donmeixner [[It makes no sense that you pop out of Mom knowing "A" from "Bb".]]

Of course. You couldn't be born knowing the names of the notes or keys. But you could have an innate ability to distinguish tones and recognize them when you hear them again. If you can hear or sing notes and repeat them perfectly, even if you don't know what they are called in your culture, I'd call that perfect pitch.   (This is not the same thing as just being able to reproduce a melody with all the notes in perfect relation to each other. It means if you know a note as "middle C" or even as "Irving" you can always recognize it or reproduce it. And it would not surprise me if most infants are equipped to be able to do that if they develop the skill as they grow -- much as infants have the capability of producing all the sounds in all languages but lose a lot of that ability if their language does not use certain sounds.)


Tradsinger: [[If you really were tone deaf, that is a medical condition and you would have problems understanding speech. By tone deafness, people mean an inability to sing in tune - well that is a skill that people can improve with practice and motivation.]]
Very good points.   If you were tone deaf you couldn't appreciate music much (beyond the rhythms) and you'd really have trouble speaking or understanding speech if your language was a tonal one such as many Asian languages.   (English can be - and is - spoken and understood without needing tonal variations, as with people who have to speak via an artificial larynx after surgery, or with early versions of robotic speech, where "speaking" is in monotone.)


I observed an interesting phenomenon a few years back, with a friend who asked me for help to learn to sing on pitch ("carry a tune"). He played a (fretless) stand-up bass and would back up other musicians perfectly in jam sessions, all by ear. But when it came to singing, if I sang or played a melody line, not only could he not sing it, but he couldn't tell whether what he sang was the same melody line or not.   He gave up on trying after a while, but it seemed so odd - to both of us - that his "pitch recognition" seemed to be fine for instruments but not when it came to his own singing.