I don't care if the acoustic piano is C=259 or the full 262. The guitar and bass (and electronic keyboard!) just need to tune to it either way, a good singer can then follow and everything will sound fine regardless.
But if people were truly born with perfect pitch you would expect them to be stuck at one particular reference frequency.
And conversely if they only gained outstanding pitch reference during certain formative years, you would expect that would have been relative to the prevailing external reference they were exposed to at the time.
So if some isolated child had great pitch but unfortunately was only exposed formatively to a non-standard reference they might be SOL if they could not adjust in later years to join a mainstream orchestra or something.
In addition the agreed-upon reference frequencies have been a moving target over the long run.
Perfect here may be more like perfect in a wide range of ways more so than really absolute.
Some people sure can tune an instrument in isolation using no external reference and it will be a perfect A=440 even without the ability to identify notes by name, that seems to be very helpful right there.
I don't care if the acoustic piano is C=259 or the full 262. The guitar and bass (and electronic keyboard!) just need to tune to it either way, a good singer can then follow and everything will sound fine regardless.
But if people were truly born with perfect pitch you would expect them to be stuck at one particular reference frequency.
And conversely if they only gained outstanding pitch reference during certain formative years, you would expect that would have been relative to the prevailing external reference they were exposed to at the time.
So if some isolated child had great pitch but unfortunately was only exposed formatively to a non-standard reference they might be SOL if they could not adjust in later years to join a mainstream orchestra or something.
In addition the agreed-upon reference frequencies have been a moving target over the long run.
Perfect here may be more like perfect in a wide range of ways more so than really absolute.
Some people sure can tune an instrument in isolation using no external reference and it will be a perfect A=440 even without the ability to identify notes by name, that seems to be very helpful right there.