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infants and pitch
Title: infants and pitch
by Saffran appear to be very revealing in this respect, showing that
young infants at the age of 8 months, unlike adults, primarily rely on
absolute pitch cues.
Saffran, J. R. & Griepentrog, G. J. Absolute pitch in
infant auditory learning: evidence for developmental reorganization.
Dev Psychol 37, 74-85 (2001).
Saffran, J. R. Musical Learning and Language Development.
Ann NY Acad Sci 999, 397-401 (2003).
these results suggest that absolute pitch is a primary perceptual mode
that is heavily superseded by relative pitch (probably in the course
of language acquisition). Early musical training or learning a
tonal language like Thai or Japanese may help to prevent this edging
out-process, with the consequence that certain subjects retain the
ability to perceive absolute pitch throughout life. Verbal
categorizations of notes may be helpful in this respect, but it would
be misleading to take them for the main underlying
A paper by Sandra Trehub suggests that infants are also sensitive
to relative pitch:
Trehub SE (2001) Musical predispositions in
infancy. Ann NY Acad Sci, 930: 1-16 2001.
In searching for this ref, I just found
another of Trehub's demonstrating the ability of non-musicians to
discriminate recordings of instrumental themes from popular TV shows
in their correct key, from those transposed up or down by only one or
two semi-tones. They conclude that "Adults' reportedly poor
memory for pitch is likely to be a by-product of their inability to
name isolated pitches."
Schellenberg, EG and Trehub, SE (2003) Good
pitch memory is widespread. Pyschological Science, 14 (3):