Perfect Pitch Study

[Garr]

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID= ... c=su_pitch

A snippet:

Among the findings of the study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA : "Either you've got it or you don't," says senior report author Jane Gitschier, a professor of medicine and pediatrics at U.C.S.F. She says that data collected from more than 2,000 people aged eight to 70 years old during the study indicates that there is likely a genetic basis to perfect pitch—one she believes is activated by early music training "Absolute pitch almost certainly requires exposure to music at a young age," Gitschier notes. "You need to have some idea of the nomenclature."

A total of 2,213 individuals took an online exam consisting of 36 electronic tones and 36 piano tones. For each sound they had to identify the corresponding note on the musical scale. A score of at least 24.5 on both tests indicated that a participant might have perfect pitch. To the researcher's surprise, there were two distinct clusters of results: "those that represent highly accurate pitch perception," the researchers wrote in the study, and those whose scores seemed to indicate that they were randomly guessing. From this striking dichotomy of haves and have-nots, Gitschier says, "Our data suggest that…it could potentially be described by a single gene."

[bassjones]

Fortunately for the rest of us it is entirely possible for one to develop near perfect relative pitch with training.