Absolute psychoacoustics may be acquired by training even after becoming an adult

by Jack Sharp

" Absolute pitch " that you can absolutely recognize the height of the sound when you listen to the sound alone is a very unusual ability to be said to be one in 10,000 people, a famous musician like Mozart had It is known for it. It is generally thought that absolute pitch is established by training music at a young age in addition to genetic ones, but in a new study "Absolute pitch is not affected even by becoming an adult You can attach it. "

Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible | bioRxiv
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/03/355933

Yetta Kwailing Wong et al.'S research team at Hong Kong City University reported that the paper titled "Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible" (it is difficult to obtain an absolute pitch as an adult). Can adults always get the absolute pitch feeling? Although there was a study that examined that there were few samples, the strength of training was also low. Therefore, researchers conducted high intensity experiments on more subjects using perceptual learning .

Through three experiments, researchers had 43 subjects train 12 to 40 hours of laboratory tests on the pitch of different tones and octaves combined. In addition, the subject was a student at the City University of Hong Kong, and both a person with music experience and a person without music experience existed, but neither subject had absolute pitch.

by Tadas Mikuckis

As a result of training, 6 out of 43 people, 14% of subjects were able to answer the heights of the sounds with accuracy of more than 90%. The accuracy of 90% is said to be equivalent to the "real owner of absolute pitch" in the real world.

In addition, as a result of the exploratory data analysis, it was shown that 39.5% of the subjects were trained by 60 hours of training, and 58.1% of the subjects were able to obtain the absolute pitching by 180 hours of training. From these research results, the researchers indicated that they may be based on the type and amount of perceptual learning, but even adults can obtain absolute pitch.

It is important to note that Mr. Wong's paper has not yet been peer reviewed, but in the past there was a paper saying that absolute pitching can be acquired after becoming an adult. In a study published in July 2015, the team by Howard Nusbaum of University of Chicago and colleagues asked 17 students without absolute pitching to hear the sound of 180 pianos and heard what sound they sounded immediately I did training to send feedback. As a result of repeating this training, the subject's ability to hit the sound has improved dramatically. After a similar test a few months later, the results indicated that although the result was slightly inferior to just after training, it also had a high sound recognition capability.

by Marius Masalar

Mr. Nusbaum's research result does not directly indicate that "Adults can obtain what is equivalent to" true absolute pitch "by training", but even without training music in early childhood, Depending on the method, it shows the possibility to acquire the absolute pitch even after becoming an adult.