Absolute Pitch experiments

[John Musselwhite]

I was going to post this to the OT list (since no one's using it) but since 
it relates to pitch I thought more people might find it interesting here.

(from http://www.world-science.net/)

Birds show superior listening skills

Posted July 2
 From the University of Alberta
Being called a bird-brain might not be so bad, after all.

Canadian researchers have shown that humans just aren't cut out to discern 
certain pitches like their feathered friends. Testing completed on humans, 
rats, and three different species of birds shows that the birds--even ones 
that have been raised in isolation--are better at identifying, classifying, 
and memorizing absolute pitches than both humans and rats, with humans 
performing just slightly better than rats.

Absolute pitch is the ability to remember a note's precise pitch.

"It's amazing how dissimilar the results of this test are when you compare 
humans and birds," said Dr. Chris Sturdy, a psychology professor at the 
University of Alberta. "Humans and rats are weak by any standard, and 
they're just awful when you compare them to the songbirds."

For the study, humans were given monetary rewards when they memorized or 
recognized the pitches that were played for them, while the birds (zebra 
finches, white throated sparrows, and budgerigars) and rats were given food 
rewards.

Sturdy said humans actually perform fairly well in tests of relative pitch, 
which refers to the relationship between two pitch sounds played one right 
after the other, allowing the listener to use one pitch as a reference for 
the other. However, when humans try to comprehend absolute pitch, which 
refers to pitches played alone without any external standard to contrast 
them with, their ability is "lackluster at best," he said.

Sturdy believes that it is too early in the ongoing research to speculate 
extensively about the cause of the striking difference between the absolute 
pitch processing abilities of birds and mammals. Whatever the cause, Sturdy 
thinks it cannot be special to humans because other mammals (rats) are no 
better at judging absolute pitch than humans.

The latest findings from this study, which are published this month in the 
research journal Behavioral Processes, take the researchers to the middle 
stages of an ongoing project to determine if all birds are better equipped 
than all mammals to understand absolute pitch. Absolute pitch testing is 
planned on more mammals and bird species. The goal is to create a map of 
absolute pitch understanding among as many animals as possible.

"How animals understand absolute pitch may get to the heart of the origins 
of musical perception," Sturdy added. "Once we can determine the extent of 
the differences in absolute pitch perception, then we can begin to 
understand why these differences exist and why our mammalian brains work 
the way they do."
		
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