iternabe I believe the perfect pitch is much more than that. In the NYT article I cited:
Dr. Profita, who studied the piano and violin at the Juilliard School before turning to medicine, realized he had perfect pitch at age 6. "The minute I hear a note, I know it," he said. "A single note takes on a real nature, like an object. An A is an A just the way a table is a table."
In addition, people with true perfect pitch can identify all notes in a chord without thinking. You can find video of Rick Beato demontrates this amazing ability with his son.
This is the kind of perfect pitch that is born naturally, and it cannot be attained by training.
I know, and I agree. What I was saying was that I think what Chang meant to say there was that the sort of pitch memory that I was talking about can be trained. But he conflates it with perfect pitch. Although a part of me thinks that maybe he believes that "true" perfect pitch can be learned. Regardless, that to me felt like the least important thing there. The idea of "Mental Play" or audiation is extremely powerful imo.
I understand that many people might struggle with it, so I don't mean to say that everyone must be able to do it. But I think it is extremely important to playing musically, to the point where I can't think of an extremely musical player who can't to a pretty good extent, "visualize" the sort of sound they want to produce. And it can be developed early -- I know I did and it sped up the process of learning piano by a lot.
There was a video where a famous jazz musician was asked how he played musically, and he said, you know how when you imagine a piece of music, you kind of go "da, da, da...". Well, that's not enough, you have to imagine it go "DA, DA, DA..." in your head. It was funny but oddly instructive.
A lot of the issues with Chang's book boil down to him taking something that works in some cases, for some people, and generalizing it to the population as a whole. But a lot of what he says is still A valid way of approaching things, and often one that's not very commonly known by average piano teachers or students. So in that way, it is interesting. A lot of his tips around "post-practice improvement", the importance of sleep and breaks and so on predate Molly Gebrian etc. by over a decade, and are just as valid now. It provides an interesting framework for practice. I can't think of another book that tries to clearly lay out how practice should be structured in the same way. You can glean similar information (and at a higher level) from books written by other concert pianists, but I think those books are too difficult and inaccessible for beginners and are also usually targeted at more advanced students/teachers (Seymour Bernstein, Gyorgy Sandor, Josef Hoffman, Gieseking, just to name a few).