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Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references. It is commonly believed that only individuals with special genetic makeup and early musical training within the critical period can develop AP. Recent studies have begun to challenge the critical period notion by showing the possibility of AP acquisition in adults. However, the learning effects could be attributed to learning of pitch height instead of chroma, extended working memory, relative pitch strategies, chance under repeated attempts, pre-existing AP abilities and/or specific cognitive profiles. An 8-week online computerized training program was designed to address these concerns and clarify learnability of AP in adulthood. Twelve musicians on average spent 21.4 h completing 15,327 training trials. By the end of the training, they learned to name an average of 7.08 pitches (ranging from 3 to 12) at an accuracy of 90% or above and within a response-time (RT) window of 1,305–2,028 ms. After training, pitch-naming accuracy was significantly improved by 128.1% (from .139 to .317) and size of error reduced by 42.7% (from 2.62 to 1.50 semitones) for the trained timbre, which generalized partially to an untrained timbre. Overall, results provide more convincing evidence for the learnability of AP judgment in adulthood beyond the critical period, similar to most perceptual and cognitive abilities.

Importantly, while learning AP in childhood is possible with months or years of practice (Crozier, 1997; Miyazaki & Ogawa, 2006; Sakakibara, 2014), it is considered impossible in adulthood with no “convincing success observed” in repeated attempts in the past decades (p.434, Bachem, 1940; p.29, Levitin & Rogers, 2005; p.358, Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). However, the dichotomous view has been challenged by empirical findings that showed a considerable number of musicians with an above-chance performance similar to that of these two participants but far from that of “true” AP (Bermudez & Zatorre, 2009; Van Hedger et al., 2020; Vanzella & Schellenberg, 2010). Another reason to consider these two participants as outliers comes from the perspective that the critical period represents “a central tendency, an average age at which individuals pass through a particular developmental stage” (p.106, Levitin & Zatorre, 2003).

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