Absolute pitch

For more than a century, absolute pitch is regarded as a gift for few selected musicians.

Absolute pitch is the ability to name the pitch of an isolated tone without any external reference. It is a surprisingly difficult task even for professional musicians. In contrast, few individuals find this task easy and effortless. What's adding to this mystery is that learning absolute pitch is widely believed to be impossible in adulthood.

Our work (Wong & Wong, 2014) suggests that the prevalence of absolute pitch is much higher than previously assumed, especially when the testing procedure minimizes unnecessary cognitive demands and provides multimodal experiences that typcially appear when musicians hear music tones. This indicates the multimodal nature of absolute pitch memory.

Our recent papers demonstrate that absolute pitch is learnable in adulthood for both tonal language speakers (Wong et al., 2020a) and non-tonal language speakers (Wong et al., 2020b). It challenges the 'critical period + genes' theory of absolute pitch development. Instead, the perceptual learning perspective better accounts for the acquisition of absolute pitch.