11 Facts About Absolute pitch

Absolute pitch, often called perfect pitch, is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.

Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of these abilities, achieved without a reference tone:.

The skill is not exclusively musical, or limited to human perception; absolute pitch has been demonstrated in animals such as bats, wolves, gerbils, and birds, for whom specific pitches facilitate identification of mates or meals.

Evidence suggests that absolute pitch sense is influenced by cultural exposure to music, especially in the familiarization of the equal-tempered C-major scale.

Absolute pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages, such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, which depend on pitch variation to distinguish words that otherwise sound the same—e.

Related searches

Absolute pitch is the ability to perceive pitch class and to mentally categorize sounds according to perceived pitch class.

Prevalence of absolute pitch is higher among those who are blind from birth as a result of optic nerve hypoplasia.

Absolute pitch is considerably more common among those whose early childhood was spent in East Asia.

Absolute pitch might be achievable by any human being during a critical period of auditory development, after which period cognitive strategies favor global and relational processing.

Absolute pitch is not a prerequisite for skilled musical performance or composition.

However, there is evidence that musicians with absolute pitch tend to perform better on musical transcription tasks compared to those without absolute pitch.