Levitin effect

The Levitin effect is a phenomenon whereby people, even those without musical training, tend to remember songs in the correct key. The finding stands in contrast to the large body of laboratory literature suggesting that such details of perceptual experience are lost during the process of memory encoding, so that people would remember melodies with relative pitch, rather than absolute pitch.

The effect was first documented by Daniel J. Levitin in 1994 and was regarded as a significant result in cognitive psychology. In 2012, the effect was replicated for the first time. There are theories as to the possible development of this effect and a strong differentiation between a person's ability to distinguish relative pitch versus absolute pitch. Cognitive disorders can affect a person's ability to experience the Levitin effect.