Comparable large-scale surveys including an on-site pitch-naming test were conducted with music students in Japan and Poland to obtain more convincing estimates of the prevalence of absolute pitch (AP) and examine how musical experience relates to AP. Participants with accurate AP (95% correct identification) accounted for 30% of the Japanese music students, but only 7% of the Polish music students. This difference in the performance of pitch naming was related to the difference in musical experience. Participants with AP had begun music training at an earlier age (6 years or earlier), and the average year of commencement of musical training was more than 2 years earlier for the Japanese music students than for the Polish students. The percentage of participants who had received early piano lessons was 94% for the Japanese musically trained students but was 72% for the Polish music students. Approximately one-third of the Japanese musically trained students had attended the Yamaha Music School, where lessons on piano or electric organ were given to preschool children in parallel with fixed-do solfège singing training. Such early music instruction was not as common in Poland. The relationship of AP with early music training is discussed.

Absolute pitch (AP)—an ability to identify an isolated pitch without musical context—is commonly believed to be a valuable ability for musicians. However, relative pitch (RP)—an ability to perceive pitch relations—is more important in most musical contexts. In this study, music students in East Asian and Western countries (Japan, China, Poland, Germany, and USA) were tested on AP and RP abilities. In the AP test, 60 single tones were presented in a quasirandom order over a five-octave range. In the RP test, ascending musical intervals from 1 to 11 semitones were presented in four different keys. Participants wrote down note names in the AP test and scale-degree names or musical interval names in the RP test. The conservatory-level Japanese students showed the highest AP performance and more than half of them were classified as accurate AP possessors, but only 10% were classified as accurate RP possessors. In contrast, only a small percentage of participants from Poland, Germany, and the USA were identified as accurate AP possessors, whereas many more were accurate RP possessors. Participants from China were typically intermediate on both measures. These noticeable contrasts between AP and RP performance in different countries suggest influences of the underlying socio-cultural conditions, presumably relating to music education. Given the importance of RP in music, the results suggest that more emphasis should be place on RP training, particularly in East Asian countries.

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Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a colourful and intriguing artist in the world of Parisian avant-garde. In the turbulent times of the early 20th century he created the concept of musique d’ameublement (‘furniture music’) – a vision of music that did not require attentive listening because it was supposed to play an extravagant role (as it was perceived in that period) of an acoustic background accompanying all everyday events. A change in recording and sound reproduction techniques in the 20th century that led to the ubiquity of music in the contemporary world seems to confirm that Satie’s ‘furniture music’ can be treated as a prophetic idea. However, the problem of how the concept of musique d’ameublement should be interpreted still remains ambiguous. The main aim of the present paper is to discuss the two contrary ways of the interpretation of ‘furniture music’. The first approach assumes that Satie can be treated as ‘the progenitor’ of muzak – a musical genre initially associated with the activities of Muzak company and then gradually identified with any background music provided on a mass scale to the public space. The second approach is an attempt to interpret the concept of musique d’ameublement in a completely different way – as an expression of opposition to an increasingly mechanized Western world dominated by progress and technology, where the role of music boils down only to the function of the acoustic background. Therefore, Satie becomes one of the precursors of the actions taken by the opponents of muzak (e. g. pipedown movements), who seek to eliminate the imposed background music from the public space. The reconstruction of musique d’ameublement (basing, inter alia, on selected source materials) is treated as a starting point for the discussion that leads to the acoustic ecology perspective.

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