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Perfect pitch has fascinated me ever since I first discovered it existed. About 0.01% of the population have it – about as rare as finding a four-leaf clover! But for us perfect pitchers out there, find bragging rights in the fact that famous musicians such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Charlie Puth all possess this rare capability.
Most of us probably know the gist of what perfect pitch is – where a person miraculously is able to identify a musical note (or sometimes the pitch of everyday objects by the ABSOLUTELY ENDLESS plethora of requests from those around them) simply by hearing it, without any visual cues. But seriously, the majority of the time we make something up because you really can’t confirm nor deny our statement.
What makes a perfect pitcher? (not the volume of the container)
Despite decades of research being conducted on perfect pitch – or absolute pitch as researchers define it – there is still no complete model of its neurobiological mechanisms. Wilson et al. (2008) delineate its potential autosomal dominant nature, and though various papers dole responsibility on various different brain regions (usually somewhere in the left hemisphere), the most complete interpretation has probably been by Levitin & Rogers (2005).
They describe a 2-component model, composed of “pitch memory” – simply the ability to store pitch in the long-term memory, used by those with relative pitch (most of us can do this with some training!) to identify a note in comparison to another – and “pitch labelling” – the unique ability to then assign particular labels to each pitch, often verbal in nature. There is an often described “critical period” in which perfect pitch is most easily developed, somewhere in childhood, with numerous papers demonstrating a correlation between the age of first music lesson and the frequency of perfect pitch. Furthermore, it is also considered learning to assign labels to pitches during this “critical period” – for example, those learning tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese – may foster the development of perfect pitch, which is my personal favourite explanation.
But the hunt for an explanation is far from over! Interestingly, Reis et al. (2021) also propose that the frequency following response – the central nervous system’s ability to precisely encode and track the features of sounds – may potentially play a larger role, favouring the “genetic disposition” argument. Similarly, Van Hedger et al. (2015) argue instead for the role of one’s auditory working memory, which is the brain’s ability to temporarily hold, process, and mentally manipulate these sounds.
How perfect is it really?
It may please the audience to know that even amongst those who flaunt their so-called “perfect” pitch, there is a lot of malleability to this “perfectness”!
For one, Bahr et al. (2004) describe a more accurate perfect pitch for more familiar instruments, as well as for more familiar notes, such as the orchestra tuning standard of A . Moreover, Deutsch et al. (2011) found that for more frequently experienced notes (such as white keys over black keys), accuracy of naming also increased.
But even more surprisingly, Hedger et al. (2013) stipulate that those with perfect pitch can even be retuned, just like an instrument! When presented with music that was gradually detuned over the course of a few minutes, by the end of the listening session, participants now recognised this detuned music as the “correct” tuning. This “retuning” phenomenon extends far beyond just minute adjustments – when I swap instruments between the trumpet (tuned in B-flat) and the guitar/piano (tuned in C), over the course of a few minutes, I am able to re-recognise either B-flat as “C” when playing the trumpet, or concert pitch C as “C” when playing the guitar/piano.
What if I want to be perfect?
The answer may indeed lie in a certain class of drugs called histone-deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors. Morishita & Hensch (2008) posit that HDACs may act as an epigenetic “brake” on the critical window, and thus the partial removal of this brake via HDAC inhibitors such as valproate, commonly used as a mood stabiliser for management of mania in bipolar disorder, may ‘reopen’ this critical window. Gervain et al. (2013) for instance, perhaps unconvincingly due to the poor study design, demonstrated that administration of valproate successfully increased the accuracy of pitch identification after relevant training.
However, the good news is that drugs aren’t needed! The aforementioned influence of working memory by Van Hedger et al. (2015) presents an interesting case where adults gained semblances of perfect pitch. Over the course of the experiment, some adults were able to attain some form of increase in pitch-naming accuracy, which Van Hedger et al. (2015) attribute to the mediatory effect of working memory between the oft-discussed variables of “age of musical learning onset” and “perfect pitch possession”.
Wong et al. (2025) also advocate for the possibility of adults learning perfect pitch, even outside of the supposed “critical window”. After participating in an 8-week computerised training program, participants increased their pitch-naming accuracy by 128%, albeit remaining at an accuracy of 31%, far from “perfect”. Nonetheless, the issue lies in the lack of literature surrounding long-term studies that follow up with participants.
What does this mean?
It seems that perfect pitch may not be so perfect after all? With the uncertainty surrounding its development, and the even greater uncertainty as to whether you can develop it as an adult, it remains a mystery for now. There are PLENTY of “perfect pitch training courses” out there. If you do happen to try one, or have tried one, let me know – I’m curious! Perhaps there is a critical window? Perhaps there isn’t, and it just depends on the person and a good old hunk of chance? Or perhaps it really is as simple as “practice makes perfect”?
References
Bahr, N., Christensen, C. A., & Bahr, M. (2004). Diversity of accuracy profiles for absolute pitch recognition. Psychology of Music, 33(1), 58–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735605048014
Deutsch, D., Le, J., Shen, J., & Li, X. (2011). Large-scale direct-test study reveals unexpected characteristics of absolute pitch . The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4). https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3654614
Gervain, J., Vines, B. W., Chen, L. M., Seo, R. J., Hensch, T. K., Werker, J. F., & Young, A. H. (2013). Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102
Hedger, S. C., Heald, S. L. M., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2013). Absolute pitch may not be so absolute. Psychological Science, 24(8), 1496–1502. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612473310
Levitin, D. J., & Rogers, S. E. (2005). Absolute pitch: Perception, coding, and controversies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(1), 26–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.11.007
Morishita, H., & Hensch, T. K. (2008). Critical period revisited: Impact on vision. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18(1), 101–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2008.05.009
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