Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to <i>lose</i> it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem to do better.<p>It&#x27;s a very frustrating and difficult to explain phenomenon. I hate to use the oft-used but inaccurate color analogy, but it might be valid in this context. Imagine that everyone around you is fully color-blind, but not yourself. People are amazed that you can tell something is blue just by looking at it. You&#x27;ve had this ability your whole life. But then one day you look at something and report that it&#x27;s blue, and someone uses their color-analyzer and tells you that it&#x27;s not blue, it&#x27;s in fact yellow. And they&#x27;re right! But it still looks BLUE to you. Something has broken, and you can&#x27;t explain it to others easily because they can only see gray.

Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It&#x27;s occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other.<p>Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - <i>if</i> I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn&#x27;t be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it&#x27;s useful for is recognizing what key it&#x27;s in. If I hadn&#x27;t been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later.<p>I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn&#x27;t important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it&#x27;s <i>all</i> relative.

Professional classical singer here. I&#x27;m personally glad that I don&#x27;t have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying temperaments.<p>This discussion doesn&#x27;t seem to be acknowledging how many pitch standards there are that are still in common use, and even in increasingly-common use due to the original-instruments movement.

I think it&#x27;s overly simplistic to group people into those who have perfect pitch and those who don&#x27;t. Of course, I don&#x27;t know if the article makes this claim, but I think a lot of people tend to view perfect pitch as a binary ability -- either you have it or you don&#x27;t. But speaking personally, I have &quot;sort of&quot; perfect pitch (imperfect pitch? semi-perfect pitch?), by which I mean that I can sing and&#x2F;or recognize the pitch of certain notes from memory, but not any arbitrary note, not under all circumstances, and not instantaneously. If I&#x27;m not right on the money, I&#x27;m usually at least within a semitone or two. I can do it reliably enough that I&#x27;m convinced it&#x27;s not just a fluke when I get it right, but on the other hand it&#x27;s not at all &quot;perfect.&quot; Moreover, the recognition happens too slowly to be practical in real time; usually it involves audiating part of a song that I know has certain notes, and using them as reference pitches. Perhaps if I dedicated more time to it I could get it more accurate or faster, and maybe even develop proper perfect pitch.<p>All that being said, while having true perfect pitch would probably open up new ways to appreciate and understand the music I&#x27;m listening to, I think that relative pitch is a far more useful skill -- nigh essential for many genres.

The way I do it is I keep a memory of a song with a known reference frequency in my head. Usually it&#x27;s the Super Mario Bros. theme, whose root is middle C. I know how the other notes on the scale sound relative to middle C. Sharps and flats are trickier, but if they sound unusual I can go half a step up or down and see if they match some other note. Usually I can identify a tone within half a step or so. Or at least I could, using this method, when I was a kid. Haven&#x27;t tried it much lately.

This is one of those occasions when the research team definitely needs to test on more than the local population of subjects.<p>Because all the authors appear to be Chinese, probably all the test subjects were too. But because the Chinese language requires substantial awareness of subtle changes in prosody (esp. pitch), it&#x27;s likely that speakers of other languages will not perform as well on their absolute pitch tests.<p>I suspect native speakers of Chinese have developed a subtle ear (and voice) for pitch during that critical period of language acquisition in childhood that makes them more able to acquire perfect pitch in adulthood than speakers of other languages, especially western ones.

&quot;In three experiments, we trained adults to name pitches for 12 to 40 hours. Within the training period, 14% of the participants were able to name twelve pitches at 90% accuracy or above, a performance level comparable with typical AP possessors.&quot;<p>This sounds like good relative pitch, with a memorized reference tone. Absolute pitch doesn&#x27;t fade in 12 to 40 hours. Many musicians have relative pitch abilities that look, to observers, like absolute pitch, because they&#x27;ve memorized a reference tone sometime in the recent past and can find any other note relative to that reference (some folks also use their own voice as a reference tone, because they know the top and&#x2F;or bottom of their range, or how a specific note feels when they sing it).<p>I only have the summary to go by, but this sounds quite different from absolute pitch and quite similar to relative pitch. We&#x27;ve always known people can acquire very good relative pitch recognition skills as an adult. That isn&#x27;t new or groundbreaking (though if they have a training regimen that works fast enough for a study like this, that would be great news, since ear training for very good relative pitch recognition is a months or years long process for most people).

Anecdata: my piano teacher was one of a class in the 1920s who were all explicitly trained into absolute pitch during kindergarten . Every person in the class learned it and retained it until at least late middle age. Some were better than others: my teacher’s sister, for example, could give you the pitch of anything from knocking a piece of wood to the sound of a car exhaust.

(Disclosure&#x2F;Disclaimer: I don&#x27;t have perfect pitch nor do I aspire to acquire it. I am, however, fascinated that some people do have perfect pitch.)<p>Rick Beato provides a lot of (too much) context before explaining &quot;Why Adults Can&#x27;t Develop Perfect Pitch&quot;. [0] (Timecode link to Beato&#x27;s point.)<p>Beato&#x27;s video was featured on MetaFilter a couple of months ago. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;816VLQNdPMM?t=364" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;816VLQNdPMM?t=364</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;175853&#x2F;Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Perfect-Pitch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;175853&#x2F;Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Pe...</a>

It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I&#x27;d be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.

I&#x27;ve studied cello from age 5 to conservatory degree; the pitches of the open strings are burned in my memory. I can also often tell which key an orchestra plays by timbral cues. However, I do not have &quot;real&quot; perfect pitch, although the topic study might find that I do. True perfect pitch is like the anecdotes in the thread: discomfort with &quot;wrong&quot; transpositions or tunings, learning melodies by real rather than relative pitch, internal references that can go out of tune with age. All these are completely alien to me.

