1999 Volume 47 Issue 1 Pages 19-27
In the present paper, the process of acquiring absolute pitch was investigated. A 3-year-old child was trained every day for 19 months to acquire absolute pitch. The contents of the training were tasks to identify 9 kinds of chords. According to Eguchi (1991), the ability to identify these chords qualified as acquisition of every white-key note's absolute pitch. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the transition of cognitive strategies longitudinally in this training process. According to the view that the attributes of tones have two components “tone height” and “tone chroma”, absolute pitch possessors were supposed to have a strategy depending on “chroma” in identification of pitch. Results showed that 2 strategies were observed in the training process: one depending on “height”, and the other depending on “chroma”. The process of acquing absolute pitch was divided into 4 stages: Stage 1: always depending on “height” Stage 2: n oticing “chroma”; Stage 3: confusing “height” and “chroma”; and Final Stage: identifying pitch accurately, depending on “height” and “chroma”.
