Perfect vs Relative Pitch
One is rare and hard to acquire, the other can be trained by anyone. Why relative pitch deserves most of a musician's ear-training time.
Perfect (absolute) pitch is the rare ability to name or sing a note with no reference note to go on; relative pitch is the far more common ability to identify notes by their distance from one another. Relative pitch is the one every musician can train, and for most music it is the more useful skill.
Two different ways of hearing notes
Absolute pitch is the rare ability to name a note heard in isolation, or to sing a given note from memory, without a reference. The University of Chicago describes it as the ability to identify any musical note by name after hearing it, without reference to other notes. In contrast, relative pitch is the ability to identify notes in relation to each other: to hear that two notes are a perfect fifth apart, for example, or to work out the next note of a melody once you know the first.
Perfect pitch is real, but rare. The commonly cited estimate is about one person in 10,000, although that figure is widely repeated rather than firmly established, and studies of music students have found higher rates. Relative pitch, by contrast, is common among musicians, and both abilities allow people to play by ear.
Can adults learn perfect pitch?
Perfect pitch was long thought to be present from birth, or at least developed through early musical exposure, and impossible to acquire after childhood. Research from the University of Surrey challenges that belief. In the Surrey study, 12 adult musicians were trained online for eight weeks and learned to identify an average of seven musical pitches with 90% accuracy or higher, and two of them matched the performance of people with natural absolute pitch across all twelve pitches. Earlier training research at the University of Chicago reached a similar conclusion: some adults could learn to identify and remember notes over an eight-week programme, and the best learners kept the skill months later.
That said, these studies involved small groups, and not every participant got there. Even if adult musicians can learn perfect pitch, most students should probably still prioritise their time. That's because for most aspects of music, from playing in a band to improvising or singing in harmony, hearing notes relative to each other matters more than naming single notes perfectly. Relative pitch is noticing that G sits a fifth above C, or that a tune has just moved up a step.
How to train relative pitch
Interval recognition is the practice most closely linked to relative pitch. The core idea is not to name each note in isolation, but to hear how far apart any two notes are. Begin with a few intervals, such as major and minor thirds, played or sung, and link each one to the opening of a song you know well. Sing back short phrases played on a piano or app, then check them. Solfège, the do-re-mi system, trains you to hear each note's place in the scale, which is exactly what relative pitch needs.
Over time, relative pitch improves with this kind of short, regular practice at any age, and the gains show up in ear training, improvisation, playing by ear and transcribing songs. Ten minutes a day of intervals and singing back is a sensible place to start, leaving room for the rest of your practice.
