Relative pitch vs perfect pitch: what the research says

Play a single note on a piano and ask someone to name it. Most people can’t, and in the US and Europe, where the ability is rare, neither can most musicians. Play a note first, tell them it’s C, and many musicians can name the next one. The first skill is absolute pitch, usually called perfect pitch. The second is relative pitch.

This article covers what each skill is, how rare perfect pitch is and what it goes with, what studies have found about adults learning to name notes, and how to practice. There are sounds to play from the app’s piano and two short drills.

Two ways to name a note

Relative pitch is naming a note by comparing it with one you know. You hear a reference, hear the interval to the next note, and get the second note from the interval. Wikipedia gives a simple example: if do and fa are played and you know the first is do, you can name the second.

Absolute pitch, often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a pitch with no reference at all. It isn’t sharper hearing: people who have it typically hear no more keenly than anyone else. It works more like sorting each note into one of twelve categories, closer to seeing that a color is blue than to measuring a frequency.

Here is relative pitch at its simplest. Each sound plays the same reference note, C3, which you can call do, then a second note:

The syllables are movable do: do is whatever the reference note is, so the same syllables work from any starting note. Many ear-training classes use solfège this way to teach relative pitch.

How rare is perfect pitch?

Nobody knows exactly. The figure you’ll see most often is 1 in 10,000 people, but Wikipedia’s article notes that the frequency in the general population isn’t known and that this number may not be accurate. A 2019 review by Jill Carden and Tony Cline found that studies indicate a prevalence of at least 4% among music students.

What it goes with is clearer. In 2006, Diana Deutsch and colleagues tested first-year students at two conservatories: at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, students who all spoke Mandarin, a tone language in which pitch helps carry the meaning of words, and at the Eastman School of Music in the US, students who spoke no tone language. The test was 36 piano notes, each more than an octave from the one before so that relative pitch would be of little help, and the bar for absolute pitch was at least 85% correct. As Deutsch reported, the share of students who passed was:

Two patterns show. In both schools, the earlier students had started lessons, the more of them had absolute pitch. And at every starting age, far more of the Mandarin speakers had it. A 2009 study by the same group, at an American conservatory, found the language effect again. Among students of East Asian heritage, those who spoke a tone language very fluently scored significantly higher on a test of absolute pitch than those who spoke one fairly fluently or not fluently, and the non-fluent group scored no differently from Caucasian students who spoke only nontone languages. Early lessons were linked to better scores as well, independently of language.

Deutsch and her colleagues suggest that the potential for absolute pitch may be universal, realized when infants learn to link pitches with verbal labels during the critical period for learning features of their native language. Genes may play a part too. These are associations seen in music students; they can’t tell you what would have happened to any one person.

Can adults learn to name notes?

For a long time the answer looked like no. Researchers have tried to teach absolute pitch in the lab for more than a century, and Wikipedia notes that as of 2005 no adult had been documented acquiring it. Three recent training studies complicate that picture:

• Van Hedger, Heald and Nusbaum (2019) trained six adults for eight weeks, about 32 hours in all. On the tests used, two of the six ended up as fast and accurate as people who developed absolute pitch in childhood, and they still were about four months later. Most of the others improved only modestly. The authors spell out the limits: the six were a small convenience sample with unusually good auditory memory, all with some musical training; the two who succeeded had started music lessons at 6 and 7 and were already ahead of the others before training; and the sample is too small to say what share of adults could do the same.
• Wong, Lui, Yip and Wong (2020) ran three experiments in which adults practiced naming pitches in a computerized, game-like program for 12 to 40 hours, starting with three pitches and working up to twelve. Six of the 43 participants, 14%, learned to name all twelve with 90% accuracy or better, comparable to absolute pitch as the research literature defines it, and their improvement lasted at least one to three months.
• Wong, Cheung, Ngan and Wong (2025) gave twelve musicians an eight-week online program, 21.4 hours of training on average. By the end they could name an average of 7.08 pitches with 90% accuracy or better within a set response time; the range ran from 3 pitches to all 12.

Put together: adults can get better at naming notes without a reference, some of them much better, and a minority of the people trained in these studies reached the level of those with absolute pitch, after many hours of focused practice. The studies don’t show that most people will get there, and nobody yet knows how to tell in advance who will.

Relative pitch is what most musicianship runs on

Absolute pitch isn’t required to perform or compose music well. Relative pitch, on the other hand, is common among musicians, especially those used to playing by ear, and a precise relative pitch is a constant among good musicians. It’s what lets you sing a melody in tune by pitching each note from the one before, play along with other musicians, and follow the intervals of a tune whatever key it’s in. And it can be developed through ear training.

A few ways to practice it:

• Start with a few notes that are far apart. Do, mi and sol, the notes of the major chord on do, make a good first set.
• Sing the reference before you answer, and keep it in your head while the next note plays.
• Add notes a few at a time: re and fa, then the rest of the major scale, then the notes in between.

In this drill the first note of each sound is do. Name the second: do again, mi or sol. The reference isn’t always the same note, so you have to hear the interval rather than remember a pitch.

The two note paths in the app

Earstep has a path for each skill.

Notes from a reference trains relative pitch. Each session picks one reference note between C3 and B3 and names it on screen. Every question plays that reference, then a second note at or above it within an octave, and you name the second note on a dial of note names. The path starts with “Do, mi and sol” and grows a few notes at a time, through “The major scale”, to “Every note”.

Perfect pitch trains naming a note with no reference at all. Each question plays a single note, anywhere from C3 to B5, so how high or low it sounds gives nothing away, and you name it. The path starts with “C or F♯”, two notes half an octave apart, and adds a few at a time until “Every note”. That shape, a few pitches first and more as you go, is like the training in Wong and colleagues’ 2020 study.

Try the first level. The drill plays one of the two, in one of three octaves, with nothing to compare it with.

To be plain about what this path does: it trains naming notes without a reference. It doesn’t promise perfect pitch. The studies above are the reason. Some adults who trained reached that level and most didn’t, and no one can yet say in advance who will. Relative pitch is different: it’s the skill most musicians rely on, and it can be developed through ear training.

Sources

• Absolute pitch, Wikipedia: the definition, what is and isn’t known about how common it is (including the 2019 review by Carden and Cline), how it differs from keener hearing, its links with tone languages, early training and genes, and the history of training studies.
• Relative pitch, Wikipedia: the definition and the do and fa example, how common it is among musicians, and that ear training develops it.
• Solfège, Wikipedia: movable do, in which each syllable names a degree of the key rather than a fixed pitch.
• Deutsch, Henthorn, Marvin and Xu (2006), “Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: the two conservatories, the test and the findings.
• Deutsch (2006), “The enigma of absolute pitch”, Acoustics Today: the percentages by age of first lessons.
• Deutsch, Dooley, Henthorn and Head (2009), “Absolute pitch among students in an American music conservatory”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: tone-language fluency and absolute pitch.
• Van Hedger, Heald and Nusbaum (2019), “Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults”, PLOS ONE: the eight-week study, its results and its limits.
• Wong, Lui, Yip and Wong (2020), “Is it impossible to acquire absolute pitch in adulthood?”, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics: three training experiments with 43 adults.
• Wong, Cheung, Ngan and Wong (2025), “Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood”, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: eight weeks of online training with twelve musicians.