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I have absolute pitch, and I find it kinda crazy that as the new music director for a small church in our rural area, it turns out the pastor has it as well! Just found it out yesterday at a choir practice...

I don't know the odds but I'm curious how you found out.

The odds are pretty low I think. There are some little online tests you can do that will give you a rough idea of your comparative sense of absolute and relative pitch. Relative pitch is much more common and is highly trainable. No so clear whether absolute pitch can be trained without some hefty genetic input.

Some say 1:10,000, but we thought there might be more hope here in a recent thread...

Here is a test...

in a music-oriented setting you're far more likely to run into other people with perfect pitch. In my high school I wasn't aware of anyone else who had it, but in college (music conservatory), i know a handful of kids who do, and so far i've had two ear training professors and a theory professor with perfect pitch.

I've always thought that true perfect pitch (i.e., an ability to identify the exact note on any instrument) is vanishingly rare. In nearly forty years of playing music I've met one person with that particular gift. I've met a handful who can reliably identify exact notes on their own instrument. In such cases, my feeling has been that what these people are identifying is subtle pitch-related variations in timbre, not pitch as such.

However, other contributors on this forum have shown me good research evidence that true perfect pitch might be much more common that I though -- particular among Asian people.

So this seems to me to be any open question.

I've met at least a dozen people with perfect pitch during my studies. I don't consider it to be particularly special, nor could I definitively link it with super musical abilities. Some were technically strong performers, some weren't. It's not as rare as one might think. At any decent music college, you would find several students with perfect pitch. It's generally the product of starting musical education at a very young age (usually age 3 or earlier), but sometimes later. For people who start this early, I don't believe it is very rare at all.

I find that just about all of the musicians that I work with in the jazz arena have perfect pitch. In the classical realm, I find that singers, string players, and conductors are more apt to have it.

Regardless, many of them claim that it is something that we allow ourselves to have. Though, I suspect that many of the jazzers pick it up by osmosis: Many of them don't read music that well and after years of trial and error and concentration (for some), are able to pick up everything by ear.

I find it odd that my own sense of pitch works best with softer sounds, but as the volume increases I'm less accurate - I can be off as much as a whole step in really loud situations.

firstly nothing is perfect, secondly - almost anybody can have perfect pitch if he/she really wanted to.

that's a myth

It's possible, but also compare it to a concept like "perfect color recognition", and consider how much the brain tricks most people. For example, everyone will see a ripe banana as yellow, no matter what brightness and shade of light it is in. However, the actual color perceived by the eyes may be very different, and could be more green or blue than yellow; but the brain knows bananas and thus makes it yellow. The clearest test of this was a fruit basket in front of a tile wall in which the tiles exactly matched the different colors of the fruits; it's fascinating to watch the tiles change colors as the light was filtered in different ways, while the fruit didn't seem to change.
There is a culture that names colors based on hues and shades, rather than what we consider "colors" (we use the wavelength of the light). They may see sky blue and gold as virtually the same color, while we perceive a huge difference. On the other hand, they can tell the difference between the different shades of blue and aqua easily, while we have more difficulty. I think this was part of a BBC documentary a few months ago (you could compare it to the difference between recognizing pitch versus recognizing chords). Try finding the colors brown or gray in the wavelight spectrum; you won't find them, but the brain manages to create them.
Finally, when you see at night, your eyes are detecting more in black and white than in color, because a different type of cell is better for night vision.

Interestingly, smells can be recognized and remembered relatively clearly by a significant portion of the population. The BBC also recently did a documentary about perfume and cologne designers, and some of them memorize thousands of chemicals that humans can identify by smell. However, this involves identifying a chemical compound, whereas a musical pitch is a very different thing.


I think it's easier to recognize pitch if I have some type of reference. For example, I know the pitch I speak at in normal conversation. For someone with absolute pitch, I'm curious if they learned how frequencies resonate within their ear, and can make a good initial judgement based on that. Give them a pitch made by a screwed up sine wave and see how well they identify it.

yes, it's a myth that you either have it or not.
consider this:




you just have to rediscover child like listening to music.

I don't have perfect pitch, but I've gotten better, or 'closer' to having it. When I go to the piano each day, before playing, I always hum what I think to be middle C. About 50 percent of the time, I'm right on it. I'm never above it, and I don't think I've been more than a half step flat for a long time.

That's better than what I used to be able to manage. I think that what has helped is working on pieces in all the twelve keys, and practicing a lot (more than two hours on many or most days).

Practicing the very same piece (not practicing different pieces in different keys) in all the twelve keys helps to get your brain to differentiate the characters of the different keys. I hope to eventually have perfect pitch, but honing my relative pitch abilities is more important and my first priority.

People mix up perfect or absolute pitch where, with no reference you can tell what note the vacuum cleaner is making and relative pitch where you can compare an unnamed note to a named one and say what it is. The latter is common and a product of training. THe former is rare, can be assisted by training but not necessarily.

I've always wondered how much training is associated with absolute pitch. A non literate, untrained 3 year old novice who has innate absolute pitch can't possibly know what "Ab" means. Identifying note names has to be trained. Is absolute pitch then the ability to remember specific frequencies? Does being around badly tuned instruments affect the development of absolute pitch?

I also wonder if absolute pitch is an advantage or disadvantage. I definitely do not have absolute pitch but I have very good relative pitch. When I hear an instrument that is out of tune, I crawl the walls, even if it is just one instrument and one note in an orchestra. I would imagine having absolute pitch would make this even more torturous.

My son can tell every note's name out of up to 5 keys played simultaneously, while I would not even be able to tell how many notes were played . That's something I called absolute pitch. We found it out at about month two since he started piano study. He could easily tell the key signature of a music played by the end of the first measure, which was before he even knew about all the scales. That's how we found it out.

That's just mean, someone with perfect pitch teaching ear training.. I'm picturing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar teaching a junior high class how to dunk a basketball. Unfair advantage. And for the record, I do have perfect pitch, to the point that I can identify the pitch signature of random objects and "unpitched" percussion instruments. People don't realize the extent to which music is literally everywhere..

i got 0/12

What is the point of this post???

I think what he meant is that you can re-learn everything. If now you are a baby, and are taught the word red means blue, you will be able to do it.


I used to teach many kids when I just got off of the boat. I noticed some kids could become perfect pitch within 2 months of learning to play piano, some would take several years, and some just were never able. To be honest, I think one must have the gene first. I think it is the same like color blind people. If you are color blind, no matter how much you practice, you won't be able to see the color.