'Perfect pitch' in humans far more prevalent tha...(can identify a series of repeated notes ...)

To explore the cognitive basis for perfect pitch, Marvin and Newport wanted to test the basis for pitch perception and memory in people who had never been musically trained in order to get a better idea of exactly how common perfect pitch is in humans. Estimates of how many people have perfect pitch have always been unreliable because non-musicians have no way to identify a note, whether they recognize it or not. Newport has worked for decades to understand how infants come to make sense of the jumble of sounds spoken to them, and one of her former students, Jenny Saffran, had begun to use their experimental materials to study pitch perception in infants. Marvin and Newport, working together, created a pitch-based test similar to these language-based tests.

Both musicians and non-musicians listened to groups of three notes, with the groups played in a continuous stream in random order for 20 minutes. Just as the human mind quickly begins to identify new sound sequences (words) in a foreign language, the students learned to identify the groups of notes embedded in the stream. Crucially, however, the test made it very difficult for a student to identify and remember the names of particular notes because the notes were constantly coming in the 20-minute stream.

Marvin and Newport then tested the students. They replayed the note groups, plus new groups the students hadn't heard before, and asked the students if each group of notes was familiar or unfamiliar.

The critical feature of the test was that the team transposed some of the original note groups to a different key without the knowledge of the students.<
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