All babies start out in life with perfect pitch - the ability to identify a note without any reference sounds - but only a few continue to possess it in later life, according to the latest findings of research into why only one in 10 000 people retains this unusual talent.
A study of eight-month-old babies found that all possess perfect pitch which is lost within a few years.
Only a tiny minority of people - which has included Mozart, J S Bach, Yehudi Menuhin, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra - are able to keep their innate ability to determine perfect pitch.
Jenny Saffran, director of the Infant Learning Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that everyone is born with perfect pitch. She bases the conclusion on tests that identified perfect pitch in babies who had yet to learn to talk.
Most adults are better at recognising relative pitch - the difference between two musical notes - than babies, who have to learn it.
"If is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear," Professor Saffran said.
"If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we wouldn't understand that 'Happy Birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man and a woman was the same word."
The experiments involved the manipulation of songs to determine whether the babies were able to follow changes in absolute or relative pitch. The "songs" were actually a continuous three-minute stream of bell-like tones.
After infants listened to the three-minute sequences, they were played segments of the song that were identical in relative pitch but different in perfect pitch.
By monitoring how they turned their heads to the sounds - an indication that they are listening to something unexpected - Professor Saffran could tell whether the babies were able to identify changes in perfect pitch.
"With absolute pitch, it might be a case of use it or lose it," Professor Saffran said.
She added that it is well established that children who learn musical instruments at an early age are more likely than other children to have perfect pitch.