'Perfect pitch' in humans far more prevalent tha...(/P Students who unconsciously used perfe...)

Students who unconsciously used perfect pitch to indentify notes stumbled over the transpositions. They heard them as a new group of notes they'd never heard before. Students who relied on relative pitch, however, heard the transposed notes and automatically and unconsciously recognized them as familiarthe notes seemed to be of the same group heard before.

The test corresponded well with the results of conventional tests for perfect pitch in musicians, which strongly suggests the new test works. But to the surprise of Marvin and Newport, there were a number of nonmusicians who used perfect pitch to identify groups of notes but did not know they had perfect pitch.

The team is now investigating the other cognitive abilities of this new group of listeners with perfect pitch, to determine what might distinguish them from the more numerous listeners with only relative pitch perception. Marvin and Newport are also planning to investigate a controversial hypothesis that native speakers of tonal languages like Chinese, which utilize pitch to distinguish different words, have their perfect pitch abilities enhanced by their language's necessary attention to pitch.

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