New Scientist - Pitch perfect

The uncanny ability to recognise any note has long been associated with musical genius. But the real mystery is why we can't all do it…

By the 1990s, however, researchers began to realise that people without musical training may also have some of the prerequisites for absolute pitch. Cognitive psychologist and musician Daniel Levitin at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, provided some of the most convincing evidence for this when he asked a group of non-musicians to learn a tone from a tuning fork. A week later, half of them were asked to pick out "their" tone from a selection, while the other half were asked to sing it…

The brains of people with absolute pitch "may be somewhat different to begin with, filtering information in a slightly different way to the average", says Patrick Bermudez, also at McGill University. If you then expose that brain to a musical education at a very young age, he says, the result would be absolute pitch. The hunt is now on for other traits that might lead to the pitch template...