* aurally identify key signatures
* aurally identify chords
* sing a given note on command
Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked:
* Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor
* The famous motif in Beethoven's 5th is in C minor
* Blues Traveller's "Hook" is in A
* Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat
* Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor
* etc.
A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
For me, sometimes, I can hear the opening note or chord of one song and it will immediately remind me of another unrelated song. When I check, they're almost always either in the same key or a semitone off. It happens most reliably when the timbres are similar. It's not a conscious thing, and the more I try to make it happen the less it ever does. Oddly enough though, I am terrible at identifying intervals. (Major third, perfect fifth, yeah, I know they're different and I can hear that, but ask me out of the blue which one was just played and I'll manage to get it wrong.)
Another thing I can do is play what is essentially a "mental recording" of a song I know well in my head. It's like if I had an iPod, and I felt some urge to listen to "La Grange" by ZZ Top, I can hear it in my head -- guitars, drums, vocals. I can skip around to whatever part interests me. I find that when I start tapping out the rhythms of what I'm recalling, or humming along with its melody, my recollection is pretty spot on when played against a real recording on speakers. Again maybe a semitone off at worst.
Both of those suggest to me that, somewhere in there, I do have an absolute pitch reference that I'm drawing from in an undisciplined way. If I sat down and practiced I bet I could refine it, but... why? Might be a neat party trick, but aside from that I don't really feel like I'm missing anything without it.
If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch based on the interval between the two.
Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual musician, but if you're a dedicated musician the skill is an asset that allows you to execute a whole lot quicker. Occasionally it can be a curse, because you're more sensitive to out-of-tune notes.
There are many skills which are much easier to instill in early childhood and are simply harder to master if approached in adulthood -- language learning, certain athletic skills, and more -- but we would never consider any of these impossible to achieve through study. Sure, maybe the maximum achievable skill level is less than what could have been possible if study began in early childhood, but we would not say that it is impossible for adults to achieve a level of mastery, or that those who gained a skill through serious practice must be using some separate mechanism than those who learned it in early life.
I contend that it is the same with absolute pitch. After all, there is not even a perfect level of absolute pitch mastery! In layman's terms, "perfect pitch" is usually understood to mean that a person can immediately name a pitch when played -- on a 12-tone western music scale. But some people people with perfect pitch have better precision than that and can estimate quarter tones, etc. If a note is played that's 20 cents sharper than Ab, and person #1 says "that's an Ab" while person #2 says "that's a note a touch sharper than Ab", most people consider neither statement to disqualify them from having absolute pitch. But there is a difference. Moreover, no person on Earth can name a pitch down to, say, a couple decimals of absolute frequency value. Doesn't this imply that the skill exists as achievable points on a spectrum, not as a flat binary?
"Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear. Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and it was."
This is incredibly impressive for two reasons:
- It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely to semitone identification
- A pure tone from a tuning fork doesn't have any of the characteristic overtones, timbre, etc. that you'd get from an instrument to help identify the sound
From that link:
> For the same reason, absolute listeners do not perceive pitch "height". They do not perceive pitches as "higher" or "lower" or physically "next to" each other. As musicians, of course, absolute listeners learn that, metaphorically, pitches are "higher" and "lower" than each other, because they can see these relationships on a page of sheet music. They also learn that, theoretically, "distance" between notes exists, because you can count the semitones that separate them, and you can see the "distance" between keys on an instrument. But, to an absolute listener, neither "height" nor "distance" has any direct perceptual reality.
> For example, when a non-absolute listener hears a guitar slide, we literally hear something moving down. But an absolute listener's experience is nearer to the color-changing rectangle above. They hear a series of discrete pitches, changing—not moving—from one to another. Although they know the sound has "descended" from their knowledge of the musical scale, the sound does not give them a literal experience of downward movement as it does to non-absolute listeners.
The link has a gif of a box moving through the color spectrum which helps understand the point.
As soon as having learned some relative pitch, it becomes very difficult to train absolute pitch. One single note a day. For the second note the brain will switch to relative mode, and there's no progress on absolute. Forcing the ear/brain to run in absolute mode seems possible, but is difficult consistently enough to practice absolute.
Source: Experimenting with my own ability (or lack thereof).
This is gold. I similarly maintain lists of melodies that prominently feature certain intervals.
I'd like to skip this relative pitch translation and jump straight to recognizing each note directly, but I have gaps in coverage. I'm happy you brought up "Comfortably Numb" since it's also burned into my neurons - just now I thought about it for a moment, went to the keyboard and hit B exactly! Also love "Hook" and will never be able to forget that harmonica intro.
