Open AccessRecognition of transposed melodies by absolute‐pitch possessors
Author(s) -
MIYAZAKI KEN'ICHI
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5584.2004.00260.x
Subject(s) - melody , absolute pitch , relative pitch , piano , speech recognition , context (archaeology) , musical notation , psychology , audiology , pitch (music) , communication , acoustics , mathematics , computer science , musical , perception , art , history , physics , medicine , archaeology , neuroscience , visual arts
Melody recognition experiments were carried out to investigate how absolute‐pitch listeners deal with melodies in a 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 in piano sounds. Listeners were required to determine whether the two melodies were the same or different with respect to relative pitch. The listeners who had absolute pitch performed more poorly in comparing transposed melodies than in comparing nontransposed melodies, and their performance for transposed melodies was significantly poorer than that of the listeners who did not have absolute pitch. These results suggest that absolute pitch may work to a serious disadvantage to musicians in dealing with melodies in different tonal contexts.