Pitch recognition is a complex subject discussed in many technical publications. With the risk of being labeled a dilettante, I'll share something I learned several years ago. I went to a talk given at the Kennedy Center as part of a Mozart festival. The speaker was a researcher in the area of pitch recognition and her findings were very interesting. Using the the audience as test subjects, she   played first a reference note, then a series of notes, and then asked the audience to select the note from the series which was the same as the reference note. We did it easily. She repeated the experiment but added a series of intervening notes after the reference note. At first, this had little or no effect on our ability to recognize the reference note, but, as she added more and more intervening notes, our success rate decreased radically.    She also presented some of her studies on pitch and genetics. She studied pitch perception in families and found a small but statistically significant correlation between left handedness and pitch recognition. She also studied people who had trouble distinguishing between right and left, as expressed verbally, but not as expressed nonverbally, i.e., pointing with the fingers. She found a small but statistically significant correlation between this trait and pitch perception. I know two sisters with this trait who are also quite musical. The friend who was with me at this talk said that his ex-wife had the same problem with right-left perception and they had once traced it back through several generations in her family. However, he had not studied pitch perception in these people. I wonder whether these findings are indicative of a right brain/left brain phenomenon. Any comments?