Absolute Pitch: Practice Makes Perfect,the Earlier the Better

Abstract

Support for the hypothesis that there is a critical period in the development of absolute pitch is largely indirect, consisting of retrospective, biographical analyses. A direct demonstration that the same techniques for acquiring absolute pitch are more effective with immature compared to mature individuals is apparently lacking from the literature. To address this, an experiment comparing A4 reference tone acquisition of pre-school (4-5 years) and adolescent (13-15 years) participants was carried out. At the end of six weeks of training, the pre-school group (N = 12) showed significant improvements in reference tone identification and reproduction, compared both with themselves and with the adolescent group (N = 12). A synthesis of both critical period and unlearning hypotheses is proposed as an integrative framework for the absolute pitch literature.