Absolute Pitch (AP) is the ability that some people have to perceive or produce a specific musical tone without any reference to an external standard. There are at least two important cognitive abilities related to absolute pitch: auditory memory and the ability to assign tones to the auditory stimulus, a skill that only some people possess. Early estimates suggested that 1 in 10,000 people had absolute pitch, but these estimates have since been significantly revised to 1 in 1,500.
Several studies published in high-impact journals have suggested the existence of a genetic basis for AP. For example, see the segregation study by Profita and Bidder (Perfect pitch. Am J Med Genet 1988, 29(4):763-771), the study of carriers by Baharloo et al. (Absolute pitch: an approach for identification of genetic and nongenetic components. Am J Hum Genet 1998, 62(2):224-231), or the study by Drayna et al. (Genetic correlates of musical pitch recognition in humans. Science 2001, 291(5510):1969-1972) conducted on monozygotic and dizygotic twins in relation to their abilities to detect discordant notes in popular melodies.
Finally, AP has a higher prevalence in patients affected by Williams syndrome (Martinez-Castilla et al: Do individuals with Williams syndrome possess absolute pitch? Child Neuropsychol 2013, 19(1):78-96) and autism spectrum disorders (Yu et al: Pitch Processing in Tonal-Language-Speaking Children with Autism: An Event-Related Potential Study. J Autism Dev Disord 2015, 45(11):3656-3667; Heaton P: Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 2003, 44(4):543-551), with very high prevalence rates of up to 30%. It is also known that AP is somehow related to synesthesia. In neurophysiology, synesthesia is understood as the joint assimilation of several types of sensations from different senses in the same perceptual act. In relation to music, a person with synesthesia has the ability to feel (not just associate) notes and tonalities with different colors (“hearing colors”).
