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People with Perfect Pitch: Why Some are Lucky and Others Aren’t
In his book “Musicophilia,” renowned neuroscientist Oliver Sacks described the remarkable ability of Sir Frederick Ouseley, a former music professor at the University of Oxford, to recognize the pitch of everyday sounds. For example, he said it “thundered in G” and the “wind whistled in D.”
Ouseley had perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch — the remarkable, rare ability to identify or produce particular musical notes without having a reference note as a guide.
“People who possess this ability [absolute pitch] can name notes as immediately and effortlessly as most people can name colors,” Diana Deutsch, an adjunct professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University and a professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, told Live Science in an email.
But why do some people have this extraordinary ability, while others don’t?
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First, it’s important to note that absolute pitch differs from “relative pitch,” which describes someone’s ability to differentiate between the pitch of two or more notes — an essential skill for musicians playing in an orchestra. But only 1 in 10,000 people have absolute pitch, and scientists don’t yet know what leads to this ability.
There are several theories, however. The first relates to genetics, as the skill can run in families. However, identifying a specific genetic cause has proved difficult.
“Researchers have attempted to find a DNA marker for absolute pitch, but although there have been several suggestions, none have proved conclusive,” Deutsch said. It is also difficult to tease apart the influence of genetics from a person’s environment, for instance parents with absolute pitch may be more likely to spend time teaching their children.
Another explanation is the “critical period” theory. Like our ability to learn a language, there may be a specific developmental stage when humans are more likely to cultivate absolute pitch based on their exposure to certain environmental influences. One study, for example, found that 40% of musicians who began training when they were 4 years old or younger had absolute pitch, compared with 3% who started training after they turned 9.
Some of Deutsch’s research in speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese — who are more likely to have absolute pitch — has supported this critical-period theory.
“In these languages, words take on entirely different meanings depending on the lexical tones in which they are spoken,” Deutsch said. (Lexical tones are the pitches of words.) If you say the word “ma” in Mandarin in one tone,