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Many of you are familiar with some of my writing on early childhood education. Here, someone I’ve chatted with explains at some length her process for helping her children acquire absolute pitch. This is something possible for almost everyone during a narrow window of time; it and similar time-sensitive skills are worth serious consideration if you are a parent of a young child.
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While I acknowledge that these are separable, in practice I would be very surprised to meet a child with pitch training who lacked musical training, while all musical training contains at least some passive pitch training (hearing and naming notes, even if not for specific purposes of pitch training). Everyone I know who has AP actually discovered that they had AP, without ever deliberately developing it--they were just musically trained as children, and one day learned they could do something that others could not. (This is often the case with children--they typical-mind so strongly that they often don't even realize they have special abilities, or disabilities, like poor vision or hearing.)
So limiting the sample in this case to musically-trained children is, I think, a way of making the strongest case for "lots of people can do this." In the general population absolute pitch seems pretty rare. This study suggests that estimates of AP prevalence should be revised dramatically upward--to 4%. (It also may be linked in some way to autism.)
Well, again--if we could just put some children into Skinner boxes... Seriously, though, as with all the gifts of childhood, the nature/nurture debate is difficult to navigate given that most children are not raised in especially intentional ways. APs prevalence in musically trained children versus children without such training clearly suggests, to my mind, that it is in fact a skill--kinda.
I agree, but I think part of what prevents this from happening, aside from the fact that many children receive no deliberate education prior to showing up at preschool, is that absolute pitch is a surprisingly low-utility ability, far less useful than, say, color vision. I once had a long conversation with a friend of mine about trying to leverage his AP into a mnemonic device, or a career in some kind of audio production, and his position was that it was mostly just a party trick--but also often annoying, because he notices when people transpose his favorite songs into different keys, and finds it jarring. I may have been a bit maudlin about how cool it was that he could literally enjoy music on a level that was beyond my ability, and he was like--eh, I guess. Even my piano tuner said, "it might be useful if we didn't have tuning machines... but we do."
Possibly my friend and I are just insufficiently inventive! But I have yet to actually meet someone with AP who finds it nearly as amazing and interesting a subject as I find it to be.
Yeah, one of my friends with absolute pitch reports the same thing—but relative pitch really is an incredibly useful skill for music, and the former entails the latter. I think those who have it and dismiss it often do so in comparison to “a generally good musical ear” and not something like my own near-tone-deafness and total inability to carry a tune when singing without accompaniment (this despite training early-ish on piano and becoming quite competent at it).
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