Tag Archives | absolute-pitch-research

Ernst Terhardt Writes About Absolute pitch

In view of the above findings one may be inclined to suspect that Moore may unconsciously have himself “trained off” his AP faculty, as it had made transposition harder to him.So it appears that, in a sense, the ability of AP in principle is implanted in every human, but is easily lost in infancy and/or childhood when it is not maintained and developed by training in naming musical tones…. About 30% of the non-AP possessors were able to tell whether or not musical samples were played plus/minus 1 semitone “off key”.The general view that I have deduced from all the above findings is this: To become a “genuine” AP possessor you must early in life become aware that you already are an AP possessor, and this kind of awareness, of course, may emerge from the experience that pitches can be identified, though at first imperfectly, to a certain higher-than-chance extent.

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