How Can You Tell If You Have Perfect Pitch?

Mariah Carey, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Mozart, Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix, and Yanni. What do these musicians have in common? They're all said to have perfect pitch.

How rare is perfect pitch? If you don’t have it already, can you learn it?

What is perfect (or absolute) pitch?

Perfect pitch (technically known as absolute pitch) is the ability to identify, without effort, the pitch of a note.

Let's say someone plays a D on the piano. A person with perfect pitch—and the musical training to be able to name the notes—would be able to identify the note as a D without any reference. Or they might hear a note played and be able to reproduce it on an instrument without having to search for it. If you told someone who had vocal training and perfect pitch to sing a D, they'd be able to do it easily. 

When someone can identify a note only when it's based on a reference note, that's called relative pitch. People with perfect pitch, on the other hand, don't need a reference note to label an audible tone correctly.

How rare is perfect pitch? 

Out of every 10,000 people, only between 1 to 5 of them will have perfect pitch. Out of every 10,000 musicians, however, between 100 and 1100 (that’s 1-11%) may have the gift. Perfect pitch is also observed to run in families, which suggests it's at least partially genetic.

Perfect pitch is more common in cultures where the language is tonal. In tonal languages, the same word said in different tones has different meanings. (That's compared to cultures where tone indicates emotion and not meaning.) One study of music students found that 60 percent of Mandarin-speaking students who had studied music since the age of four or five had perfect pitch relative to only 14 percent of English-speaking students.

Some scientists argue that this could mean perfect pitch can be taught. That's especially true for someone who learns to alter and identify pitch from a young age, like when they're learning to speak their first language. 

Other studies have shown that perfect pitch is more common among people with ...

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