Absolute+Pitch+and+Meaning+in+Music+Definitions


 * Bobby Bray**

In my research I came across the work of Leonard B Meyer, who in his book [|Emotion and the Meaning of Music] defined some useful terms regarding the different groups of theorists who discuss the "meaning" in music. These terms are useful when examining absolute pitch (AP) phenomena. They are as follows:

Absolutists- who believe musical meaning is exclusively self contained within the music. Referentialists- who believe musical meaning is "associated with concepts, actions, emotional states, and character, which are outside music." He also included two more sub-classifications that work in conjunction with each of the two aforementioned terms: Formalist- who see the details in music (pitch, note choice, etc.) eliciting purely intellectual meaning. Expressionist- who see the details in music as being able to give rise to emotion.

Given this context, and applying the Believing Game to the Referential Formalist perspective for a moment, let us examine the following study. Diana Deutsch, who is credited by many as having defined the field "Psychology of Music," claims that her paper [|Tone Language Speakers Possess Absolute Pitch]gives evidence stating that "...association of pitch with meaningful words very early in life..." gives rise to perfect pitch. The experiments she did involved native speakers of Vietnamese and Mandarin, both of which use pitch to denote meaning. The results and sound samples provided on the page linked above are pretty convincing. It seems that the "meaningfulness" of the words is key to the development of absolute pitch, in Deutsh's opinion. My question, from a Referential Formalist perspective, is weather or not this meaningfulness is associated with the conceptual or emotional understanding of the specific words? Could that have played a role in the ability to reproduce the notes of the words nearly perfect each time; possibly due to some evolutionary benefit of having an enhanced memory of details when emotions or conceptualization is activated? It is worth noting here that this experiment displayed Genuine Absolute Pitch, and not Pseudo or Quasi Absolute Pitch as described in Bachem's paper "Various Types of Absolute Pitch." I am curious however, if younger children who speak these languages stick to the higher pitched chroma of the same note. By the way I would describe Bachem as an Absolute Formalist.

Many articles on AP suggests that it is the critical early age when the possibility of attaining AP exists. This article from Japan entitled [|Why Are People Able to Acquire Absolute Pitch Only During Early Childhood?]surmises that AP is related to the dimensions we focus on at different ages. It suggests that children under 6 identify notes by their chroma. They said the older the children were in the study the more they focused on the "hight" of the note. They also found that the older the kids were, the harder it was to attain AP. In a study displayed in Desmond Sergeant's article in The Journal of Research in Music Education, the percentage of people with AP is directly correlated with the age at which music training began; the earlier the training began the better chance of having AP ([|Table 3 bottom of page]). I agree with Desmond when he suggests that associating specific pitches with note names "at an age when awareness of pitch dominates auditory perception" is a likely cause of AP ([|end of last paragraph]).