Abstract:  Absolute pitch (AP) is a rare ability to process music pitch; it also has the special cognitive and neural basis. The studies by event-related potentials showed that AP musicians use less working memory but with multiple cognitive strategies during AP processing. Functional neuroimaging studies showed that the left posterior dorsolateral frontal cortex and the left planum temporale are very important to AP musicians, but the involvements in some right cerebral regions indicate the increased load and difficulty during pitch processing in quasi-AP musicians. Structural neuroimaging studies showed the special morphometry of the left planum temporale as well as the white matter structure in AP musicians. Future research needs to further divide AP ability into “with relative pitch ability” and “without relative pitch ability” together with their cognitive and neural basis, and investigate the effect of gene polymorphism on AP ability through imaging genomics, and also necessarily examine the neural basis of pitch processing in the musicians with native tonal language.

Key words: absolute pitch, functional correlate, structural correlate