Perfect Pitch for Four Months

About two weeks after the crash, Edward Freytag was being driven home by his wife, Joanna. He reached over and turned on the radio. A jazz quintet was playing, and he started calling out the chords: C minor 9, F13 sharp-11, G minor 13. Before the injury, according to The New York Times Magazine, he had never been able to name a note played on a piano without a reference.

The crash happened in July 2021, on a road near Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Freytag was 66 and taught music at a middle school. He fractured eleven bones; his helmet was dented at the front left. In the months that followed he composed at night, driven by what he called a compulsion, and said he could "see" the notation of music he was hearing. One piece from that period, Brain Bleed, he later could not remember writing. Then, over roughly four months, it all receded with the injury: the impulsiveness, the urge to compose, and the ability to put names to notes.

Sadie Dingfelder's feature, published online on 2 November 2026, presents him as the first person known to have gained perfect pitch from a brain injury, something neuroscientists had considered possible in theory but never documented. I could not read the feature in full; what I attribute to it comes from passages quoted by other outlets. This piece is about a different source, the only peer-reviewed one, and about a narrower question: what is known about how that ability was established.

Remembering a pitch, naming it

Absolute pitch, or perfect pitch, is the ability to name an isolated note, an A or an E flat, without first hearing another note to compare it with. Freytag's neurologist, Rima Abou-Khalil, puts it at about one person in ten thousand. Relative pitch, which musicians train for years, recognises intervals: the distance between notes. Freytag, the Times reports, already had good relative pitch before the crash.

In 1994 the psychologist Daniel Levitin asked 46 people to sing two popular songs from memory and compared their pitch with the original recordings. Forty percent hit the correct pitch on at least one trial; 12% did so on both. Levitin proposed treating absolute pitch as two abilities: a memory for pitch, more common than previously recognised, and a much rarer ability to attach a label to it. When someone is said to have perfect pitch, it is usually the second that is meant.

That is why the test matters. A case report published in Cureus in 2023 offers a concrete example. A 53-year-old pianist with absolute pitch had suffered a brain haemorrhage. On day 15, her doctors sat her at a grand piano in a rehabilitation room and played 60 tones across five octaves, in an order set by a random-number table, asking her to name each one. She was 88% correct, and answered nearly 80% of the time within three seconds. Even those authors note that there is no standardised test for absolute pitch.

What the paper says

The only scientific publication on the case is a four-page case report in Neurocase (2023) by Rima Abou-Khalil and Lealani Mae Acosta of Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Its title is not about perfect pitch but about acquired synesthesia and heightened creativity in a musician after traumatic brain injury. The abstract does not name the patient, but his age, handedness, injury and course match Freytag's story, and Abou-Khalil speaks about him in the Times feature.

In the abstract, the ability to name chord structures appears among the manifestations of synesthesia, alongside "seeing" the notation; both are described as novel experiences. Then one sentence concerns pitch: the Synesthesia Battery, the authors write, revealed a vision-sound synesthesia, higher than average vividness of visual imagery, and "Absolute Pitch/Perfect Pitch", in quotation marks in the original. Later, perfect pitch is listed again among the changes the patient went through over about four months.

The full text is available only by subscription. Europe PMC has no open copy and Unpaywall lists it as closed. I have not read it. So I do not know whether its pages describe a piano test, a count of correct answers or some other way of establishing the ability, and I am not assuming either way.

A tool built for another question

What can be checked is the instrument the abstract names. The Synesthesia Battery was described in 2007 in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods by David Eagleman and colleagues. It runs online. The first screen asks which forms of synesthesia a person believes they have, from twenty options. An 80-question questionnaire follows, taking about ten minutes on average, and then computer tests in which a person repeatedly picks the colour they associate with a letter, a number or a sound, so that the consistency of their answers can be measured. Its purpose is to separate stable associations from improvised ones.

The 2007 description contains no task in which a note is played and the participant names it. I do not know which version of the battery was used in 2021, or which answer produced the label "Absolute Pitch/Perfect Pitch". So I cannot say the finding is self-reported. I can say that the abstract attributes it to a tool designed to verify synesthesia, and that nothing in that tool's published description measures the ability to name a pitch.

There is also an earlier version of the case: an abstract the same authors presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 2023 meeting. It mentions the compulsion to compose, the forgotten composition, of which the authors say they have an mp3, and the ability to name chord structures while listening to music. In the public text I read, perfect pitch does not appear. But that text breaks off mid-sentence ("In addition to"), in the version published in Neurology as well, so the absence proves nothing.

Reported, labelled, measured

Across the sources I could read, "perfect pitch" is used in three senses. There is an ability that is reported: chords recognised in a car, as remembered by Freytag and his wife and reconstructed by a journalist five years later. There is an ability that is labelled: the phrase that, according to the abstract, came out of a synesthesia battery. And there would be an ability that is measured, as with the pianist in Cureus: a task, a number of trials, an error rate. Whether that third kind exists for Freytag cannot be determined from the accessible sources.

The radio episode itself contains something checkable. Recognising the quality of a chord, a minor ninth or a thirteenth, is work an experienced musician can do with relative pitch alone, and Freytag had good relative pitch. Saying "C", "F" or "G" from a car radio, with no reference note, is what requires knowing where the sound sits in absolute terms. This is my reading, not the authors'. But it means the part of the anecdote that needs perfect pitch is also the one part that could be compared with the actual key of the recording. In the sources I could read, nobody says they did so.

What remains

Some facts remain. There was a traumatic brain injury affecting the frontal lobe, and the changes faded within months, along with mild deficits in attention, memory and word-finding. The compositions remain too: Brain Bleed was performed live by Igneous Percussion at Middle Tennessee State University. Abou-Khalil and Acosta propose that creativity and synesthesia both depend on new connections in the brain. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told the Times that new artistic abilities after left-frontal trauma are not uncommon. The rarity the paper itself claims is different: creativity and synesthesia appearing together. Vanderbilt's 2023 news release said a literature search had found only one earlier report of that combination, after a stroke. The claim of a first for perfect pitch comes from the journalism.

That an injury might, for a few months, release a memory for pitch that many people carry without names for it is an attractive hypothesis. It remains a hypothesis. Nor can I rule out that the case is stronger than its abstract suggests: if those four pages contain a piano test, this piece should be corrected, and I would be glad to correct it.

One last point. Freytag may be the only person who could describe how music changes when every note has a name, and what happens when the names go. But his ability had already disappeared by the time the story became news, and it can no longer be tested. How much of those four months can we still know, other than through his memory of them?