How Rare Is Perfect Pitch?

Ask how rare perfect pitch is and one number comes back. About one person in ten thousand. It turns up in encyclopaedias, in newspaper features and in conversation among musicians.

We went looking for the study behind it. The papers cited alongside it do not report it. They counted musicians, or they counted people who volunteered for a pitch test, and both groups are loaded with the trait before the counting starts.

What the research says plainly is narrower. Absolute pitch is extremely rare in the United States and Europe, and nobody has explained the rarity. That is a weaker statement than a rate, and it is the one that can be backed up.

So the figure stays out of the table above. A number with no measurement under it is not data, however often it is repeated.

The top row is the largest published set of note-naming scores, and it is the row most likely to mislead you. A pitch-naming test was put on the web and 2,213 people took it. Of those, 981 named notes at a level the authors called extraordinary.

That is 44 per cent, and it is not a prevalence. People who suspect they have a rare ability are exactly the people who click a test for it. Everyone who read the page, shrugged and left is missing from the denominator.

The row still earns its place, because its shape is worth far more than its share. A later section on this page is about that shape.

Our own perfect pitch test has the same problem and always will. Nobody arrives at a page called perfect pitch test by accident.

The second and third rows come from one survey of more than 600 musicians in conservatories, training programmes and orchestras.

Split that group by the age their training began and the two ends barely look like the same population. Forty per cent of those who started at four or under reported absolute pitch. Three per cent of those who started at nine or over did.

The authors read that as early training being necessary rather than sufficient. Their other finding points the same way. People reporting absolute pitch were four times more likely to report someone else in the family with it.

A later study tested conservatory students in the United States and in China on site, with no volunteering involved. Prevalence rose the earlier training had begun in both countries. At every starting age it was far higher among the Chinese students, who spoke Mandarin.

Mandarin is a tone language, so the pitch of a syllable changes which word it is. The suggestion is that infants learning such a language attach pitches to labels as a matter of course. That happens inside the window when they are learning the sounds of speech.

• Beginning music young is common. Absolute pitch is not, so it is not the whole story.
• It clusters in families, which points at something inherited alongside the training.
• It is commoner among speakers of tone languages at every age of starting.
• None of the three is a method. All three describe what happened before somebody turned five.

Most abilities produce one hump. Measure a thousand people on almost anything and the scores pile up in the middle and thin out at both ends.

Note naming does not do that. In the web study the scores formed two separate humps, one near chance and one near the ceiling, with a thin stretch between them.

That is why absolute pitch gets described as something you have or do not have. It is also why an average accuracy across everybody would describe nobody. The average lands in the valley between the two groups, where almost nobody scores.

The same data turned up two smaller oddities. Wrong answers clustered on the note A, as though A were pulling guesses towards it. And naming accuracy drifted with age, with older listeners tending to hear notes as higher than they were.

This page publishes no figure of its own and will not until a cell holds at least a thousand results. Results stay in your browser and nothing is uploaded, so that day may be a long way off. We would rather say that than fill the gap.

What the test gives you today is your own number on your own machine. It reports the share of notes you named exactly right, and how far the misses fell in semitones. Answering at random averages a miss of three semitones, so the second figure tells you whether the notes did any work.

If the notes did no work, the relative pitch test is the more useful page. It measures the gap between two notes rather than the name of one. Most people who cannot name a note are perfectly good at comparing two.

One last caution, and it covers every figure above. A share of a population tells you nothing about a person. What counts as a good reaction time makes the same argument for a far commoner measure.