Some of my songs:
* Vampire Weekend - "Mansard Roof" in F major
* Radiohead - "Everything in its right place" first chord: C major
* Queen - "Bohemian Rhapsody" piano part in Bb majorI'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would be handy to have a few of these
Has popular songs for each key and mode
That's why tuning forks and pitch pipes exist. You need a source of truth to ground things in, and then you can train yourself to hear the relative distance between notes from there.
My understanding of true, perfect pitch is something a bit more innate. Individual with perfect pitch do not need to rely on any other techniques.
I've known people with both types. If anything, the practical differences are not significant enough to truly matter from my observations. Many of the folks with true, perfect pitch have told me that it is a curse more than a blessing. These people tend to hear notes even when they do not want to e.g., toilets flushing in an out of tune C, the pitches in people's voices, the pitches of jet engines, CPU coil whining in D#, etc..
When a lot of modern life is constant noise and out of tune, it can be somewhat distressing for people with perfect pitch, or at least, so they have told me. I can't imagine turning off a song on the radio solely because it's a few cents out of tune, but hey, I knew people that would.
I'd heard the song so many times that I found I could recall the low, then high E at the start and that's really all you need to get the rest in tune.
This is by no means a guaranteed method to learn perfect pitch.
This idea of recalling songs is an easy way to explain perfect pitch to others in a way they can easily try for themselves. If you can sing the first note to a song, and then afterwards you actually listen to that song, and you are actually in tune, then you have perfect pitch. That's a far cry from being able to name the note, or rattle off the notes in a chord, but in my view the mental recall is the true innate essence that undergirds every other component of the umbrella of perfect pitch.
To show a microtonal piece that stands up to Chopin requires a composing genius much better than me, so I can't show you it. Such a person may not even exist today.
A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%.
It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!
Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0
> a completely useless skill
It's probably an overrated skill depending on the musical task, but to say it's completely useless is really ignorant. Nearly anyone who studies music at the university level or above would find this statement ("completely useless") to be wildly incorrect.
> Random chance would be 8.3%.
A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
The smiling emoji at the end of the first paragraph indicates that these statements were made somewhat in jest, or perhaps exaggerated. Of course some uses can be found for absolute pitch. I saw one a couple weeks back, when Jacob Collier was tuning the audience choir to lead into "Somebody to Love" played on the piano. But, hadn't he had absolute pitch, he might just have picked up a reference note from the piano or his in-ear monitors, like a filthy commoner. Usually when making music, having good relative pitch is required, and a reference instrument is mostly handy, making perfect pitch somewhat redundant. But do tell what you're doing with perfect pitch, I'm curious.
And on curiosity, I went to your website and randomly listened to "The Fugue Song" [0]. Really loved it! Very nice moment when the singing comes in, repeating the phrase from the fugy guitar intro. Good song! (I'm a total sucker for Nina Simone's "Love Me Or Leave me", do you know that? A song where she's inserting some counterpoint improvisations in the middle). I'm listening to a bit of "Hiss" now.
> 8.3%
Rounded to the next semitone of course, I left that detail out, it's in the paper.
Why is that relevant? Whatever pitch they pick would fall into one of the 12 buckets, even if it isn't precisely the correct pitch.
I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)
As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.
One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.
Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two.
Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know
If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition
You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.
Best of luck!!
The Japanese Wikipedia page for pitch accents simply call it “Accent for Japanese dialects“.
That is to say, I don’t think this is pitch as in musical pitch perfect.
The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it sounds completely wrong.
The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh" but it's the same basic idea.
I'd be interested to see if there are any studies around any correlation between absolute pitch and a tonal native language though.
Maybe I took the title too literally.
As someone who wants to gain perfect pitch (and still feels mildly distant from this ability) one thing I can say has been the most helpful:
* Get a string instrument
* Strum the strings
* Try to tune the first string by ear
* Once you think you have it, check it against a chromatic tuner.
This way will you see how progressively your feeling of "in tune" can be measured in hertz.
I can get pretty pretty close (within about 5hz).
I used to have competitions with my children on who could get the note closest without a tuner. One of my kids got pretty good where they could almost nail it within 1 hz. It made things fun and a little less "maintenance".
The best way I can describe the process is you have a sensitivity to a threshold of being in tune. I hear the note but there is something inside myself, it almost feels like anxiousness that kinda peaks right before I hit the note and then stops when I "feel" I've hit that note I'm aiming for. As I've said, I can get within about 5hz which to a musician they can probably notice it is off but for the average ear, it feels muddy but close.
