitch on a series of tasks. To help answer this question, doctoral student Katherine Reis and Prof. More common among musicians is “relative pitch,” the ability to name musical notes in relation to one another on a scale (“do, re, mi”) but not without a reference note.įor psychologists and neuroscientists at the University of Chicago who have studied perfect pitch for years, this raised an interesting question about the relationship between sensory processing and cognition: What makes some musicians so good at identifying musical sounds? Is it the way their brains process sounds, their musical training, or both?
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In fact, this ability is rare enough that society celebrates people who can label musical notes heard spontaneously: They are said to have “perfect pitch,” or “absolute pitch” as scientists who study the science of auditory perception call the ability.
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Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening expertise of most people. Both light and sound travel as waves, with characteristics that allow people with typical vision and hearing to perceive and categorize them when they reach their eyes and ears: “That’s a small red dog barking,” someone might say.īut while people can easily name most colors in different groups-distinguishing the specific frequencies and wavelengths of light-few can do the same for musical notes, which represent sounds with distinct, unchanging pitches.