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“ Intervals, scales, and tuning” in The Psychology of Music, edited by D. Furthermore, no evidence was found that this absolute pitch avantage depended on key, interval size, or musical context.īachem, A. The possession of absolute pitch was strongly correlated with enhanced performance on all these tests of relative pitch. Three different conditions were employed these used brief sine waves, piano tones, and piano tones preceded by a V7-I chord cadence so as to establish a tonal context. The intervals to be named were either ascending or descending with separation ranging from 1 to 12 semitones and equally involved all 12 pitch classes.
To explore this issue, 36 trained musicians-18 absolute pitch possessors and 18 non-possessors with equivalent age of onset and duration of musical training-were tested on interval naming tasks requiring only relative pitch. Absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify or produce a musical tone without a reference tone, has been shown to be advantageous in some musical tasks however, its relevance in musical contexts primarily involving relative pitch has been questioned.