What's good everybody? Welcome back to Love Music More. Today I want to talk about perfect pitch or absolute pitch, the ability of somebody to hear the little microwave ding and say, that's an A, or the people that can hear an ambulance going by.
Perfect Pitch - Nature or Nurture?
It's kind of a neat parlor trick, but also incredible musicians, people like Brian Wilson, Celine Dion, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, they apparently all had. Perfect pitch. Same thing with Mozart. And it's an interesting subject because it's been debated as to where it really came from. Like, is it nature? Is it nurture? Does it help if you are a musical savant?
Is it even that useful? Let's dive into it. Perfect pitch is less like having better ears, and it's more like having the ability to recognize music or notes in the way that people recognize words or can write them down. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you're not able to engage with music at that deep level, but it is kind of a cool shortcut, and it is, particularly in Mozart's case, a great way to...
Take the music that you hear and write it down very easily. You're removing that friction. And that's part of the reason why if you've seen Amadeus, you know, Mozart goes back to his room or his study and after he hears all these wonderful symphonies, he just goes and writes them back down. And obviously that's not just perfect pitch, that's perfect understanding and memory and all of these incredible things.
And, for a while people threw it out as like it's a 1 in 10,000 chance, and there's been a lot of research on this. Turns out that is not the case. General population, very uncommon. Music student population, pretty common. I know this from when I was at music school. And people say that it's probably around 4%.
And then for music student populations, as people have, you know, kind of run these studies, basically it's like 4% if you've studied music and it's much higher if you've studied music and continue to study music into later in life.
So why does that happen? I mean, a ton of it is early training. So this is one of the things that I noticed with the folks that had perfect pitch in my music school is they started music very early, which makes sense, right? It's like you're connecting music on the same linguistic and like the same language learning pipeline that when you put a kid in a bilingual school, they are bilingual very quickly.
But if only it was that simple. It's not just that, but there is a strange genetic component to it. There's a predisposition. They did family studies that found what the researchers called familial aggregation. It runs in families more than chance would predict. So there's a nature and a nurture side of this.
So early musical training seems to be necessary, like you need to have quick exposure to notes early on in your life, but there is some level of genetic predisposition.
I found a cool study that happened in Japan, and they tested 104 children across ages 4 through 10 in music schools, and essentially the theory that they found was pitch labels attached early enough, the brain starts to treat notes like named categories, like words, so they learn these speech sounds.
So earlier and then the absolute pitch, the perfect pitch is just another category system that just kind of dovetails on that same part of the brain. But the weird thing that I've seen is that it doesn't necessarily go away. I watched a few people, so there's a guy that I collaborated with a lot, Okudaxij, also known as Gokudaxij.
He is an incredible musician, and he did not have perfect pitch, but I watched him throughout the course of music school kind of train his way into it. And by the end, I think he had like half perfect pitch, and so he was able to...
kind of reason out what every note was because he memorized like six of them very fascinating and there were a few other studies like this where adults tried it was in 2019 essentially they found a larger than chance group of these adults reached absolute pitch
like performance which sometimes is called relative pitch you can memorize a few pitches and then you logic out from that anchor pitch because you know the intervals you know the ways that pitches you can you know count out do re mi fa so la ti do and essentially from there they were able to get enough with enough training it was eight weeks of training
The best learner was able to get perfect pitch and retained it for at least four months, and they didn't keep surveying after that. Very interesting, right? Same thing with 12 adult musicians in 2025, so just last year, they did an eight-week online course and they were able to name an average of seven pitches at 90% accuracy. Some reached all 12 pitches. Very interesting, right?
I mean, I think adult training is real, but I think it's very similar to language. It just gets harder and harder and doesn't mean that it's not possible, but it's also is the question of why do you do it?
Like if you really have this internalized and it works really well, it can be very helpful, particularly if you're in a conservatory style setting or if you're trying to communicate really quickly or if you want to do really well on your training courses.
Um, and that might be part of the reason why, you know, 30% of Japanese music students have perfect pitch versus 7% of Polish music students. Why is that? A lot of people think that it isn't just because the Japanese language is tonal, which is part of it, tonal. Um, it also is that the music schools train for different things and start earlier.
