Perfect Pitch isn't Flawless: The Musically Gifted Failed to Notice Out-of-Tune Notes

Do you have perfect pitch? You may not be as musically flawless as you might think. Researchers have found that people who possess this rare ability failed to notice a gradual change in pitch while listening to music.

Only about one in 10,000 people have absolute pitch, the ability to accurately identify a note simply by hearing it. These gifted individuals are frequently able to replicate a song on a piano simply by hearing it. In fact, several well-known composers have been assumed to possess absolute pitch, including Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Handel.

Yet this latest study seems to show that "perfect" pitch may not be so perfect. The researchers recruited 27 people who were identified as having absolute pitch by standard tests. They were then split into two groups. While both groups were tested on identifying notes at the beginning of the experiment, their testing then diverged.

The first group listened to Johann Brahms' Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. About 15 minutes into the piece, the music was detuned to become flatter at the rate of two cents a minute, which is the tonal distance between two notes. By the end of the piece, the pitch had been detuned by 33 cents.

Surprisingly, though, none of the listeners detected this change. The group was then tested in the same way they had been at the beginning of the session. The researchers found that the volunteers actually identified out-of-tune notes from the newly detuned music as being in tune. The tuned notes, in contrast, were reported as being slightly out of tune.

The researchers then conducted another test composed of only five notes, called phase music. This test also found that people with absolute pitch changed what they determined was in tune after listening to slightly out-of-tune music.

"Listening to detuned music significantly shifted the perceived intonation and generalized to notes that had not been heard in the detuned music," said Howard Nusbaum, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This is further evidence of how adaptable even the adult mind is for learning new skills. We are finding out more and more about how our brains are equipped to learn new things at any age and not limited by abilities previously thought to be available only from the time of birth."

Currently, the researchers are experimenting with people who have more limited pitch identification abilities. They're seeing if these abilities can be improved, which may give even more insight into how the human brain works.

The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.