Perfect Pitch

Quite by accident, I discovered that my autistic son has perfect pitch.

Perfect, or absolute pitch is when a person can sing or play a note without any external reference. For example, if I ask my son to sing a C note, he can do it exactly.

This is very rare in neurotypical people, but autistic people are 500 times more likely to have perfect pitch than the general population.

The way I understand it is that he sees musical notes similar to the way we see colours. We wouldn't confuse blue with red in the same way that he would not confuse a C with an E.

It was quite odd how I found out he had perfect pitch. We were watching a DVD of Disney's Frozen when my son remarked that the soundtrack was higher on the DVD than the cinema version. I didn't believe it, but when I played an audio recording of the Frozen soundtrack, it matched his singing exactly and when I compared it to the DVD I found that his comments were, indeed, correct.

I am interested to explore where his musical abilities will take him. He is interested in learning to read music, which is what we are doing right now. Whether this translates to the ability to play an instrument well remains to be seen, as his motor skills and coordination are quite poor.

Autism is AMAZING and my son is a musical superman.