If you have perfect pitch, your brain looks different!

But, we don’t yet know how it (your brain) functions differently to result in the ability to identify a pitch individually. In the research, perfect pitch, which is a commonly used term, is referred to as absolute or AP pitch. Researchers have known for sometime that the brain structures (parts) of a person with absolute pitch has specific areas that are identified as unique or different. However, they don’t know  how those structural differences might function or connect in equally unique or specific ways.

Here is a good definition of perfect/absolute pitch from the abstract:

“Absolute pitch (AP), the ability of some musicians to precisely identify and name musical tones in isolation, is associated with a number of gross morphological changes in the brain, but the fundamental neural mechanisms underlying this ability have not been clear.”

Now here is the significance of this particular study. Basically, there is a area of the auditory processing system, the one that processes broad frequency tuning, that could be the start of our understanding the neural mechanisms underpinning perfect/absolute pitch.

“Absolute pitch (AP), the ability of some musicians to precisely identify and name musical tones in isolation, is associated with a number of gross morphological changes in the brain, but the fundamental neural mechanisms have not been clear. Our study shows that AP musicians have significantly larger volume in early auditory cortex than non-AP musicians and non-musician controls and that this increased volume is primarily devoted to broad-frequency tuning. We conclude that AP musicians are likely able to exploit increased ensemble representations to encode and identify frequency.”

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