I was aged about nine when my parents proposed me for a Saturday morning school for young musicians. The head of the school was one of my aunts and she explained to me that I would need to sit an audition just like the other children.
A few weeks later, the school’s head of studies, the venerable Dr May, ran me through the usual kinds of aural tests. Then he said, “I would like you to do one more test. Can you sing a B flat for me?” I took a breath to sing the note, but he interrupted. “No, no,” he said. “Think about it carefully. Hum through a tune you know until you come to a B flat.” This seemed a lot of bother for a simple question, but I hummed through a song from Mary Poppins until I came to a B flat and sang that. Dr May played a B flat on the piano. My note was bang on and knowing looks passed between Dr May and my auntie.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just shown that I had perfect — or absolute — pitch. This is the ability to sing a given note out of the air or to name the pitch of a note that one hears without a reference tone. It does not even have to be music. Perfect pitchers can identify the particular note of a car horn or hum of a vacuum cleaner just as well.
At the age of seven, Mozart astonished onlookers when he heard a bell toll or a pocket watch strike and instantly named the note. Of today’s musicians, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Stevie Wonder and Yo-Yo Ma are among those said to have perfect pitch.
Estimates for how many people have the ability run from one to five in 10,000 in the general population, though testing for perfect pitch is difficult, as some knowledge of music — “What is a B flat?” — is necessary. Those who start learning a musical instrument before the age of six are more likely to have it, as are people who speak tonal languages, such as Mandarin.
Some studies have suggested it is possible to acquire perfect pitch as an adult, but I find that hard to believe. I have known some brilliant professional musicians who have failed. Even if practice helps, it seems likely that some genetic component is at work as well. Either you have absolute pitch, or you don’t.
Interest in the subject has intensified as research into how the brain reacts to music has yielded possible ways to treat conditions such as autism, or even Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. For autistic children, this can bring major benefits.
Researchers have compared musicians with perfect pitch to those without. They found that the usual asymmetry where there is a larger left side of the planum temporale, an area of the brain associated with language, was more pronounced in musicians who had perfect pitch. I have this kind of “left-brain” perfect pitch.
The incidence of perfect pitch in autistic children is very high, but in these cases a lack of planum temporale asymmetry is often involved. Markers for such “right-brain” perfect pitch include poor reading comprehension and memorising a piece immediately after hearing it.
The advantages gained from learning the piano are well attested. Case studies include a non-verbal seven-year-old with perfect pitch who went from beating his head with his fist in frustration at his first lesson to displaying improved vocalisation and communication skills that enabled him to move to a mainstream school.
Another child with poor motor planning, who started piano at the age of three, progressed from early temper tantrums to a greater ability to control himself, alongside fluent playing and improved sight-reading.
These examples are taken from Perfect Pitch in the Key of Autism (2016), co-authored by Henny Kupferstein and Susan Rancer. The book provides a detailed guide to teachers and parents on how one-to-one piano lessons can help an autistic child according to their individual needs.
Rancer credits the late Darold Treffert, a specialist in autism spectrum disorders. When she kept trying to categorise people with perfect pitch as low level, medium level, or high level, he said, “No, it’s like autism, it’s a spectrum. I’ve found that these people also have photographic memories, so photographic memory and perfect pitch [go together].”
“Music is an outlet for kids [with autism],” says Rancer, who has been working with autistic children for 50 years. “For them to have a way of expressing themselves is important. Let’s say the kid is non-verbal. How are people going to know that he’s got all this music going on in his head if he’s not able to tell you?”
Learning the piano helps to organise the brain, improving hand-eye co-ordination, motor control, visual tracking and attention span. “The parents come back and tell me their kid’s reading is improved, and so has their writing, because these kids all have low muscle tone in their hands,” Rancer tells me. “I would love to see more testing done with perfect pitch, because it so often gets overlooked. If you tell an autistic kid they have perfect pitch and photographic memory, how do you think they feel? We keep hammering them with ‘You can’t do this’, ‘You can’t do that’. Nobody gives them credit for any gifts they have.”
It is hard not to be moved by Rancer’s account of a non-verbal girl who used to hit out and bite, and could not feel her hands, so she needed weights on them at the piano. Everybody had written her off, but her mother asked for the lessons to be recorded so that the whole family could see what she had been achieving. Although she is non-verbal, she can also sing, like most autistic children, as singing involves a different part of the brain.
Unfortunately, my own experience is that perfect pitch becomes less perfect as one gets older. I hear everything a semitone sharp these days, a decline apparently caused by hairs in the ear becoming brittle, Rancer explains. I miss being a student, when I had a room on the top floor of a house and was the only one who could hear the front doorbell, as I was permanently tuned into its distant F sharp. The other students in the house could not believe it. Well — it was fun while it lasted.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
Read the full article here