Some of the questions they ask do not require such sophisticated equipment. One class looks at the musicology of happy and sad music. I gather music from all cultures that would be related to either weddings or funerals, but we don't tell the students which is which. But we were completely wrong. We mostly didn't have a clue.
Perfect pitch is actually a misnomer.
Pitch is continuous and most people have the ability to identify a note within a couple of half tones either up or down. Those with bona fide perfect pitch, however, have it somehow encoded into their brains. Within the general population, only 1 in 10,000 people are able to listen to any pitch and correctly name it. In the West, by process of enculturation we know what is happy and sad and how that is reflected in music, but in other cultures, they celebrate completely different aspects of weddings and funerals than we might. So, in that class we look at how music is tied to emotion, to culture, to musical universals and other elements that may or may not be common across cultures.