Long story short, practice with a tuner and within a year you'll surprise yourself.
5 Hz is going to be larger practical pitch difference at G3 (196 Hz) compared to E5 (659 Hz).
Don't be pretentious man, we are tuning guitars and violins not prepping the kids for Juliard.
The same as how you use hz to talk about a specific note, your ear understands hz when listening. Cents are just ratios of intervals subject to a given scale. Do you think we are so bad we are messing up A3 as being close to B5?
How about we use Just Intonation or 12-TET? But then should we base it on 5 limit[0] or Pythagorean[1] tuning.
See where being a pedant gets you.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-limit_tuning
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning
Most tuners work in hz. Your ear works in hz. That's all the thought that went into it.
If any of us are consistently getting to within a hertz I'll consider switching to cents.
The article also presents different senses of perfect pitch, and categorizes your sense as being at the lowest threshold (or lower).
I think "My journey of learning perfect pitch over 15 years" is more apt
Learn perfect pitch in 15 years sounds more like a step by step article.
I would have clicked both, just expect something closer to the latter.
I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch.
> Don’t learn a non-C instrument
I would recommend against this because it severely limits your options for instruments to play.
Interesting point. I had a similar thought about singing.
In theory, a good enough singer would be able to use their vocal chords as a reference. Unless their vocal range is changing on a regular basis, if they remember the highest piched note they can sing, they could refer to that as an anchor.
• Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I've read of vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts.
• Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I've read of people who had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or 60s because their perfect pitch was now off and everything sounded wrong to them.
* "Concert pitch" of A=440Hz is not universal.
* 12 tone equal temperament is not universal.
* Analog playback systems often run at slightly incorrect speeds.
* Some instruments are difficult or impossible to tune, so the tuning will vary with temperature. Nobody is going to tune a pipe organ in a drafty church every time the weather changes.
* DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0], which changes the tuning.
And with digital players now, you can speed it up but digitally alter the sound back to it's original pitch.
Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it.
Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a tritone versus a perfect fifth for example.
You'll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they possess perfect pitch when it's almost invariably relative pitch.
Yes, I can do this. I don't understand why people are so keen on gatekeeping perfect pitch.
Better learn to play an instrument; I don't know what a perfect pitch would be good for.
Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn't have one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It's not something that I'm concerned about practicing or maintaining. I'm a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing.
I wonder if there's a "spectrum" of pitch ability, and also a spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.
Instruments have fairly unique timbres at different pitches, and our brain can pattern match that more effectively than pitch itself. So, you can actually "burn in" the correct timbre, which makes it easier to find. Since I was so used to an A reference note for tuning, I got to where I could get pretty close.
Years later, I saw this video, with someone who seems to have brute forced it to approximate perfect pitch using a similar method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE
I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see it being a spectrum as well.
Any first-hand experience?
Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days.
All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author, and that is ofc commendable.
However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils down to at the very least being able to immediately [1] recognize the Hz aka note-name of any pitch-producing entity (keyboard/string/woodwind/brass instruments, toothbrush, drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.) with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions like being able to identify every single note of a specific cluster and there's variability of maximum number of notes each AP possessor is able to distinguish.
Also, short of old age and intoxication/sickness, the distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days.
All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes even the notorious Valproate study [2].
I'm not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific interest and I get the appeal of it being 'magical' however one can't help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected.
But even then, the article unintentionally presents a 'happy-ending' type of story; the author most likely definitely did not obtain AP ability but what they're describing is exactly what everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive for, and I'd wager there are many studying musicians that haven't developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and would greatly benefit from). Let's just don't perpetuate elitist obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP possessor superiority comes from.
Many things that are considered perfect pitch skills take practice, and the OP is absolutely correct in that certain timbres are easier to classify than others. As a kid I would have had a harder time telling you the pitches if two woodwind instruments were playing a chord, vs two stringed instruments, due to familiarity. Its something you tend to work on accidentally as a background process as a musician
Much of perfect pitch discrimination is an active process though, eg being able to split up a song into its constituent parts and pick out the notes of each line is something you have to learn. All perfect pitch does is give you the ability to perform that discrimination, but anything more than that is a skill. For things that people consider to be perfect pitch skills (tone classification in a cluster), there absolutely are good days and bad days
Lots of pitches in nature aren't especially clean - nor are musical instruments, which is what makes them of varying ease to classify when you're unfamiliar. There are harmonics that can be make it hard to classify, or the central tone can be washed out in noise or similar tones. Its like trying to identify the dominant frequency in white noise, it takes practice
Its likely that OP had perfect pitch as a kid (demonstrating pitch classification), and simply never really capitalised on it mentally to develop it. Because you're right in that no adult has ever experimentally been demonstrated to have learnt this, even with extensive training and musical experience
For me piano is definitely the easiest instrument to identify, I'm sure largely because it's what I've played all my life. Pipe organs are the worst. I assume that in general the purity of the tone correlates negatively with ease of identification.
