Absolute Pitch

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability some people have to instantly and effortlessly name the pitch of musical tones, as readily as most of us name the colors we see. Others are said to possess AP if they can produce (such as by humming, whistling, or singing) a tone given its name. Suppose you are at a concert by your favorite rock group and the guitarist begins to play the opening strains of one of the group's biggest hits. Within a few notes, the entire audience recognizes the song and they jump to their feet. But you overhear someone sitting in the next row complaining, “They've changed the key to C—I can't believe they did that, it sounds so wrong!” The annoyed concert-goer in front of you probably has AP. This entry describes the nature of absolute pitch, its acquisition, and current controversies.

A common misconception is that people with AP are more skilled at being able to notice when a tone is played or sung out of tune, or at being able to sing perfectly intonated tones. Although such differences certainly exist among people, this is a separate phenomenon and not associated with AP. (The fact that there is no agreed-upon name for superior “in tuneness” skills may feed the confusion.) What AP possessors do is notice the pitches (and by extension, the keys) of pieces of music, something that most of us do not. Sing “Happy Birthday” at a birthday party three times, and you may well be singing it in three different keys, and not be at all bothered by it. This is because the identity of a melody is defined by the intervals, not by the actual tones used.

Part of a long-standing fascination with AP is that it is so rare (some estimates put it at fewer than 1 in 10,000 people) and that among musicians it is often regarded as the ultimate in musical endowment. Although nearly all musicians can name tones if they are given a reference tone to start with (using their knowledge of intervals to calculate tone names relative to this reference), those with true AP can do so without any external referent, relying instead on an internal template. Some musicians have acquired a stable, long-term memory representation for a single musical tone (typically their tuning note) and can use their knowledge of intervals to “calculate” the names of other tones; this is called quasi-absolute pitch. For this reason, an important methodological consideration in screening for AP possession is that reaction times must be collected.

Why do so many more of us learn to name colors than pitches? Tone labels lack the ecological salience that color labels do, most parents don't teach them, and appreciation of music generally requires that one focuses attention on patterns, intervals, and relations, rather than on the actual pitches of tones. The preponderance of evidence suggests that AP must be acquired early in life, generally before the ages of 8 to 12. There is no documented case of an adult acquiring true absolute pitch. What seems necessary is the early and systematic pairing of tone sensations with verbal labels, whether acquired through explicit or implicit exposure. Gottfried Schlaug found enlargement of [Page 2]the planum temporale in musicians with AP, but the implications of this remain unclear.

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