I always thought perfect pitch was a lot like language - it's significantly easier to learn/retain if it was learned as a child, but it's still possible to learn as an adult.
However, there are some musicians who believe either is has to be learned as a child, or you have to be born with it.
Are there any cases of adults learning to have perfect pitch, or any studies which suggest that they can't?
Sakakibara, A. (1999). A longitudinal study of a process for acquiring absolute pitch. Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology 47.
lists that everyone is born with the ability to learn absolute pitch and
Saffran, J. R. & Griepentrog, G. J. (2001). Absolute pitch in infant auditory learning: Evidence for developmental reorganization. Developmental Psychology 37: 74–85. Abstract
lists that people can learn absolute pitch just like they learn color names, but they are, however, a lot behind. Imagine yourself learning color names at your current age: it's hard, but it's not impossible.
Blue-shaded square http://www.color-hex.com/colorimg.php?color=abcdef
That's not just blue, it could be one of the many shades of blue. Is it baby blue, maya blue, sky blue, light blue, or powder blue?
Disability and impossible to learn if you happen to don't have some genes would be the same - wouldn't it? You made the analogy to colors.
Commented
May 17, 2011 at 0:45
Impossible to see and impossible to learn are different, the analogy to colors is irrelevant.
Commented
May 17, 2011 at 0:50
You raise several interesting questions. The questions will undergo a modest redirection, but I hope that I will not lose the intent of the OP.
Does absolute pitch have a heritable component? Yes, according to this University of California Genetics of Absolute Pitch Study. Both European families and East Asian families had a “linkage peak” at 7q22.3. In an important sense, Yes, perfect pitch is something you are literally born with.
Is tone deafness something you are born with? Yes, according to the article Tone Deaf by Hazel Muir in the New Scientist, which compared identical twins (who share 100% of their genes) and fraternal twins (who share 50% of their genes). The study suggested that “your genetic make-up largely determines your ability to perceive pitch. Spector's team concludes that this skill is roughly 80 percent hereditary.”
This study would suggest that if you (or your identical twin) were tone deaf, then there would be very little chance that you could learn AP, no matter how hard you tried. Life has dealt you a weak hand; stay away from the musical arts. This would be similar to a comment made by a color-blind person. This sex-linked genetic trait will prevent him from a career in interior design. (While I am guessing that user unknown is male, the odds are in my favor.)
What if you’re not tone deaf but desperately want to impress that dazzling violinist? Can you learn how to fake AP as well as a Chinese concert pianist who started at the age of four? Maybe, according to Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence from the production of learned melodies by Daniel Levitin. You could work on your pitch memory, which is more common. Maybe you could conceal a hit tuning fork, hit it in the bathroom, and hum the issuing note sub rosa before you come to the piano. Maybe you could have a mirror or confederate help you figure out what note is being played. Or, barring that, maybe you could memorize the answers for this AP test.
Oliver Sacks (psychologist) wrote a book called "Musicophelia" which addresses how our brains process and are affected by music:
He also talks about things that go wrong...
He mentions the incidence of "perfect pitch" or more properly "absolute pitch" as a rather small percentage of the population. Most can accurately sing a melody they've heard only one time or so... But the ability to accurately name pitches is considerably rarer.
That is... "That's a B-flat above middle C"
This ability can degrade; he lists cases of individuals with the ability who will loose part of the listening range at various points in life.
He does think that this is an ability that a percentage of the population is simply born with.
There is good evidence that, in practice, one should not expect to learn perfect pitch as an adult. One relevant study shows a very clear decline in the rates of having perfect pitch as a function of when musical training began--but that downward trend is swamped by the huge influence of being a native tonal language speaker. Thus, it is quite clear that perfect pitch is not rare given appropriate experience as an infant, but there's a strong suggestion that it gets increasingly hard to learn as one gets older.
If you look hard enough, you can probably find an instance of someone learning perfect pitch as an adult, but that would be extraordinary; normally, by the time you're an adult, your opportunity to develop perfect pitch has passed.
