Other studies have shown that perfect pitch is more common among people with autism. That’s especially true for someone who learns to alter and identify pitch from a young age, like when they’re learning to speak their first language. Some scientists argue that this could mean perfect pitch can be taught. (That’s compared to cultures where tone indicates emotion and not meaning.) One study of music students found that 60 percent of Mandarin-speaking students who had studied music since the age of four or five had perfect pitch relative to only 14 percent of English-speaking students. In tonal languages, the same word said in different tones has different meanings. Perfect pitch is more common in cultures where the language is tonal. Perfect pitch is also observed to run in families, which suggests it’s at least partially genetic. Out of every 10,000 musicians, however, between 1 (that’s 1-11%) may have the gift.

Out of every 10,000 people, only between 1 to 5 of them will have perfect pitch. People with perfect pitch, on the other hand, don’t need a reference note to label an audible tone correctly. When someone can identify a note only when it’s based on a reference note, that’s called relative pitch. If you told someone who had vocal training and perfect pitch to sing a D, they’d be able to do it easily. Or they might hear a note played and be able to reproduce it on an instrument without having to search for it.

A person with perfect pitch-and the musical training to be able to name the notes-would be able to identify the note as a D without any reference. Let’s say someone plays a D on the piano. Perfect pitch (technically known as absolute pitch) is the ability to identify, without effort, the pitch of a note. How rare is perfect pitch? If you don’t have it already, can you learn it? What is perfect (or absolute) pitch? What do these musicians have in common? They’re all said to have perfect pitch. Mariah Carey, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Mozart, Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix, and Yanni.

D flat major 7 scale