I've always had strong relative pitch ability and many people mistake my ability for perfect pitch. But in most practical applications, it's not just the _answer_ you arrive at that makes the definition so (because this can be faked), it's _how_ you know it.
People with absolute pitch just _know_ it without thinking -- no tricks, no mental reference note, no memorizing songs, no relying on a certain instrument's timbre, etc., they just know it.
This sounds vastly worse than just "losing absolute pitch" and was an extremely unpleasant and life-changing experience for the people that described it to me. Hearing about it was enough to convince me that absolute pitch is more of a curse than a blessing for musicians.
Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.
I'm held back by a sense of embarrassment when singing. I feel weird singing by myself (always have), let alone with others around. I don't have this same embarrassment making mistakes when playing an instrument. Any tips on how to help with that?
⸻
1. The cathedral choir kind of spoiled me for choral singing though. In most church choirs, the accompanist will play choral parts one at a time for the singers to hear them. At Holy Name, they just played all four parts together and you had to hear your part in the chord.
And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner.
Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.
From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names until they were older and started taking music lessons.
My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440.
And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it — tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.
I remember that most of my CD players, and my MP3 players, and I think my iPods had AB repeat. For those who have not used a player with AB repeat, what it did was let you mark two points on a song ("A" and "B") and then it would loop the section between those two points.
It was great if you were trying to transcribe a song or figure out how to play it on your instrument. You could put a couple chords or a section of the melody on AB repeat until you got it and then move on.
The major streaming players don't seem to have this. Nor does Apple's Music player when playing local files.
You can download a song (if your streaming service supports it) or record it (if downloads are not supported) and then open it in GarageBand or something similar which should have a way to repeat a section.
That works but is a bit of a hassle, and sometimes you might want to try to figure out a song when you aren't at your computer.
Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic people (35) [3].
I'm one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a kid).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/h... - not scientific but given that it normally is 1 in 2000 at best, this is way too high.
[2] More sources talk about it, but can't seem to find it right now. I'm pretty sure that [3] has some sources, but don't want to do the research.
Instead, I think interval identification is the most useful skill. Hearing two notes after each other and being able to name the interval is relevant to every genre of music and live performance, so it can be played back on whatever instrument is in front of you.
The next most useful skill (in my opinion) is chord decomposition: hearing a chord and being able to identify the component notes, relative to the tonic. Diads are useful enough for guitar players/bassists, but triads are super useful for piano players, vocalists, or other polyphonic instruments.
Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.
i always wondered why we dont seem to have developed ML models that can do this yet. its not like the synthetic data is hard to generate, if data limitations are the excuse.
Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a much lower or higher register.
Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first six notes of a melody at a time. https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ New songs are still being added daily. Enjoy!
"Sometime when I was ~12 years old, I remember surprising my clarinet teacher by correctly repeating some random notes that he played. He told me I had perfect pitch, but I didn’t think so, because I couldn’t name notes for any instrument other than the clarinet."
Okay, so then this doesn't seem like an article written for the average musician (person).
Recently I've become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant sound. It's also interesting to hear (and play) baroque instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.
The core ability with perfect pitch is to remember a note persistent over many months or years. If you know a song well, and you have perfect pitch, you will almost always sing it in the correct pitch. Not within a semitone; within a percent, enough that if you were singing with the recording, you would not be out of tune.
There is overwhelming evidence that this ability is either genetic or acquired at a very early age. It's a difference between people like the way you can fold your tongue or move your thumb. It's innate.
someone with musical training can use this skill to identify the 12 tones of western music, but that's frankly just a party trick built on the core capability.
Here's the concrete example. My son has perfect pitch. I didn't know this until we were watching a Beatles movie, I think A Hard Day's night, and he asked why the instruments Were Out Of Tune. Later I played the record and compared it with the video, and they were off by less than a quarter tone. The Beatles another musicians in the '60s often used very speed to subtly change the tone and tempo and many Beatles Tunes are at a pitch that lies between the standard a 440 12 lb scale
I didn’t expect that but in hindsight it makes sense.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948
Abstract TL;DR: Results suggest that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through intentional training.
