In a follow-up to Ryszard Nycz’s work Culture as Verb this article outlines a new way of bringing forward his great project. The challenge it has to face is the cognitive dilemma that lurks at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, or, in other words, the dissonance between the traditional paradigm of accumulating and developing the store of cultural knowledge and cognitive procedures that underpin new, experimental and inductive knowledge with a potential to effect qualitative change. The article contends that Nycz’s study allows us to bypass that dilemma. The ‘Third Way’, as it is called here, would open up new forms of innovation, i.e. not just knowledge whose value is determined by its utility for the systems of late capitalism, but a mode of concrete practice of rediscovering the outer world for the humanities. In the process of capturing and transforming of that world, the metaphors of embodied labour and of knowledge production (conceptualized as the verb) function as extraordinarily important tools of the humanities reinvented as a practical, embodied theory.

This paper has two distinct parts. Section 1 includes general discussion of the phenomenon of "absolute pitch" (AP), and presentation of various concepts concerning definitions of "full", "partial" and "pseudo" AP. Sections 2-4 include presentation of the experiment concerning frequency range in which absolute pitch appears, and discussion of the experimental results. The experiment was performed with participation of 9 AP experts selected from the population of 250 music students as best scoring in the pitch-naming piano-tone screening tests. Each subject had to recognize chromas of 108 pure tones representing the chromatic musical scale of nine octaves from E0 to D#9. The series of 108 tones was presented to each subject 60 times in random order, diotically, with loudness level about 65 phon. Percentage of correct recognitions (PC) for each tone was computed. The frequency range for the existence of absolute pitch in pure tones, perceived by sensitive AP possessors stretches usually over 5 octaves from about 130.6 Hz (C3) to about 3.951 Hz (B7). However, it was noted that in a single case, the upper boundary of AP was 9.397 Hz (D9). The split-halves method was applied to estimate the reliability of the obtained results.

Absolute pitch is a unique feature of the auditory memory which makes it possible for its possessors to recognize the musical name (chroma) of a tone. Six musicians with absolute pitch, selected from a group of 250 music students as best scoring in musical pitch-naming tests, identified the chroma of residue pitch produced by harmonic complex tones with several lower partials removed (residual sounds). The data show that the percentage of correct chroma recognitions decreases as the lowest physically existent harmonic in the spectrum is moved higher. According to our underlying hypothesis the percentage of correct chroma recognitions corresponds to the pitch strength of the investigated tones. The present results are compared with pitch strength values derived in an experiment reported by Houtsma and Smurzynski (1990) for tones same as those used in this study but investigated with the use of a different method which consisted in identification of musical intervals between two successive tones. For sounds comprising only harmonics of very high order the new method yields a very low pitch recognition level of about 20% while identification of musical intervals remains stable at a level of about 60%.

The Committee on Acoustics of the Polish Academy of Sciences was founded in 1964 by the reso lution of the General Assembly of the Polish Academy of Sciences, within its Division of Engineering Sci ences (Division 4). The idea of creating the Committee was brought up by Professor Ignacy Malecki, a distinguished scientist, an academic teacher, and an internationally acclaimed authority on acoustics.