Perfect pitch may have more to do with your first language than your genes.
People with absolute pitch can name a note out of thin air. It is often called one in 10,000, but nobody really knows. What is clear is that it is far more common among people who grew up in East Asia speaking tonal languages, where pitch changes a word's meaning.
Absolute pitch, often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or produce a note without hearing a reference note first. Someone with it might name the key of a song on the radio, name every note in a chord, or even name the pitch of a passing car horn. It is different from relative pitch, the more common skill of recognising the gap between two notes.
How rare is it? The popular figure of one in 10,000 is widely repeated but may not be accurate; a 2019 review found a rate of at least 4 per cent among music students. Nor is it a sign of sharper ears. People with absolute pitch hear no better than anyone else. The difference seems to be in how the brain categorises sound, much as most of us learn to label a band of light frequencies 'blue'.
Language appears to matter. Absolute pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese, in which the same syllable spoken at a different pitch is a different word. Tellingly, people of East Asian ancestry raised in North America are much less likely to have it than those raised in East Asia, which points to experience rather than ancestry. Among East Asian music students, those fluent in a tonal language have it more often than those who are not.
Many researchers think there is a critical period in early childhood when anyone might acquire it if they learn to link sounds with labels. Some evidence suggests genes play a part too, and the ability is more common in autistic people and those with Williams syndrome. Whether adults can truly learn it is still debated, though some have trained themselves to identify notes with impressive accuracy. It could only become a meaningful idea in the first place once pitch was standardised: before the late 19th century, an 'A' could sit anywhere between a modern G sharp and B flat.
Source: Wikipedia — Absolute pitch · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
