I have heard many different views of people that absolute pitch is ONLY acquired by training, ONLY by genetics, by genetics but also possible with training or ONLY both. But what is the truth?
According to Wikipedia, absolute pitch generally implies some or all of the following abilities, achieved without a reference tone:
- Identify by name individual pitches (e.g. F♯, A, G, C) played on various instruments.
- Name the key of a given piece of tonal music.
- Reproduce a piece of tonal music in the correct key days after hearing it.
- Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass.
- Accurately sing a named pitch.
- Name the pitches of common everyday sounds such as car horns and alarms.
Also, the majority of musicians have relative pitch. What is the reason for this? Is it because absolute pitch is WAY harder to train than relative pitch? Or is it simply, because absolute pitch is only genetic?
According to wikipedia, relative pitch implies some or all of the following abilities:
- Determine the distance of a musical note from a set point of reference, e.g. "three octaves above middle C"
- Identify the intervals between given tones, regardless of their relation to concert pitch (A = 440 Hz)
- the skill used by singers to correctly sing a melody, following musical notation, by pitching each note in the melody according to its distance from the previous note. Alternatively, the same skill which allows someone to hear a melody for the first time and name the notes relative to some known reference pitch.