Abstract
Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in
speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store
melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch,
and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low
pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily
relative pitch processors. Infants familiarized with a melody for
7 days preferred, on the eighth day, to listen to a novel melody
in comparison to the familiarized one, regardless of whether the
melodies at test were presented at the same pitch as during familiarization
or transposed up or down by a perfect fifth (7/12th of an octave)
or a tritone (1/2 octave). On the other hand, infants showed no preference
for a transposed over original-pitch version of the familiarized
melody, indicating that either they did not remember the absolute
pitch, or it was not as salient to them as the relative pitch.
- auditory
- perception,absolute
- perception,female,humans,infant,male,memory,music,pitch
- pitch,acquisition,interval,melody,memory,music,perception,pitch,scale
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