Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults

Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to name any musical note without the aid of a reference note, is thought to develop in an early critical period of development. Although recent research has shown that adults can improve AP abilities in a single training session, the best learners still did not achieve note classification performance comparable to performance of a genuine AP possessor. Here, we demonstrate that genuine AP levels of performance can be trained in eight weeks for some adults, with the best learner passing all measures of AP ability after training and retaining this knowledge for at least four months after training. Alternative explanations of these positive results, such as improving accuracy through adopting a slower, relative pitch strategy, are not supported based on joint analyses of response time and accuracy. The post-training AP assessments were extensive, totaling 204 notes taken from eight different timbres and spanning over seven octaves. These results clearly demonstrate that explicit perceptual training in some adults can lead to AP performance that is behaviorally indistinguishable from AP that results from childhood development. Implications for theories of AP acquisition are discussed.