Human hearing excels at comparative judgments but fails at absolute ones.

Evidence

Human hearing is very accurate when comparing the characteristics of two sounds, but quite inaccurate in making absolute assessments of the characteristics of sounds in isolation. This is also true in the perception of pitch. An interesting exception is the ability of some people to evaluate pitch on an absolute scale without any reference, this ability is called absolute pitch (Rossing et al., 2001). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1122

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1122