The elements of absolute pitch.

Originally published in Acta Laryngologica, 14, 382-92, 1930.

Dr. C.L. Chiloff
Employed at the private ear, nose, and throat clinic of Professor Woyatschek
for the military academy of medicine in Leningrad.

Translated by Christopher Aruffo
www.acousticlearning.com

Absolute hearing is one of the components of musical hearing.  Therefore, before considering this faculty in particular, it is necessary to briefly define the musical ear in general.

One distinguishes three forms in musical hearing:  the external format, the internal format, and the mixed form.  Under the banner of "external format" is the faculty of receiving and interpreting external sounds, thus creating a particular psychic state which one calls "musical pleasure".  The "internal format" is a particular faculty of composition, creation, design of such musical images expressed by sounds, without involving something to excite the sounds externally.  The musical ear is a function of the central nervous system and is not, in the adult human, dependent on the peripheral auditory apparatus.  It is what makes possible the preservation of compositional faculties in a man who has become completely deaf (for example, we refer to the creative work produced by Beethoven in the second half of his life).  Lastly, the "mixed shape" of the musical ear includes and comprehends the entirety of its external and internal features.  In this form, the external musical ear is used as a stimulant to the development of internal hearing.

The internal musical ear, essential to musical creation, cannot form itself without the involvement of ordinary hearing, it is surely based on a knowledge of sounds in general.  The proof of this is in the fact that one cannot find a musical composer among congenital deaf-mutes, i.e. among individuals who cannot represent even a single sound.  It is clear that for the development of musical hearing it is essential to have some preliminary preparation, roughly speaking, in the consistent reception of exterior sounds; the memory for these sounds accumulate in the neural centers and are used as a basis for the development of musical imagination.

As for the other two forms of musical ear, i.e. external hearing and mixed hearing, they are created in turn by a whole series of components divided into two categories:  elementary and complex.

In the category of elementary components we find: the ability to determine the ratios between pitches (intervals), the intensity of the sound, the consonances and dissonances, and, finally, the ability to determine the absolute pitch of a sound (without having recourse to the comparison between the given tone and one previously heard).  This is precisely what we call absolute hearing.

The category of complex components include the following faculties:  to distinguish tunings and tonalities; repetition and recall of musical phrases or entire musical works; the invention of new sound combinations; and finding the musical expression of the tone color, nuances, and phrasing.

Among this enumeration of elementary and complex components, there is that one which has so far been of little interest to the ear physician:  the ability to determine the absolute pitch of a sound.  We are not in a position to provide conclusive explanations of this faculty; we can merely indicate using ad hoc experiments with some details of its expression.  We point out the theory of hearing by resonance offered by Helmholtz.  A sound of a definite pitch reaches the basilar membrane and vibrates a given "cord", which creates a specific irritation in the nerve endings in the organ of Corti.  This irritation is transmitted by the auditory nerve to a given section of the brain's temporal lobe.  If there are several sounds simultaneously, the latter will vibrate several cords which will create corresponding irritations also transmitted to their respective sections of the temporal lobe.  It is supposed that with low tones, the basilar membrane resonates with the turns of the whorl at the top of the "snail" where the cords are long, thick, and relaxed, and high tones resonate at the base of the whorl where the cords are short, thin, and taut.  In the temporal lobe of the brain (in the centers of our auditory faculty) the sounds of different height obviously also have various fields of activity; the centers for the musical tones between low "E" and "A" are in the second temporal circonvolution; between "E" and "C3" will be found in the third circonvolution, and finally, "C3" and above are localized to the posterior half of the fourth circonvolution.  According to these theories, one must acknowledge the existence of particular tonal scales in the peripheral and communicative bodies of hearing.  According to these circumstances it might be possible, theoretically speaking, to access the initial stimulation in the peripheral auditory apparatus caused by a specific pitch sound from which, consequently, one should be able to determine the pitch of the sound-- i.e. to know its absolute pitch.  We know, however, that this ability is exceptionally rare.  Indeed, there are only a few isolated examples of people being able to instantly recognize the sound of a tone.  Even with these people, it is impossible to explain the nature of absolute hearing via Helmholtz's theory alone, or even by the admission that each sound is physically recorded by our auditory apparatus, because it is still necessary for the subject to relate their experience; to do this, a subject must compare the given sound with an unspecified standard among those sounds which he has previously heard.

To illustrate our thoughts, we present below the results of our experiments with musicians whom we believe to have an absolute ear.  Our research was conducted with Bezold-Edelman tuning forks for pure tones; the subject was asked to immediately name the tone represented by the sound of the tuning fork.

Table 1.

People claiming to have absolute hearing.

