[Cognitive Workshop] Thursday at 12pm – Stephen Hedger "Individual differences in the short and long-term training of musical pitch"

One view of the acquisition of absolute pitch (AP) has assumed that early learning plays a critical role. This theory does not support the idea that non-AP adults can learn musical note names and become “true” AP possessors.  In the current studies, we measure how pitch acuity correlates to explicit learning of musical notes.  Adult (post-sensitive period) participants first engaged in a pitch reproduction task, similar to that used by Ross, Olson, and Gore (2003) to measure auditory sensitivity.  Following this task, participants engaged in a musical note learning task, in which they were given a training task on a single octave of piano tones and subsequently tested on these tones as well as on notes from different timbres and octaves (generalization). We found a significant correlation between performance on the pitch reproduction task and generalized learning, suggesting that individual differences in auditory memory might influence the degree to which one can attain AP. Importantly, previous musical experience, nor age of music onset, was not a significant predictor of generalized note learning.  Future research will use electrophysiological measures (such as auditory brainstem responses) to track the neural changes that result from both short and long-term training of musical pitches.