Abstract: Musical absolute pitch (AP) is an interesting perceptive for musical psychologists. ERP studies indicated that the population with AP ability adopted less cognitive resources to process musical pitch, meanwhile there were different processing mechanisms for different AP abilities. Functional neuroimaging indicated that left posterior dorsolateral frontal and left planum temporale played an important role in AP processing; brain structure studies found that the cortical thickness in some brain regions for AP population was thinner than Non-AP population, it might be reflected the specific neural mechanisms for AP processing. The form of AP ability needs the interaction between congenital and acquired environment, and the brain mechanism of this interaction needs the studies about behavioral genetics.

Key words: absolute pitch, ERP, functional neuroimaging, brain structure