Perfect pitch is not at all a miracle available to the elite. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be born with perfect pitch - you can develop it, just like you can learn to speak or read.
Absolute ear for music is the ability of a person to determine the pitch of a sound without resorting to comparing it with another sound of a known pitch. In addition to absolute, there is also a relative ear for music, which is understood as the ability to determine the intervals between sounds and thus determine the pitch of a sound relative to another, with a known frequency. At the same time, the majority of people who are professionally or amateurishly involved in music possess relative pitch, and absolute pitch even among musicians is found no more often than in 9% of cases.
A wonderful gift?
Such a rarity of absolute hearing for many centuries recorded it in the category of "innate gifts", a kind of miraculous ability that cannot be developed - just be born. Many hold this point of view to this day. In fact, everything is completely different - absolute pitch can and should be developed.
The process of developing this ability can be conditionally compared with teaching a child to speak or read. Once born, a person can neither speak nor write. Over time, listening to the speech of the adults around him, he begins to isolate individual words from it, later - he learns to pronounce them, at first indistinctly, then everything is cleaner. In the same way, learning to read, the child learns to separate sounds from speech, correlate them with letters, and reproduce. The same thing happens with hearing - having set such a goal, a person can learn to determine the frequency of sound with high accuracy and call it in a certain way - fa, do, sol, re, la. There is no miracle in this - only diligence and dedication.
Is perfect pitch available to everyone?
However, the ability to accurately determine the pitch (or frequency, if you rely on the physics) of a sound without comparison with other sounds is quite rare. The reason is that for the development of absolute hearing, some abilities are still desirable, first of all, good sensitivity to sounds. People who initially have such sensitivity will be able to acquire perfect pitch faster than those who have "stepped on the ear". For the development of this ability, it is also useful mainly to auditory perception, auditory memory (as opposed to visual or kinesthetic). Nevertheless, even a person who is initially insensitive to sounds can learn to more or less accurately identify notes by ear - it just takes him much more time, patience and training.
