Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

I thought there was a pill you could take to get perfect pitch (assuming absolute and perfect pitch are the same).

https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...

More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem to do better.

It's a very frustrating and difficult to explain phenomenon. I hate to use the oft-used but inaccurate color analogy, but it might be valid in this context. Imagine that everyone around you is fully color-blind, but not yourself. People are amazed that you can tell something is blue just by looking at it. You've had this ability your whole life. But then one day you look at something and report that it's blue, and someone uses their color-analyzer and tells you that it's not blue, it's in fact yellow. And they're right! But it still looks BLUE to you. Something has broken, and you can't explain it to others easily because they can only see gray.

In my first class in college for a music theory course, the first assignment was "memorize A" (440Hz). Surprisingly, after several weeks of playing the tone and matching it verbally, I did learn A. Everything else from there is knowing intervals relative to A (like, C is a minor 3rd above A, or 3 half steps).

Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like "Here Comes the Bride" is a perfect 4th, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th, and so on. There's a whole list at https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-....

I've heard anecdotal reports that absolute pitch training kind of works as an adult, but not as well. If you practice enough you can start to identify notes correctly, but if you don't keep up with training, the ability goes away.

440 is actually an international standard, not American.

>In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency was hard to generate electronically with standard electronic clocks. Eventually, in 1955, the standard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).*

* https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theo...