Another thing that is kind of weird, longtime listeners, as in from the very first episode, know that I'm really obsessed with notes versus frequencies. Frequencies being natural, notes being the names that we place.
upon several of these frequencies and then we use the octave or the jumping up where it sounds basically the same when you double one frequency to the next but there's a lot of rub in between these frequencies it really is a gradient from note to note and so I find this really interesting where it's kind of like the the ear is able to hear frequency but then the brain is what turns it into a named thing a note
And so a lot of what we're really talking about training is classification where your brain is getting really good at taking the frequency that everybody's able to hear and in the same way that Even if you don't have perfect pitch, they do brain scans and stuff like that.
It doesn't look that different in trained musicians versus perfect pitch musicians because really you just see this big like connections in the auditory cortex.
One of the things that I think is part of the fun and the agony of learning music and learning how to mix is you fundamentally have to change your brain and the way that your ears are connected to your brain.
And they see this, it actually accumulates when you look at somebody's brain who, this is your brain on music.
But you don't really see a difference between perfect pitch versus not, because the real part that your brain is having to reshuffle is Being connected to frequency, the rest is kind of putting a name to it, and while certainly is useful, you know, transcribing or hearing a wrong note or knowing I want to play this note logically so I know how to sing it really quickly, fundamentally most of music is relative.
Because you sing a song, like think about Happy Birthday. Every time that somebody sings Happy Birthday, it's usually in a different key. It just moves around. But the thing that makes the song the song is the relative position of the notes to each other, even if they exist in between notes. Because again, frequency is a fluid spectrum.
And cross-cultural music study I think is very interesting because pitches are defined differently in different cultures and different times.
And like perfect pitch can tell you a note, but notes can shift like, you know, microtonal. I've had some great guests talk about that. And the relative pitch is more telling you about like, what is the note actually doing? It's the action. Something that I find really funny is I played a gig. It was a guitar and drum gig only no bass. And we were just kind of jamming out like a full.
i don't know white stripesy kind of thing and my guitar was falling more and more out of tune but it didn't really matter because i wasn't really playing with anybody and we're singing to the guitars it's like whatever the whole song just starts to fall down with the guitar so nothing's out of tune with each other and everybody in the audience thought it was fine and i you know i i felt it happening but it was kind of cool it had kind of a vibe um one of my friends with perfect pitch it killed him he's like you're just in between the notes i hate it
And same thing with if you've listened to like old Beatles records, sometimes it will have sped up or slowed down with the tape intentionally or not. And that can create a detuned experience which can be super brutal for people that are fixed in certain types of pitch syntax. So like it's almost like there's like subtitles or...
you're able to see the musical score as it's being played again can be very valuable but at the same time it can kind of be a downside because period instruments they're in weird tunings different cultural music different tunings and you know a bunch of great musicians most great musicians again like even in the large scale studies like we're talking way less than half of people that have trained like Juilliard level kind of folks
And it's a cool naming skill and it's it is useful but most of the time people call it kind of like a parlor trick and I also think that it's interesting because it's like
People talk about it as absolute absolute pitch you have it or you don't and it really does exist on a spectrum
Some people totally do like like my friend who is dying with my out-of-tune guitar But other folks they're able to grab a note or two
and that's enough for them to get actually most of the benefit out of it so perfect pitch is totally real but so much of it like everything human has a whole bunch of different factors early training perhaps the language that you grow up speaking like there was you know there's more evidence of people in tonal languages like mandarin chinese or japanese
there's a genetic component people in the same family tend to have more perfect pitch and there's a cultural component how are you being taught what is being measured where are the pressures yeah
the biggest thing is less about like what the note is and more about the note that you want to play or the feeling that you want to get then also sometimes the coolest thing is how out of tune do you want to be because what is tuning anyway At least to me. I don't know. I don't have perfect pitch. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll be back again next week with a great guest pod. Hope you've been enjoying them.
I certainly have been. Incredible year, incredible run of just great conversations that really fuel me. And if you like this podcast, I invite you to rate it five stars, share it with your friends, and also check out my music at scoobertdoobert.pizza. I'll see you next week.