Materials of Music - Pitch

A recent finding is that Asians have a high occurrence of Absolute Pitch memory, the ability to remember and recall at will a particular pitch and name it, This means that you can ask someone to sing a C# for instance and they can sing that pitch. This can be readily checked with a tuning fork and pitch pipe or tuned instrument. Asians, especially those who speak Mandarin have this ability, it is thought, because their language uses particular pitches for inflection and semantics.

This ability to remember pitches seems to have some adaptive value in, say, knowing the unique quality of someone's voice, for example a mother's ability to recognize the cry of her infant. But in music it is essential in some way, even if only a relative way, to recognizing melody, how the sequence of pitches repeats and is changed, and harmony, two or more pitches played together. People seem to show a range of abilities in this skill, we know people with absolute pitch, or good pitch memory as well as people whose ability to either hear or reproduce what they hear is impaired. Aside from the deaf, most people can be trained somewhat to reproduce what they hear accurately through ear training and sight singing. The latter uses at least the relative awareness of pitch intervals.

Like repetition, pitch memory works at different levels to establish movement within the melodic line, harmony, and larger scale tonal centers. Significantly, for a large part of the musical literature, these tonal centers, key areas perhaps are important signals of form at small and then larger forms. So pitch matters at the scale of a large work lasting an hour or more, even though the listeners pitch memory is not good. There are other cues linked with key that mark form. This is true of all musical styles.