ACQUISITION OF ABSOLUTE PITCH: THE QUESTION OF CRITICAL PERIODS Annabel J. Cohen Karen Baird Dalhousie University Past research is reviewed which suggests that absolute pitch can be acquired during preschool years. In order to account for this phenomenon, an analogy is drawn between the early acquisition of categories for speech sounds and pitch; the acoustical similarity between vowels, music tones, and chords is also noted. Attention is then directed to a Japanese technique of Oura and Eguchi (1981) for training absolute pitch in preschool children. The technique involves identification of chords. Pilot work is reported which describes an adaptation of the first stages of the Japanese technique to eight North American preschool children and a control group of adults. The majority of the children and all adults mastered a transposed chord discrimination task but were less successful in chord identification. In contrast, Oura and Eguchi reported that Japanese children performed well on the latter task. The superior performance of the Japanese children may be attributable in part to a simpler chord training procedure and weekly piano lessons which were coordinated with their absolute pitch training program. Additional studies are therefore required to determine the viability of the chord training procedure for the acquisition of absolute pitch among North American preschool children. Absolute pitch is the rare ability to name a music tone correctly without comparison to another (Neu, 1947). Experiential factors are thought to play a role in its development (Bachem, 1955; Costall, 1985; Cuddy, 1968; Neu, 1947; Riker, 1946). It has also been suggested that the greatest impact of experience occurs during early childhood when attention is directed to absolute as opposed to relational characteristics of sound (Sergeant & Roche, 1973). In addition to attentional strategies that are appropriate to acquiring absolute pitch, other prerequisite auditory sensitivities are manifested at an early age. For example, six-month-old infants can imitate pitch accurately (Kessen, Levine, & Wendrich, 1979) and infants of less than one year of age can discriminate pitches differing by one semitone in untransposed (Trehub, Cohen, Thorpe, & Morrong- iello, 1986) and transposed (Cohen, Trehub, & Thorpe, 1989) tone sequences. It is also during thefirstyears of life that infants acquire the categories for the phonemes of their native language (Werker & Tees, 1984). A parallel may be drawn between the development of categories for phonemes (vowels and consonants) and for absolute pitch. More specifically, for a particular language, many acoustically different sounds known as allophones are taken as exemplars of one phoneme. Similarly, in music, acoustically different sounds are categorized by a particular note name. For example, music instrument tones with fundamental frequency around 440 Hz might be considered allophones of the Psychomusicology, 1990 Copyright © 1990 Volume 9, Number 1 31 Psychomusicology