is this something you can learn or are just born with ?Nature or nurture?Many people have believed that musical ability itself is an inborn talent.[25] Some scientists currently believe absolute pitch may have an underlying genetic basis and are trying to locate genetic correlates;[26] most believe that the acquisition of absolute pitch requires early training during a critical period of development, regardless of whether or not a genetic predisposition toward development exists.[27] The "unlearning theory," first proposed by Abraham,[28] has recently been revived by developmental psychologists who argue that every person possesses absolute pitch (as a mode of perceptual processing) when they are infants, but that a shift in cognitive processing styles (from local, absolute processing to global, relational processing) causes most people to unlearn it; or, at least, causes children with musical training to discard absolute pitch as they learn to identify musical intervals.[29] Additionally, any nascent absolute pitch may be lost simply by the lack of reinforcement or lack of clear advantages in most activities in which the developing child is involved. An unequivocal resolution to the ongoing debate would require controlled experiments that are both impractical and unethical.Researchers have been trying to teach absolute pitch ability for more than a century,[30] and various commercial absolute-pitch training courses have been offered to the public since the early 1900s.[31] It has been shown possible to learn the naming of tones later in life, although some consider this skill not to be true absolute pitch.[32] No training method for adults has yet been shown to produce abilities comparable to naturally-occurring absolute pitch.[33]For children aged 2-4, however, recent observations have shown a certain method of music education[34] to apparently be successful in training absolute pitch,[35] but the same method has also been shown to fail with students 5 years and older, suggesting that a developmental change in perception occurs which favors relative learning over absolute and thus supporting the theory of the "critical period" for learning absolute pitch.[36]
