Ethnicity effects in relative pitch

Abstract

Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to identify a musical pitch, occurs at a higher rate among East Asian musicians. This has stimulated considerable research on the comparative contributions of genetic and environmental factors. Two studies examined whether a similar ethnicity effect is found for relative pitch (RP), identifying the distance or interval between two tones. Nonmusicians (n = 103) were trained to label musical intervals and were subsequently tested on interval identification. We establish similar ethnicity effects: Chinese and Korean participants consistently outperformed other participants in RP tasks, but not in a "relative rhythm" control task. This effect is not driven by previous musical or tone-language experience. The parallel with the East Asian advantage for AP suggests that enhanced perceptual-cognitive processing of pitch is more general and is not limited to highly trained musicians. This effect opens up many research questions concerning the environmental and genetic contributions related to this more general pitch-based ability. © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.