Can Perfect Pitch Be Learned?

Lundin, Robert W.

doi:10.2307/3389949

Cited by 14 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…One possibility is that the added sensorimotor experience gained by musicians may enhance absolute note representations (cf. Cuddy, 1968;Lundin, 1963) or improve pitch discriminability (Kishon-Rabin, Amir, Vexler, & Zaltz, 2001), consequently improving IAI. Additionally, it is possible that musical training does not cause better IAI.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation

et al. 2016

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Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name or produce an isolated musical note without the aid of a reference note. One skill thought to be unique to AP possessors is the ability to provide absolute intonation judgments (e.g., classifying an isolated note as Bin-tune^or Bout-of-tune^). Recent work has suggested that absolute intonation perception among AP possessors is not crystallized in a critical period of development, but is dynamically maintained by the listening environment, in which the vast majority of Western music is tuned to a specific cultural standard. Given that all listeners of Western music are constantly exposed to this specific cultural tuning standard, our experiments address whether absolute intonation perception extends beyond AP possessors. We demonstrate that non-AP listeners are able to accurately judge the intonation of completely isolated notes. Both musicians and nonmusicians showed evidence for absolute intonation recognition when listening to familiar timbres (piano and violin). When testing unfamiliar timbres (triangle and inverted sine waves), only musicians showed weak evidence of absolute intonation recognition (Experiment 2). Overall, these results highlight a previously unknown similarity between AP and non-AP possessors' long-term musical note representations, including evidence of sensitivity to frequency.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation

et al. 2016

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“…Some training studies used a very small sample size (3 or less participants per condition; Brady, 1970;Cuddy, 1968;Hartman, 1954;Meyer, 1899;Mull, 1925;Wedell, 1934) and involved self-training of the authors of the manuscripts (Brady, 1970;Meyer, 1899). Other training studies were difficult to interpret, e.g, with only a binary judgment on a single tone learned (e.g., "C" or not "C"; Mull, 1925;Russo et al, 2003), or with insufficient information provided for interpreting the performance of the participants (Lundin, 1963). Therefore, despite the apparently substantial AP improvement attained in some of these studies (e.g., Brady, 1970;Lundin, 1963), it remains unclear whether AP can be acquired in adulthood.…”

Section: The Role Of Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other training studies were difficult to interpret, e.g, with only a binary judgment on a single tone learned (e.g., "C" or not "C"; Mull, 1925;Russo et al, 2003), or with insufficient information provided for interpreting the performance of the participants (Lundin, 1963). Therefore, despite the apparently substantial AP improvement attained in some of these studies (e.g., Brady, 1970;Lundin, 1963), it remains unclear whether AP can be acquired in adulthood.…”

Section: The Role Of Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Is it impossible to acquire absolute pitch in adulthood?

Wong

Lui

Yip

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the rare ability to name the pitch of a tone without external reference. It is widely believed that acquiring AP in adulthood is impossible, since AP is only for the selected few with rare genetic makeup and early musical training. In three experiments, we trained adults to name pitches for 12 to 40 hours. After training, 14% of the participants (6 out of 43) were able to name twelve pitches at 90% accuracy or above, with semitone errors considered incorrect. This performance level was comparable to that of realworld 'AP possessors'. AP training showed classic characteristics of perceptual learning, including performance enhancement, generalization of learning and sustained improvement for at least one to three months. Exploratory extrapolation analyses suggest that 39.5% and 58.1% of the participants would acquire AP if the training lasted for 60 and 180 hours respectively, suggesting the potential for the majority of the participants to acquire AP. We demonstrate that AP continues to be learnable in adulthood. The extent to which one acquires AP may thus be better explained by the amount and type of perceptual experience.

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“…The most widely accepted theory is that "genuine" AP ability can only manifest within an early period of development (the critical period theory) 4,5 . In part, the critical period theory of AP is bolstered by the lack of conclusive evidence that AP can be learned by post-critical period adults [6][7][8][9] as well as a more recent study suggesting that there is a need to re-open the critical period for learning AP with a pharmacological intervention 10 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults

Hedger

Heald

Nusbaum

2018

Preprint

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Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to name any musical note without the aid of a reference note, is thought to develop in an early critical period of development. Although recent research has shown that adults can improve AP abilities in a single training session, the best learners still did not achieve note classification performance comparable to performance of a genuine AP possessor. Here, we demonstrate that genuine AP levels of performance can be trained in eight weeks for some adults, with the best learner passing all measures of AP ability after training and retaining this knowledge for at least four months after training. Alternative explanations of these positive results, such as improving accuracy through adopting a slower, relative pitch strategy, are not supported based on joint analyses of response time and accuracy. The post-training AP assessments were extensive, totaling 204 notes taken from eight different timbres and spanning over seven octaves. These results clearly demonstrate that explicit perceptual training in some adults can lead to AP performance that is behaviorally indistinguishable from AP that results from childhood development. Implications for theories of AP acquisition are discussed.

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Can Perfect Pitch Be Learned?

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation

Telling in-tune from out-of-tune: widespread evidence for implicit absolute intonation

Is it impossible to acquire absolute pitch in adulthood?

Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults

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