This table shows us that none of the subjects in our experiment named any sound with complete accuracy.  The arithmetic mean of the errors in this trial series was a semitone, 1-2 tones, 3 tones, or more.  It goes without saying that the same trials conducted on musicians who did not claim to have absolute pitch were even more conclusive in demonstrating the absence of the ability.

Table 2.

People not claiming to have absolute hearing.

These people made greater and more frequent errors; they also often mistook the octave, which we did not observe among those claiming to have absolute pitch.  The results of our experiments also show that absolute hearing may be a relative thing, an ability to more or less precisely guess the height of a simple tone.  Theoretically speaking, it would seem that the absolute pitch judgments should have been completely accurate, because a pure sound vibrating only one auditory cord should cause the activation of only one neural center.  This is not what we observed.  Apparently, our brain does not have a single scale to measure the height of a sound; the brain is not designed to recognize the actual vibration of a pure tune, e.g. 200 or 500 oscillations per section; the theoretical assumptions stated previously are insufficient to explain the nature of absolute hearing.  Other factors must be necessary.  These factors are easily clarified by conducting further experiments using complex sounds, which are a series of harmonic sounds based on a fundamental pure tone.  We conducted our research using complex sounds with the same subjects (with and without absolute pitch) and determined our results in the same manner.  The sounds were created by an Urbantschitsch harmonica.  The subjects were asked to indicate the pitch of the sound presented in each trial.

Table 3.

People claiming to have absolute hearing.

Table 4.

People not claiming to have absolute hearing.

In these tables, we see that people with absolute pitch often determine the pitch of a complex sound with total accuracy; even people who do not have absolute pitch are sometimes able to do it.

By comparing the results of the experiments on pure sounds with the experiments on complex sounds, we may discover one of the factors determining the nature of absolute hearing.  we have already said that a complex sound is composed of a fundamental sound plus a whole series of harmonic vibrations.  We believe that these harmonic vibrations are one of the elements of absolute hearing.  According to Helmholtz's theory, if we hear a low complex sound, its fundamental tone is placed in the terminal areas of the whorl, while the harmonics are placed out in the whorl's other turns, so that the highest harmonic tone will be placed nearer the outer turns at the base of the whorl.  If the sound is high, the fundamental tone will be placed at the base of the whorl and its harmonics will not resonate elsewhere within the whorl; they are higher than the limit of our resonating apparatus.  This would appear to our ear to be a truncation of the harmonic series, and sounds of different heights would arrive at our neural centers deprived of certain harmonics (a definite quantity for each sound) and, as these are the harmonics which determine the "footprint" of the sound in our ear, we may say that the complex sounds have different footprints which are characteristic of their height.

Our experiments show that the harmonics are one of the elements of absolute hearing; let us consider now how absolute hearing may make it possible to distinguish complex sounds by their footprint.

It is for complex sounds that our subjects (table 4) gave more precise information, during the trials with the harmonica which produces harmonics and therefore a footprint; by contrast, they were unable to determine the pitches of pure sounds, which have no harmonics and thus no footprint.

The pure tone emitted by the Bezold-Edelmann tuning forks hardly resemble the sounds which we are accustomed to hearing.  There are no musical instruments which produce completely pure sounds, i.e. without harmonics.  Our auditory system operates in the world of complex sounds; or, rather, our ear is accustomed to "erratic" tones, because the sound of each instrument, even when they are of the same type (two different violins, for example) provides a specific sinusoid, a specific complex footprint.  Any musician is accustomed to the footprint of his own instrument, and if the footprint is one of the essential conditions of absolute hearing, one could say that a pianist with absolute pitch may determine only the pitch of his own piano, or the violinist his own violin, et cetera, and a pianist whose absolute pitch ability is subjected to experimental trials will inevitably generate errors if the trial sound is produced by a violin or some other instrument.  Furthermore, if the same experiment were conducted with a piano out of tune by a semitone or quarter tone, the experiment will inevitably produce errors even with a pianist who can unerringly detect the pitches of his own piano.

Using the Urbantschitsch harmonica in our experiment, we obtained pitch judgments that were relatively correct; this is explained by the footprint of this instrument, which approximates the footprint of the musical instrument to which the subjects are accustomed, without which we cannot represent the nature of absolute hearing.  The idea of the footprint's influence on human hearing was proposed some years ago; v. Kries mentions several German musicians with absolute pitch who could only do so with certain instruments such as the violin, piano, etc.  He reports in his research, as we do in ours, that the ability is dependent on the footprint of the sounds.  There is still another factor which determines the essence of absolute pitch:  the "standardization" of the sound.  To make this term comprehensible, we will resort to an analogy.

