This paper presents some interesting findings. However, the statement in the Introduction ' Most studies have focused on the putative connection between tone languages and absolute pitch (e.g., [37], [38]), a rare note naming ability irrelevant to most music perception/production’ is incorrect, as it ignores two recent papers by Dooley and Deutsch (2010, 2011) showing the absolute pitch possessors outperform non-possessors on relative pitch tasks, involving both musical dictation and also the naming of musical intervals. In these papers, as in the chapter by Deutsch (2013) it is also shown that earlier claims that absolute pitch possessors perform less well than non-possessors on tasks of relative pitch were based on an artifact of the experimental procedure.

References - all posted in full at

http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/p...


Dooley, K. and Deutsch, D. Absolute pitch correlates with high performance on interval naming tasks . Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2011, 130, 4097-4104.

Dooley, K. & Deutsch, D. Absolute pitch correlates with high performance on musical dictation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2010, 128, 890-893.

Deutsch, D. Absolute pitch In D. Deutsch (Ed.). The psychology of music, 3rd Edition, 2013, 141-182, San Diego: Elsevier.

Diana Deutsch
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego

ddeutsch@ucsd.edu