These results provide evidence that some individuals have the ability to retrieve the temporal rate of an acoustic event without a reference (absolute tempo, AT). When compared with the estimated prevalence of absolute pitch (AP) found in the literature (about 0.01%, see [
48–
55]), the number of individuals that performed better than chance in our tasks may be taken as support to the hypothesis that AT might be more common than AP. Also, in contrast with AP, which is generally considered to be relatively rare and strongly related to musical training [
48], our results may be interpreted as evidence that AT is present in both musicians and non-musicians, although there is some evidence that musical training improves performance on tempo identification. It should be noted however that no accepted criterion exists for categorizing individuals as possessing AT. In the present study, as a first step in this direction we proposed a criterion based on a certain definition of chance performance. The current interpretation could however change if a different and presumably better criterion will be defined in future work.