When we describe a color as red, we do not intend to say that it therefore corresponds to a certain line in Frauenhoffer's spectrum.  The only people who would even think of such a thing are those who have seen how light is separated into its spectral components or have a general idea of the scientific nature of light.  What is understood, then, by the majority of people who are ignorant of this aspect of physics?  It is obvious that the denomination of these colors is impressed on us during childhood, and that they correspond to the colors of the objects which surround us.  The denominations of the colors are usually fixed in our memory by their relationship to the coloring of various objects of totally different natures:  the green color may be, for example, the color of grass; the color blue as the sky; the color rose as the flower that bears its name.  If we had never intended the objects' colors to be used as standards, we would have to indicate them by description.  As an example, in the lost provinces of the extreme north of the USSR, the word "pink" does not exist, because they never saw the flower of the rosebush.  They describe a dress of pink fabric as "reddish".  Apart from the primary colors, the standard colors, there is a crowd of nuanced hues; sea blue, sky blue, azure blue; ochre yellow, golden yellow, et cetera; a man who possesses a well-developed memory of primary colors may use them as standards while remembering the nuances with greater difficulty.  Closing one's eyes, without looking at the color of an object, one may clearly see red, blue, green, and other standard colors, or perhaps the ranges of these colors.  This is exactly the same thing as one observes in the musical scale of tones.  The innumerable nuances of the sounds can be systematized, just as the nuances of colors, into particular ranges; these last, in their turn, become territories of standardized sounds and not standardized territories of sound.  We can rather easily, without the assistance of external agency, imagine a deep human voice, or a soprano, or the resounding peals of a thunderclap, but it is difficult to reproduce in one's imagination the small components of these sounds; specifically, their isolated frequencies.

If no one had previously told us that such a sound is called "high" and another "low", the term "sound height" would not exist.  To a certain point, all individuals are gifted with the ability to determine the height of a sound, but with most, this faculty is in an embryonic state; i.e. they can determine its height only within coarse limits.  They may state, for example, that such a sound is generally high or another generally low.  Other people may have a more accentuated ability and can indicate a rough approximation of tone height within 1-3 tones of the musical scale.  A musician's ability to accomplish this may be limited to their musical experiences, or it may be elaborated in such a way that they may recall not only the standard musical ranges but also isolated frequencies.  For certain musicians, these tones are standards as clear as the primary colors.  For example, the "A" pitch is, for orchestral musicians, the standard tuning tone; it is well-fixed in their memory.  It is not interesting for us to know if they are able to memorize only this "A" or all the sounds of the scale as well, because here intervenes another faculty of hearing:  interval sensitivity.  Thanks to this, some people can easily judge the height of any given tone on the basis of their internal standard.  The pitch of the standard tone may be committed to memory, but when investigating absolute pitch it is essential to take this factor into account.  How can one concretely represent the memory of the tone?  Let us take, as the subjects of our experiment, passable musicians; we shall give him a tone and ask him to sing this tone after a lapse of time varying between one-half to three minutes.  If the sound is preserved in memory, then all the subjects will succeed without error in the initial trials; but if we ask them to repeat the same sound after twenty minutes, for many the tone will have started to disappear from their memory, and the subjects will frequently be mistaken.  If the subject sings just this note one hour afterward, or even two hours after, three hours, etc., one could say that he possessed a remarkable memory, and if, without being able to reproduce the trial tone by other means, he can recall the exact trial tone one or two days later, we may say that he has an ideal memory.  To discover if such people existed, we conducted the following experiments on musicians both with and without absolute pitch.  Tables 5 and 6 have the results of one of these experiments.

Table 5.

Table 6.

We see that the memory of the sounds is directly proportional to the ability to determine its pitch.  These tables show that the people who have absolute pitch may preserve the trial sound in their memory for a long time, while by contrast the people without absolute pitch forget it very quickly.

Thus, there are three factors which are the essential elements for determining the nature of absolute hearing:  determination of the footprint, the standardized tones, and the memory of the sounds.  We noticed that these three factors must be interconnected; if one of them had been suddenly lacking, this would compromise the ability to determine absolute pitches.

Literature.

W. Roudkoff. Journal des maladies des oreilles, du nez et de la gorge (Journal russe.) N:o 11-12. 1925.

W. Woyatschek. Journal des maladies des oreilles, du nez et de la gorge. (Journal russe.) vol. 4 NN. 9-10. 1927.

Larionow. Des centres auditifs de l'écorce du cerveau. Dissertation 1898.

Helmholtz. Théorie physiologique de la musique fondée sur étude des sensations auditives.

Maïkapar. »L'oreille musicale». Léningrade 1915.

Kries, J. v. Ûber das absolute Gehör. Zeitschrift für Psychologie u. Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. Bd. III. H. 1. S. 257-279. 1892.