The Current - Perfect pitch can be learned, new research suggests

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

New research suggests you can actually learn how to recognize a musical note just by hearing it, challenging the conventional wisdom that you either have perfect pitch, or you don’t. We talk to researcher Yetta Kwailing Wong and take a pop quiz to test our ears.

Whose take do you trust during this election cycle? I'm Rosemary Barton, CBC's chief political correspondent. At Issue is also where I listen and learn from the very best. Chantelle Bair, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj. They are political heavyweights. They write and talk about politics for Canada's biggest publications and broadcasters, and they help shape the national conversation. So if you're looking for people who can connect the dots,

cut through the spin, check out the At Issue podcast every week, wherever you listen. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. All right, a bit of a pop quiz. Can you name what note is playing here on the cello? Let's hear it again. All right, what about this one?

Somebody somewhere is going, I got it, I got it, I got it. If you are one of those people in the world who can recognize notes like that, right away, you might have what's called perfect or absolute pitch. You'd have known that first note was an A, the second one was an F. Up until recently, conventional wisdom in the world of music was that you either have perfect pitch or you don't. It's not something you can really learn. Well now, new research from the University of Surrey

are casting doubt on that. Yatokweiling Wang is a lecturer in psychology there. Yatokweiling Wang, hello. Hello. What exactly, I explained a little bit about that, but what exactly is perfect pitch? Perfect pitch is not a very precise term. Usually, technically we prefer to call it absolute pitch.

Okay. It refers to the ability. Just like you said, you hear a tone, and then whether you can name the pitch name of this tone, if you can. And it's typically very easy for those who can. And if you can do that accurately, you do have absolute pitch. How common is it for somebody to have absolute pitch? Oh, it is supposed to be pretty rare. There are different statistics. The estimation could be as rare as one in 10,000, although this is not very well evidenced, presumably. And recent research show it could be from, you know, seven to 50% of the students in music conservatory, but in general, it's relatively rare.

So if you have it, you're one of the lucky ones. That's what people think, yeah, I agree. I mean, but the belief was that you either have it or you don't. Why did you want to look into whether it's possible to learn absolute pitch? It's because I regard myself as somewhere in the middle. When I was young, I did learn some musical instruments

and I played with this kind of exercise and I found myself sort of accurate, but a lot of time not accurate, but I'm well above chance. So I know I'm somewhere in middle and I'm way below what's expected from so-called adler pitch possessors. So I'm better than chance, not as good as those ones. So who am I according to the theory? I just thought there has to be something wrong. So I wanted to look at it more. Okay, can we test you? I mean, you said that you are above average.

You're not guessing, but you have something. Can I test you? Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna play something and I want you to tell me what the notes are, all right? Here we go. B flat. Do you wanna try it again? I think it's a B flat. Do you want to try it again?

I think it's a B flat. I'm going to play it one more time. That's an A. It's an A. Okay, I'm going to play you one more note. Have a listen to this. Okay, I'm gonna play you one more note. Have a listen to this. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Do you know what that is?

It's like an E to me. It's an E, you are correct. If I had a buzzer, I would do the buzzer to announce that you're correct. Okay, one more, hold on. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Sounds like a C to me. It is a C. Congratulations. Two out of three.

That's pretty good. I would have got none. So you're better than me at the very least. Tell me more about how you went through this experiment. How did you figure out whether people could actually learn absolute pitch? We designed an eight-week online training program and we recruited some musicians who said who really want to develop this absolute pitch skills and then we make them do the training for on average 21 hours and they completed like 15,000 rounds of pitch naming practices. So it requires real hard work.

And then we tested their pitch naming performance before and after the training. And these are all done online, but then we did a lot of things to make sure that they literally can't cheat. So that included how we used online meeting, like we had had their consent to videotape what they're doing during the test so we know they are not looking for other cues or other information, they don't have a tuning fork in their hand, they don't have a phone in their hand that will just show them the answer etc. So we did quite careful measurement to find out how well they can perform the task and how much improvement they've got.

And we observed people improve a lot really. After the training, they could name seven pitches out of 12, which is pretty good, I would say. That's a lot to learn. And some of them got to the end, so they could name all 12 pitches very accurately with a performance level that is comparable to what you would observe among the real world absolute pitch possessors.

