A trial program to test absolute pitch with Psychtoolbox-3 on Matlab. This program refers to article "A Distribution of Absolute Pitch Ability as Revealed by Computerized Testing" (doi:10.1525/mp.2009.27.2.89).
Before performing the pitch-identification task, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire informing their age, history of musical education (start and duration of both informal and formal musical training), training habits (schedule and estimated amount of time practicing), and instruments played. These questions aimed to investigate the contribution of musical education during sensitive periods.
The set of stimuli consisted of 36 piano tones which have 1 s duration including 50 ms linear onset and offset ramps, and the fundamental frequencies of tones are ranging from C3 (131 Hz) to B5 (988 Hz) which across 3 octaves. The stimuli were presented three times at the same intensity (-4 dB) with the assistance of a personal computer running the computerized application developed on the MATLAB Version 9.6 Runtime software (MathWorks Inc, Sherborn, MA). This summed to 108 trials, and all of the tones were synthetically generated by summing a series of sinusoid waveforms.
The absolute pitch-identification task follows a previous report (Patrick et al., 2009). The 108 trials was presented in a randomized order and repeated once. Each set consisted of three blocks of 36 stimuli, with an interval of 30 s between blocks to minimize fatigue. Before starting the test, we presented a training block with four trials. Upon hearing each note, the participants saw the response screen depicted in Fig 1. The interval between stimuli was set to 4.0 s with a period of brown noise to avoid the use of strategies based on relative pitch judgments. Besides, the tonal distance between each tone sequentially presented was higher than one octave, and never had one semitone interval (not considering the octave). No octave information was requested and no feedback was given, neither during the training, nor during the test blocks.