https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/
Drugs may not even be necessary.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227794
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/355933v1
Anecdata: https://www.reddit.com/r/perfectpitchgang/comments/or0sye/ad...
I've been doing a ton of relative pitch ear training in the last couple of months and I'm slowly getting better at it but this is very hard work once you get past say P5 and harmonic I find much, much harder than melodic.
edit: nice app from that last link: https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-note
Extreme practice on 12 tones strictly on piano with hundreds of hours leading to legitimately a much lower performance than someone with 0 training and actual perfect pitch
This is just very, very honed relative pitch
Let's not even mention (1) people with perfect pitch can identify those pitches with ANY timbre. It doesn't matter the source of the sound (2) you can hit a mess of notes together and they pick up all of the notes at once
I have been playing piano for years and this exercise on musictheory.net with the piano pitches I can very quickly identify the notes from the pitch but if you play a violin I don't have a clue which note it is.