Absolute pitch (idea)

The ability to name the pitch of a note without reference to any previously sounded one (recognition) or to sing a named note without reference to a previously sounded one (recall); recognition is generally found to be easier than recall.

“Absolute tonality” is the ability to name the key of a chord or harmonic passage without previously heard reference notes. The faculty is experienced subjectively as different keys having, as it were, distinctive flavours or colours that are instantaneously recognized and never confused. The absolute recognition of the single note may carry with it an implicit tonality. But the drawings of equivalences or similarities between modalities (between keys and visual colours, for instance, (as in synaesthesia) is entirely personal and idiosyncratic however self-consistent it may be, so that efforts to establish a glossary of correspondence between them by consensus are misguided and fruitless.

However, a gramophone turntable running too fast and presenting the Jupiter Symphony in C flat causes a sensory distress to the absolute pitch musician analogous to seeing purple grass or tasting salt chocolate, since the key of the adjacent semitone is so far removed in key relationship; it may add to the confusion that by the compromise of equal temperament the key note and fourth degree of C major sound like the leading note and the third degree of C flat. Similarly for the absolute pitch musician the excitement of adventurous modulations is very much an immediate sensory pleasure as well as an intellectual and aesthetic one.

With relative pitch (i.e.knowing the pitch of a reference note), for instance orchestral A sharp and using it as a fixed point for calculating other notes or tonalities, however rapidly it operates, pleasure in adventurous modulation is predominantly aesthetic and intellectual, without the sensory element.

For the possessor of only relative pitch a more complicated process is involved than that of the instantaneous absolute recognition of the single note; it is likely that the incoming stimulus must be retained in short-term memory storage while the image of the reference note is recalled and compared, the interval between the two identified, and then translated from an interval code to a name of note code.

This analysis lends point to Teplov's criterion for absolute pitch being not accuracy but speed of recognition.

Source: "The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians."