HearmonyWhat Is Perfect Pitch? Meaning, Rarity and Myths
Perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch, is the ability to name or sing a musical note without hearing a reference note first. Someone with perfect pitch can hear a single piano key and say "E-flat", or sing an A when asked, with nothing to compare it to. It is rare in the general population, but far more common among musicians who started lessons in early childhood and among people who grew up speaking a tone language such as Mandarin.
What is perfect pitch?
Perfect pitch is a memory for pitch combined with a name for each note. Most people hear music in relationships: this note is higher than that one, this chord sounds like home. A person with perfect pitch also hears each note's identity directly, the way most people see that a color is red without comparing it to anything.
Researchers often split the ability into two parts. Daniel Levitin's 1994 study in Perception & Psychophysics asked 46 people to sing two popular songs from memory and compared their starting notes to the original recordings: 40% sang the correct pitch on at least one of the two tries, and 44% came within two semitones on both. He proposed that perfect pitch combines a fairly common ability, pitch memory, with a much rarer one, pitch labeling. A 2003 study by Glenn Schellenberg and Sandra Trehub in Psychological Science found the same: college students with no musical training could tell when a familiar TV theme had been shifted up or down by one or two semitones.
So many people remember how a song is supposed to sound. What makes perfect pitch rare is being able to put the correct note name on any isolated tone, quickly and reliably.
Is perfect pitch the same as absolute pitch?
Yes. "Absolute pitch" is the term used in research; "perfect pitch" is the everyday name for the same ability. Researchers tend to avoid "perfect" because the ability is rarely perfect.
A classic review by Takeuchi and Hulse (1993, Psychological Bulletin) describes absolute pitch as existing in degrees: possessors differ in accuracy, in whether they can sing a named note or only identify one, and in how well they handle different instruments and registers. Perfect pitch is also different from relative pitch, the trainable skill of hearing intervals and chords in relation to each other, which almost every working musician relies on.
How rare is perfect pitch?
The most widely quoted estimate is fewer than 1 in 10,000 people in Europe and North America, a figure Deutsch and colleagues cite in their 2006 study from an earlier paper by Profita and Bidder (1988). It is a rough estimate, not a rate measured in a population survey. The rate also depends heavily on who you test.
- Musicians who started young. In a survey of more than 600 musicians, Baharloo and colleagues (1998, American Journal of Human Genetics) found that 40% of those who began training at age 4 or younger reported perfect pitch, compared with 3% of those who began at 9 or older. These were self-reports, not tests.
- Tone-language speakers. Diana Deutsch and colleagues tested first-year students at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Eastman School of Music in New York State. Among students who started lessons at ages 4–5, about 60% of the Mandarin-speaking students met a strict perfect pitch criterion, against about 14% of the American students (Deutsch's summary of the data; full paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006).
The honest answer is that perfect pitch is rare in the population as a whole, and much less rare in specific groups of musicians.
Is perfect pitch genetic?
Perfect pitch appears to need both early musical experience and some inherited predisposition; neither alone seems to be enough. Baharloo and colleagues concluded that early training is "necessary but not sufficient", and found that people with perfect pitch were about four times more likely than others to report another family member with it.
Genetic studies have not found a single "perfect pitch gene". A 2009 genome-wide study of 73 families by Theusch, Basu and Gitschier (American Journal of Human Genetics) found linkage to a region on chromosome 8 in families of European ancestry and concluded that the trait is genetically heterogeneous, meaning different genes likely contribute in different families. The tone-language findings above also suggest that what children hear and learn early, including their native language, plays a large part.
Common myths about perfect pitch
Most of what people believe about perfect pitch comes from anecdotes. Research gives a more modest picture.
- "It never changes." In a 2013 University of Chicago study, Hedger, Heald and Nusbaum had people with absolute pitch listen to music detuned by a fraction of a semitone; afterwards their judgments of in-tune notes shifted in the same direction. An online study of 2,213 people by Athos and colleagues (2007, PNAS) also found that pitch naming tends to drift sharp with age.
- "You either have it or you don't." Athos and colleagues did find two fairly distinct groups in note-naming scores. But possessors still vary widely, and many people without perfect pitch have good pitch memory for familiar songs.
- "Every great musician has it." Lists of famous musicians with perfect pitch are mostly based on stories and self-reports, not tests. Many fine musicians, singers and composers work entirely by relative pitch.
- "It means you sing perfectly in tune." Naming a note and producing it accurately with your voice are separate skills. Singing in tune depends on vocal control and listening, which anyone can practice.
Does perfect pitch make you a better musician?
Perfect pitch helps with a few specific tasks and does little for the rest. It makes it easy to name notes in a recording, find a starting note without an instrument, and write down a melody's exact pitches.
Most musical skills rely on relationships instead: hearing intervals, recognizing chords and progressions, playing by ear in any key, staying in tune with other players. Those come from relative pitch, which can be trained at any age. If you are wondering about your own ears, start with how to tell if you have perfect pitch, and if you want to work on note naming, read the evidence on whether adults can learn perfect pitch.
Train note memory and relative pitch in Hearmony
Hearmony does not promise perfect pitch. Its Note Memory Mountain adventure is honest note-naming practice: you start with two anchor notes, C and G, add E, then A and D, then all the white keys, and finally the black keys with C as a guide, with a reference note available early on. As the app puts it, "Some people name notes without a reference. Most adults can build a strong note memory with practice." The rest of the course trains relative pitch, from intervals in Interval Peaks to chords in Chord Garden, following the order in our ear training for beginners guide. Hearmony is on the App Store for iPhone.