pianoloverus To the best of my understanding someone with only relative pitch can't pick out the notes in some totally random chord the way at least some people with perfect pitch can.
I think that might be true although of questionable value if it only applies to totally random chords. My suspicions were aroused by the YT clip earlier in this thread with Rick Beato where Pierre seems to have AP, but later in the test when it comes to figuring out a couple of chords, he admits he's leaning on chord recognition to some extent.
I dug a bit deeper and found this. AI abstracted the following from it:-
Research indicates that high relative pitch (RP) correlates with more accurate chord identification, while high absolute pitch (AP) may impede the process of recognising chord quality.
Also:-
The perception of chords seems an ideal case for studying the difference between global and local processing, since while they are constituted by several individual pitches, they may be perceived as whole single objects.
-so taken together, for non-atonal chords, RPs have the advantage.
I queried it re your point above;-
Q: Does the study draw any conclusions about the ability of those with AP to identify all notes in a dissonant (atonal) chord?
A: The article does not specifically focus on dissonant chords, but it concludes that individuals with Absolute Pitch (AP) are significantly better than those without AP at identifying individual notes within a chord.
Which suggests, as you said, that APs have the edge when identifying all notes in the sort of grinding dissonance which would almost certainly fox an RP like me. APs seemingly lose that advantage with more coherent harmony that RPs are familiar with. And while I don’t get on with atonal music, I do enjoy jazzy dissonance finding it far more useful, in every respect, to identify a chord rather than its individual notes. Also, a chord is something that can be experienced aesthetically; not so, the list of notes.