Gift or Gained? The Neuroscience of Perfect Pitch

By Special Guest Writer Angela W.

For musicians, the ability to understand and manipulate pitch is fundamental to their playing. Without a strong grasp of pitch-based concepts such as melody, harmony, or variation, performances would fall apart. A knowledge of pitch is absolutely essential, possibly the most important skill to master for any musician. As such, great prestige is assigned to perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch (AP). 

Broadly, AP is the “ability to identify [a] pitch [...] without using a reference tone.”¹ For example, upon hearing a chord, a musician might identify the notes within as D, F#, and A. AP can be vastly beneficial for the study of music theory, as well as self-guided practice (e.g., while “pitch correcting” or “tuning” one’s own playing). However, the neural correlates of this incredible ability have only been sparsely studied. 

Though there has been evidence to suggest that AP is heritable to an extent, its trajectory is complicated by the presence of early musical training. It is difficult to conclude that musical training within a sensitive period leads to the development of AP, since on an individual basis, there is no way to determine whether the subject might still have had AP without such training. 

At a neurological level, musicians with AP have demonstrated higher activation in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, as well as greater asymmetry of the planum temporale, compared with musicians without AP and non-musician controls.¹ Despite this, the extent to which genetics are involved in the development of AP remains poorly determined. 

Does early musical training produce functional changes in neurology, or does it simply “trigger” features that were already there (i.e., inherited)? While this question remains yet to be answered, the proof surrounding it paints a powerful picture: making music is not only a cognitive practice, but may even change the very fabric of musicians’ brains. 

Citations

• Wilson, S. J., Lusher, D., Wan, C. Y., Dudgeon, P., & Reutens, D. C. (2009). The neurocognitive components of pitch processing: insights from absolute pitch. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 19(3), 724–732. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhn121