Absolute pitch and cortical myelin

What is it about?

Absolute pitch is an ability to recognize a pitch chroma of a given tone without external reference. We have looked at the auditory cortex in great details and compared it between musicians with and without absolute pitch. We found distinctive cortical organization in the anterior part of the right temporal lobe.

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Why is it important?

This is the first paper reporting absolute pitch specific alteration of cortical organization of auditory cortex. More importantly, based on the dual pathway hypothesis of auditory information processing in cortex, we first theorized importance of the anterior temporal regions (known as processing object properties) in absolute pitch perception (that is one of the property to absolute pitch listeners).