Kathrin Schlemmer

Absolute memory for pitch: A comparative replication of Levitin’s 1994 study in six European labs

In a widely cited study, Levitin (1994) suggested the existence of absolute pitch memory for music in the general population beyond the rare trait of genuine absolute pitch (AP). In his sample, a significant proportion of non-AP possessors were able to reproduce absolute pitch levels when asked to sing very familiar pop songs from memory. Forty-four percent of participants sang the correct pitch on at least one of two trials, and 12% were correct on both trials. However, until now, no replication of this study has ever been published. The current paper presents the results of a large replication endeavour across six different labs in Germany and the UK. All labs used the same methodology, carefully replicating Levitin’s original experiment. In each lab, between 40 and 50 participants were tested (N = 277). Participants were asked to sing two different pop songs of their choice. All sung productions were compared to the original songs. Twenty-five percent of the participants sang the exact pitch of at least one of the two chosen songs and 4% hit the right pitches for both songs. Our results generally confirm the findings of Levitin (1994). However, the results differ considerably across laboratories, and the estimated overall effect using meta-analysis techniques was significantly smaller than Levitin’s original result. This illustrates the variability of empirical findings derived from small sample sizes and corroborates the need for replication and meta-analytical studies in music psychology in general.

The decay of pitch memory during rehearsal.

The present study investigates the decay of pitch memory over time. In a delayed pitch comparison paradigm, participants had to memorize the pitch of a Shepard tone, with silent, overt, or without any rehearsal. During overt rehearsal, recordings of the rehearsing were effectuated. Performance was best for silent rehearsal and worst for overt rehearsal. The differences, although partially significant, were not marked. The voice pitch during overt rehearsal was compatible with a random walk model, providing a possible explanation of why rehearsal does not improve the retention of the pitch trace.

Replication in music psychology

In this article, we address the current state and general role of replication in empirical sciences in general and music psychology in particular. We argue that replication should be an integral part of the quality management of science because it helps to improve and maintain the general benefit of empirical sciences by enhancing the confidence in scientific phenomena and theories. Replicating empirical experiments has two major benefits: (1) It increases the sheer number of observations and (2) it provides independent evidence which works as a safety net against methodological fallacies, causally influential but unknown (i.e., random) factors, researcher degrees of freedom, and outright fraud. Furthermore, we argue that for low-gain/low-cost sciences such as music psychology, measures to ensure quality standards, in particular the amount of replication experiments conducted, can be expected to be lower than in high gain/high cost sciences. These lower expectations stem from the general acknowledgments that in low-gain/low-cost sciences (1) research resources are normally scarce and (2) the consequences of inadequate theories are relatively harmless. We argue that the view of music psychology as a low-cost/low-gain science can explain the striking lack of replication studies and meta-analyses. We also discuss possible counter-measures to enhance the reliability of music-psychological knowledge.

The Role of Rehearsal and Lateralization in Pitch Memory

In classical short-term memory (STM) for categorical information it is a well-known fact that the lifetime of a trace can be lengthened ad infinitum by rehearsing the stored information. If one wishes to measure the lifetime of a trace in STM, one needs to prevent rehearsing. For instance, in the classical BrownPeterson paradigm (Brown 1958; Peterson and Peterson 1959), participants are prevented from rehearsing by articulatory tasks such as counting backwards. Auditory sensory memory has been shown to share many characteristics with categorical STM (Kaernbach 2004). However, a major difference seems to be that rehearsal seems not to be effective with sensory information. Keller et al. (1995) note that in standard delayed pitch comparison tasks no measures are taken to prevent rehearsal but that this does not fully prevent the loss of auditory information over time. Moreover, Demany et al. (2001, 2004) failed to demonstrate a beneficial influence of perceptional attention. It is quite a natural task to sing or hum a pitch, and intuitively one might think of this as helpful for the retention of the pitch trace. If rehearsed audibly, the recorded pitch data might help to elucidate the mechanisms underlying sensory retention. Therefore, the present study compared overt, covert, and no rehearsal conditions, making use of the recorded pitch data in the overt rehearsal condition in order to try to understand the performance in these three conditions.