All babies are born with perfect pitch, a new study suggests.
Psychologists believe this talent is hard-wired into the brains of young infants to help them make sense of their early world. But few adults retain the ability to recognise and identify musical notes without hearing another note as a reference, because it is not particularly useful later in life, unless you are a musician. United States researcher Dr Jenny Saffran told the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco that if humans only had perfect pitch they would not be able to make important generalisations about language. This ability is known as relative pitch and relies on tracking intervals between notes, rather than on their absolute pitch. It allows us, for example, to recognise that Happy Birthday is the same song, even when it is sung at different pitches.