When you strum a guitar or press a piano key, can you name the exact note you hear? For most people, the answer is a resounding no. Most people need a reference tone or a tuner to identify notes. Still, some gifted individuals, such as Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys) and Charlie Puth, can accurately identify notes without help. This rare skill, absolute pitch, can make learning songs, playing music, and tuning instruments easier! But how do you learn it?

You may have heard of the critical period for language learning, an age range in which kids need to learn their first language in order to become fluent. Researchers used to believe there was also a critical period for learning absolute pitch! If you didn’t get enough musical training to learn absolute pitch by age 5, you would never be able to learn it.

If you’re a grown-up who wants to learn absolute pitch, don’t be discouraged. In their latest research published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Yetta Kwailing Wong*, Leo Y. T. Cheung, Vince S. H. Ngan*, and Alan C.-N. Wong* (*pictured below) test whether there really is a critical period for absolute pitch development. The results challenge “the long-held belief that absolute pitch can only be developed for those with special genetic makeup and early musical training.”

The researchers designed a comprehensive absolute pitch training regiment for adults. Participants with extensive musical training indicated their interest in learning absolute pitch and committing to a 25-hour training procedure. During training, participants would listen to a tone and guess its pitch within a certain amount of time. They guessed one tone at a time and received corrective feedback on each of their guesses. Throughout the 8-week training program, participants were gradually introduced to more pitches and were expected to respond more quickly.

The training program would re-introduce participants to pitches they struggled to identify, allowing them to get more practice with more difficult pitches. Participants could also earn rewards during training, making the “studying” feel more like a game. Training got progressively more difficult. Overall, this training aimed to get participants to identify as many tones as possible in the shortest time possible.

While studying, they either listened to piano sounds or guitar sounds. This is important because these instruments’ tones have very different textures (timbres). In the final test, they didn’t receive any feedback or external help, and they were asked to identify pitches from both the guitar and the piano.

As shown in panels B and C in the figure below, this training program improved participants’ pitch naming accuracy, error size, and response time on average. By the end of training, participants could identify an average of 7 pitches with 90% accuracy within approximately 2 seconds! From start to finish, they saw, on average, a 128% increase in pitch identification accuracy and a 43% decrease in error magnitude for the instruments they studied.

But does learning perfect pitch in one instrument translate to the other? Similar results emerged in the instrument that participants did not study: higher pitch identification accuracy, fewer pitch identification errors, and quick pitch identification, as shown in the figure below. So, the absolute pitch developed by this training program generalized to a new, untrained instrument. This highlights that absolute pitch is a skill, and that learning was not simply memorizing the sound-name combinations.

In more musical terms, this study shows that participants could learn to identify pitch in a variety of octaves and timbres. They showed strong, repeatable performance without feedback or external references, highlighting the effectiveness of this training program.

In the words of the authors,

“absolute pitch can be fully developed in adulthood beyond the critical period, similar to most perceptual and cognitive abilities.”

This is exciting news for anyone who wants to learn absolute pitch. You could say practice makes pitch perfect!

Psychonomic Society article featured in this post:

Wong, Y. K., Cheung, L. Y. T., Ngan, V. S. H., & Wong, A. C.-N. (2025). Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02620-2