Relative Pitch Perception and the Detection of Deviant Tone Patterns

Most people are able to recognise familiar tunes even when played in a different key. It is assumed that this depends on a general capacity for relative pitch perception; the ability to recognise the pattern of inter-note intervals that characterises the tune. However, when healthy adults are required to detect rare deviant melodic patterns in a sequence of randomly transposed standard patterns they perform close to chance. Musically experienced participants perform better than naive participants, but even they find the task difficult, despite the fact that musical education includes training in interval recognition.