Widespread but Limited in Context: Absolute Tuning Judgments are Disrupted by Relative Pitch Cues

Most listeners exhibit absolute pitch memory for familiar pitched sounds, ranging from simple tones (e.g., the “bleep” used to censor broadcast media) to rich, polyphonic melodies (e.g., excerpts from popular songs). Given that relative pitch is the predominant means of processing music for most listeners, this observed absolute pitch memory suggests that most listeners have hybrid representations, containing both absolute and relative pitch cues. The present experiment assesses how relative pitch cues influence absolute pitch memory in a variety of listening contexts, varying in terms of ecological validity. Participants were asked to explicitly judge different musical sounds (isolated notes, chords, scales, and short excerpts), varying in complexity, in terms of absolute tuning (i.e., whether a musical sound adhered to conventional, A440 tuning). Listeners showed robust above-chance performance in judging absolute tuning when the to-be-judged sounds did not contain relative pitch changes (i.e., isolated notes and chords), replicating prior work. Critically, however, performance was significantly reduced and was not statistically different from chance when the musical sounds contained relative pitch changes (scales and short excerpts). Taken together, the results suggest that most listeners possess some long-term memory for absolute tuning, but this ability has limited generalizability to more ecologically valid musical contexts that contain relative pitch changes.