Perfect Pitch and Relative Pitch: What Develops, and by What Age?

In a 2012 survey, Ken’ichi Miyazaki of Niigata University and colleagues gave music students in Japan and Poland an on-site test: name the pitch of a single tone. Students who answered 95% or more correctly made up 30% of the Japanese group and 7% of the Polish group. The students with perfect (absolute) pitch had begun musical training at age 6 or earlier, and on average the Japanese students had started more than two years earlier than the Polish students.

Studies like this come up whenever someone asks “by what age does perfect pitch develop?” In this post I look at how perfect pitch differs from relative pitch, what research has found about age, and a few cautions I would like to pass on to parents.

Two kinds of pitch

Perfect pitch (absolute pitch) is the ability to hear a single tone, with nothing to compare it to, and say “that is an A.”

Relative pitch is the ability to hear how tones relate to each other. You can tell how far the next note went up or down from the first. When you recognize “Do-Re-Mi” as the same tune whether it is sung high or low, that is relative pitch at work.

Most musicians get by without perfect pitch and use relative pitch to make sense of music. Singing, finding a tune you heard on the keyboard, playing along with an accompaniment: nearly all of this depends on the relationships between notes.

What we know about age

The earlier training starts, the more people have perfect pitch

In 2006, Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego and colleagues tested first-year students at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Eastman School of Music in the United States (paper). At both schools, the earlier students had started musical training, the higher the share with perfect pitch. And at each starting age, the share was far higher among students who spoke Mandarin, a tone language in which pitch changes the meaning of words.

In the Miyazaki survey above, too, the students with perfect pitch had started training by age 6.

A report of young children acquiring it through training

In a 2014 paper, Ayako Sakakibara trained 24 children aged 2 to 6 who did not have perfect pitch, using Eguchi’s chord identification method. According to the abstract, every child acquired perfect pitch except two who stopped training. The author concludes that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 can acquire perfect pitch through intentional training.

As far as the abstract shows, though, this is a report that follows the training process, not an experiment comparing trained children with untrained ones. It is also a record of families who kept up daily training, which is worth keeping in mind.

Some adults learned it too

In a study by Wong and colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, adults trained at naming pitches for 12 to 40 hours. Many improved considerably, and 6 of the 43 participants reached 90% accuracy or better across all twelve pitches. So it is not quite true that perfect pitch can never be learned after childhood.

Why “by what age” has no clear answer

From these studies, I think we can say this much: people who start early are more likely to have perfect pitch, there are cases of young children acquiring it through training, and some adults improve a lot as well.

The research does not draw a clear line after which it is too late. The definition of perfect pitch also differs from study to study. I would not take a single age figure from these studies as a reason to hurry.

Cautions if you aim for perfect pitch

It does not replace relative pitch

In a 1993 study by Miyazaki, listeners identified melodic intervals (the distance between two notes). Some listeners with perfect pitch did well in C major but became less accurate and slower in F-sharp major and in an out-of-tune E major. Listeners without perfect pitch did equally well in every key. Miyazaki concluded that some people with perfect pitch lean on it even where a task calls for relative pitch.

Perfect pitch is a useful ability, but it is not the whole of how we hear music. I think of relative pitch as something everyone needs, and perfect pitch as something that can help if you have it.

If it stops being fun, it defeats the purpose

Training to name single tones assumes a little practice every day. If a child is pushed to keep going when they do not want to, they may come to dislike listening itself. To me, a child who keeps liking music matters more.

Things to try at home

You do not need special training to work on listening at home.

• Sing. Sing the same song in a high voice and a low voice. The child hears that it is still the same song when the relationships stay the same.
• Find a note by ear. An adult plays a note and the child looks for it on the keyboard. If they press a different key, listen together to whether it is higher or lower.
• Compare two notes. Play two notes in a row and answer “up,” “down,” or “the same.”

In all of these, I think careful listening matters more than getting the answer right.

For listening practice

Kinder Piano is a piano app for iPhone and iPad for children from about age 3 to the early years of primary school. I made it for my 4-year-old daughter. Its ear training has nine levels. They move from finding the key that matches a note, to echoing two or three notes, to finding the next note after a starting C, to picking out notes played together as a chord. All of them use only white-key notes.

Levels that compare a note with a starting C are practice in hearing with relative pitch. After a wrong answer, the child can replay the sound as many times as they like.

All 21 nursery songs are free, the first classical piece and the first ear training level are free, and free play and MIDI connection are free too. A one-time purchase opens the rest of the classical pieces and every ear training level. There are no ads and no subscription.

When to start is in What Age Should a Child Start Piano?, and what to do when practice turns into a fight is in When Your Child Refuses to Practice Piano.