So we are pretty happy and encouraged about this finding. And we thought it showed that this skill can be learned among adults, as long as you have the right way of learning. They had to do 15,000 of those tests that I did with you? Yeah, yes. That's a lot. A lot. That's like 21 hours on average. It's a very hard process. I'm not joking. There's a reason why a lot of people assume that it can't be learned because it is so difficult. That's why it took really passionate

and committed learners to try to get through these difficulties. Of course, there are elements in our design of the training program to encourage you know, encourage them to keep doing and, you know, to design the task in a certain way so they don't waste their learning time in doing something that is not productive or not helping. Whenever they work hard, they're trying to learn the really helpful skill, I would say. So for example, they can't rely on relative pitch, which is something much easier, but very similar to disability.

But if you spend a lot of time trying to do relative pitch, you're not going to learn anything about the absolute pitch and you will fail in our final test after training. How did you rule out people who were just kind of guessing and getting lucky in their guessing, right? Because there's only a handful of notes, a handful, like there's a fixed number of notes that it could be. And so people might think, well, it might be an E and they throw their lot in and they say that that's an E. How do you rule out lucky guessing? First of all, we make them

really fast. So if they are not confident enough, if they are just, you know, hesitating, thinking about whether it is an E or F, the time window for the response could have been gone. So they really need to be fast. And they got to the point that is almost intuitive. And the second thing is that we at the very end of the training, when they got through the so-called last training level of the training, we made them pass the last training level four times in a row. It just can't be lucky because it would be very, very lucky

that the chance would be really rare. You're a psychologist. I mean, you studied psychology. What do you think's going on in our brain that would allow us to learn something like absolute pitch? I think it represents the very wonderful ability for our brain to pick up the perceptual information in the environment.

The human perceptual systems are highly adaptable. We learn to detect what's in the environment. We learned to tune our system to become sharper and faster and more accurate when we see the same information, same stimulus in the environment again and again. This plasticity holds well into the adulthood, so we keep seeing this kind of ability to learn and adjust our system according to what's available in the environment. To me, absolute pitch is kind of almost like an exception because there are only 12 names to learn. How come it's so difficult? And it can trick a professional musician who's been spending like 20 years playing

violin every day and night and they still can't tell what tone they are playing. It seems to me just crazy. So that's one of the major reasons why I got into this area and decided to run the training studies to actually test it. I feel like the reason why we got a different result is really the more effective learning experience that we design into training. It's really not magic. It's really a better design combined with passionate and very committed

learners who are determined to get through the difficulty. But there's a lesson there, beyond perfect or absolute pitch. I mean, it would be nice to have absolute pitch. But the belief for a lot of people is that there are certain things that you can learn and maybe there are things that are just innate, that if you don't have that, you're not gonna be able to learn it. And I suppose the lesson more broadly

might be that we are capable, even in adulthood, of learning new things, right? Yeah, I think so. I can hear stories about similar things other than absolute pitch, right? Some think that they won't be a good musician if they start music lessons later in life, or other people would say, oh, I'm not going to learn the native accent if I pick up a new language later in my life. So there are a lot of these ideas going on, going around in us and I think we have to differentiate between the

things that are difficult from things that are impossible. Like when we feel that something is difficult, it doesn't mean that it is impossible. It may just mean that we need to find the right way to learn and we just need to believe that with some hard work we can get it through. And you know what? When we published this paper, I got a lot of emails from musicians all over the world and I got one repeated story which is, thank you for telling me that it is possible to learn absolute pitch in adulthood. I wanted to learn it so much I tried tried hard, but then it is difficult and I thought it is impossible anyways and I gave up. Now you give me a reason to try it again. I think sometimes it is just ourselves getting frustrated and then we thought,

okay, maybe it is not for us or it is not possible anyways and then we stop. it is not possible anyways. And then we stop. I hope the story would be positive in a way that something like absolute pitch in which people believe that it just can't be learned in adulthood. It's not possible, right? If you have the right method

and the right learning experience. That's a good lesson for people. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. Yeta Kweiling Wong, it's good to speak with you. Thank you very much. Yeah, bye-bye. Yeta Kweiling Wong is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Surrey.