Musician here with terrible pitch guessing ability (but semi-decent composition skillz and good harmony sense).<p>I have always found absolute (or &quot;perfect&quot; pitch) to be misinterpreted in popular culture. I have not actually met a musician with perfect pitch. However, perhaps my definition is too narrow.<p>Would a person with perfect pitch be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 432 Hz A? Would they be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 438 Hz A?<p>If the definition is to be able to tell that a note is only slightly off <i>within</i> some pre-decided tuning system, then I know many people that can do this. The question to me is whether absolute pitch is as it says in the name, &quot;absolute&quot;, or is it always limited by some measure of uncertainty? Is there a physical limitation? (Is it 1 Hz, or is it 5 Hz?)<p>Hope someone can explain this.<p>Edit: In the paper, they seem to stick to a pre-decided tuning system. Probably the standard one that we have now (equal spacing based on 13th root of 2 with 440 Hz A).

My pitch recognition isn&#x27;t bad but not particularly good either. When I play my mandolin, though, I can pick up small pitch differences on certain frets because I&#x27;m so used to associating finger position with frequency.<p>Not sure if you can reach AP (which is not clearly defined anyway) but you can dramatically improve pitch recognition in general by practice.

This is interesting to me, not because of the musical implications but because of the neurobiological ones – and especially with regards of learning accents &#x2F; pronunciation of second languages.<p>There has been a lot of studies that have tried to teach recognizing the audible difference of R and L to Japanese English learners. I don&#x27;t know of a single study has been able to produce robust results. (There&#x27;s a primary and secondary acoustic cues to the difference; some Japanese have had success recognizing the difference using secondary acoustic cues, but recognizing the primary cue which is the most robust one and which the natives use preferentially escapes treatment.)<p>However, the testing protocols and time are limited, and we have increasingly knowledge about adult neuroplasticity. Results like this keep me hopeful that it&#x27;s just that we don&#x27;t know the good way to do that yet and we might see some results in the future.

In my first class in college for a music theory course, the first assignment was &quot;memorize A&quot; (440Hz). Surprisingly, after several weeks of playing the tone and matching it verbally, I did learn A. Everything else from there is knowing intervals relative to A (like, C is a minor 3rd above A, or 3 half steps).<p>Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like &quot;Here Comes the Bride&quot; is a perfect 4th, &quot;My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean&quot; is a major 6th, and so on. There&#x27;s a whole list at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earmaster.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;free-tools&#x2F;interval-song-chart-generator.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earmaster.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;free-tools&#x2F;interval-song-...</a>.

How would you ever know if you &quot;have&quot; perfect pitch without training? I don&#x27;t even know what a C or B is[0]. Are there any tests online that don&#x27;t require prior knowledge?<p>[0] I do realize they denote some frequencies

Can somebody recommend an app for pitch recognition training for people who have the capacity to distinguish small differences in sound frequency but zero knowledge of music theory? E.g. an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn&#x27;t qualify as I have no idea of how do musical notes and their varieties sound and am to be taught these from scratch. Of course I can find some examples and listen to them but that would take a fair amount of repetitions to memorize and I&#x27;d like the app to help with this too.

One strange phenomenon I&#x27;ve noticed (while trying to teach myself perfect pitch) is that, when trying to reproduce (say) middle C, if I&#x27;m off, I&#x27;m only ever off by multiples of a half-step. That is to say, I&#x27;m singing exactly a B or C# (or on a bad day, Bb or D). My ear is sharp enough to detect if I were, say, a quarter step off.<p>This ability seems to fall somewhere in between relative and absolute pitch, and I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the only one it is true for.

I found the entire PDF on ResearchGate.<p>I&#x27;ve played the piano for 50 years (I&#x27;m 55), and I do a lot of ear-training practice with software (Ear Master, etc) to keep myself sharp.<p>I still don&#x27;t have perfect pitch. Without hearing a reference note, I won&#x27;t get it.<p>In some ways, it&#x27;s good. I keep my Bosendorfer tuned to A=443 and occasionally someone comes over whose used to the American A=440 and it bothers them. It doesn&#x27;t bother me.

From the evolutionary perspective, what advantage does having perfect pitch &quot;built-in&quot; give a person or society? Being able to identify the pitch of some game you might be hunting wouldn&#x27;t seem to make you a better hunter thus being able to survive hard times so you&#x27;re able to pass your genes along better than one without it.

I thought there was a pill you could take to get perfect pitch (assuming absolute and perfect pitch are the same).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;259552442&#x2F;want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;259552442&#x2F;want-perfect-pitch-...</a>

If you want to learn how to recognize tones I highly recommend the method of Alain Benbassat: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.miles.be" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.miles.be</a><p>You&#x27;ll notice a rapid understanding of tones and keys. There are (even free) apps for Android and iOS as well.

I&#x27;ve heard anecdotal reports that absolute pitch training kind of works as an adult, but not as well. If you practice enough you can start to identify notes correctly, but if you don&#x27;t keep up with training, the ability goes away.

My understanding is that you can train people to recognize few&#x2F;certain tones, but if you have a perfect pitch you are able to do it for every tone, which is something that cannot be learned.

I’m a pretty good musician and have never had the slightest ability to discern absolute pitch. I’d like it but not enough to work at it :)

There are supplements&#x2F;nootropics that make such a thing possible.

Of course it&#x27;s possible. Acquiring the breaths is the hard part.

It is like learning a language: just as kids can acquire a new language, they can also acquire absolute pitch. So, send your kids for early musical training, if they like music, in order to acquire absolute pitch.

Can&#x27;t you just derive any pitch if you know the default pitch of your own voice?

TLDR, what did they use to do the training, and is it available to the general public?