Very interesting. I can fairly reliably whistle a middle-c but I find it hard to take it from there (other than just the scale in the key of 'C') and picking out absolute pitches by ear is not something that I think I can do reliably. But I did get that tune right on the first try (probably just luck).

I've been doing a ton of relative pitch ear training in the last couple of months and I'm slowly getting better at it but this is very hard work once you get past say P5 and harmonic I find much, much harder than melodic.

edit: nice app from that last link: https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-note

Similarly, I can hit a concert A3 (220Hz) pretty reliably from a cold start, +/-50 cents at worse, and that's just as a lifelong music dabbler. But also I was on depakote for a few months almost two decades ago (no intensive musical training in that time, it's kind of ass for mental clarity). I notice I start to lose my reference whenever I try one of those pitch trainer apps. But I've just started messing around with this pitch practice so I'll see how it goes.

Yeah this is not really evidence at all whatsoever

Extreme practice on 12 tones strictly on piano with hundreds of hours leading to legitimately a much lower performance than someone with 0 training and actual perfect pitch

This is just very, very honed relative pitch

Let's not even mention (1) people with perfect pitch can identify those pitches with ANY timbre. It doesn't matter the source of the sound (2) you can hit a mess of notes together and they pick up all of the notes at once

I have been playing piano for years and this exercise on musictheory.net with the piano pitches I can very quickly identify the notes from the pitch but if you play a violin I don't have a clue which note it is.