True automatic perfect pitch rarely develops in adulthood, but adults can train accurate pitch memory that covers most practical uses.
Honest answer: probably not the childhood kind, where note names simply appear in your head. That window seems to close early.
But here is the good news: what you actually want (finding notes, staying in tune, transcribing songs) runs on relative pitch and pitch memory, and both are trainable at any age.
Studies of adult perfect-pitch training show slow, effortful gains that usually fade without constant upkeep, quite unlike the effortless recall of childhood possessors. The realistic adult ceiling is strong pitch memory: internalizing a reference note and deriving the rest quickly.
Meanwhile relative pitch, the skill that does the real musical work, improves dramatically with weeks of practice. Prioritizing it is not settling; it is choosing the skill musicians actually use.
A practical program: daily interval and chord recognition, singing what you hear, and occasionally testing yourself on naming lone notes to build the memory anchor.
The evidence: absolute pitch correlates with training begun before roughly age 6 and with tonal-language exposure, suggesting a developmental sensitive period. Adult training studies (including valproate-related plasticity experiments) produce partial, fragile gains rather than genuine acquisition.
Pitch memory in adults, by contrast, is well documented: many musicians can produce A440 or recognize familiar songs’ keys at better-than-chance rates purely from exposure, and deliberate anchoring sharpens it.
Tavi La Si’s Name the Note mode trains exactly that anchor-and-derive loop, while the rest of the trainer builds the relative skills that carry actual playing.