Perfect pitch means knowing absolute versus relative frequency.

Most people have no (or very little) sense of absolute pitch - if you get asked to sing / hum / whistle a song, you'll start on any random old note. You'll get the relative pitches right - the change in pitch between notes - but not the absolute.

(To be pedantic, you'll get the ratio of the frequencies approximately right)

Someone with perfect pitch can identify "that note is the A# below middle C", for instance. But not necessarily that accurately. " not the greatest at determining tunings by ear " just means that he's not very good at it. So he may identify that A# as a C or something.

Reply to sibling comment -- perfect pitch can probably be developed with a lot of training (though I imagine it's harder if you're not a kid anymore... for kids, sure -- there are tonal languages, after all!).

But it's honestly not that valuable a skill, even for professional musicians. Having really keen relative pitch (and avoiding slipping pitch if you're singing, for example) would be a much better focus to take.

What is the relationship between perfect pitch and tonal languages? I've dabbled in Mandarin and there relative pitch seems to be good enough. But I realize that there are tonal languages other than Mandarin, and I know nothing about them...

I once saw a study that said perfect pitch is far more prevalent in mandarin speakers due to it being an penal language.

>there are tonal languages, after all!

I believe most (if not all) natural tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute, so you wouldn't need perfect pitch to understand them.

Huh; quite right. I've had it in my head for several years that Thai, at least, was tonal based on absolute pitch; but it looks like that's wrong.

I did turn up that a much larger percentage of people have perfect pitch in populations that speak tonal languages.

Can perfect pitch be developed with a lot of training, or is it really a biological thing?

It's believed to be inborn or somehow acquired spontaneously at a very early age. There are products that claim to teach it, but there's no scientific evidence. Years ago I tried a few, and my impression was that it's mostly snake oil, and even if some rudimentary progress is possible, it's definitely not worth the effort, better expended on improving relative pitch and other aspects of musicianship. Wikipedia agrees:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch "[...] there are no reported cases of an adult obtaining absolute pitch ability through musical training; adults who possess relative pitch, but who do not already have absolute pitch, can learn "pseudo-absolute pitch", and become able to identify notes in a way that superficially resembles absolute pitch. Moreover, training pseudo-absolute pitch requires considerable motivation, time, and effort, and learning is not retained without constant practice and reinforcement."

It is likely some amount of both.

Studies have shown that there is a higher prevalence of people with perfect pitch in countries where tonal languages--languages in which the same series of sounds made with distinct voice pitches can denote entirely different words.

However, the percentage of people with perfect pitch remains tiny, which is not what I would expect if it was due to training alone. It seems like it might be helpful enough for musicians that we'd have turned it into a method by now if training alone reliably produced good results.

I'm fairly certain that it is one of those things you either can hear, or cannot hear - it requires a certain sensitivity in the ear, and not all people have that. Not all people that can hear the difference have trained it to a degree where they're conscious about it, so for some people it's possible.

Around the age of 15, I acquired something an awful lot like perfect pitch: I can identify and (conversely) produce seven particular notes. n=1.