I had the misfortune of having a friend in high school who could listen to something and transcribe it. I remember at band camp watching him with a cassette player and manuscript player transcribing an instrumental break from a Chicago song. He'd play a couple seconds, score it out, then play a couple more seconds until he was done.
I say misfortune because I assumed this was a binary thing: you either could do it or you couldn't, and I was in the latter category. Later in life, I found that it was a learnable skill (probably what did more than anything else for me in developing my ear was being part of the cathedral choir and doing a lot of sight singing in harmony) (another aside, having done a lot of church music over the years, it was interesting to see the level of musicianship of the cathedral choir, and I was in the larger amateur group rather than the smaller professional group—where in most church choirs, each section would have their part played at the piano and they'd sing it back, the cathedral choir would have all four parts played together at the piano and everyone would sing back in harmony. The professionals didn't bother with the piano part and just sight-sang everything, including some really tricky harmonies, like having the sopranos sing a high F against an E minor chord in the lower voices.) At my peak, I was able to work on writing music while walking without any instrument and come home and transcribe what I'd written including all the harmonizations. I've lost some of that skill from lack of practice in the years since and I had to use Capo to recover the chord progression of a piece I wrote where I couldn't remember one of the chords in the middle 8.
So bottom line, there are some people for whom this comes naturally but it is absolutely a learnable skill.
This is true of other skills that seem magical. One that stands out to me as being learnable, but often seen as magical, is 'savant like' memory capabilities.
People assume that these people have different minds and that is how they have such incredible recall, but the truth is our memories are really strong when the recall is a spatial query and the object being recalled is encoded well. People mistake their short term memory for their actual memory and they often don't do the work of encoding and decoding their thinking to improve its compression properties. This leads to the impression that our memory capabilities are much worse then they are.
If you properly encode the memory into a spatial context you can have rather incredible feats of memory. It just takes work to do the proper encoding and decoding and the creation of spatial contexts in which to store the things you want to remember.
That happens often with things that seem magical. Edward Tufte had an amazing observation about magic that really sticks with me: magic is an art of misinformation wherein the objective is to hide the work that was done. Oftentimes magical things are things which take a lot of work, but that work is hidden.
for 'savant like memory', see the book ' Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything'
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528807
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio. The "memory palace" technique is pretty useless to a person with aphantasia. Some people do, in fact, have different minds.
I say misfortune because I assumed this was a binary thing: you either could do it or you couldn't, and I was in the latter category. Later in life, I found that it was a learnable skill (probably what did more than anything else for me in developing my ear was being part of the cathedral choir and doing a lot of sight singing in harmony) (another aside, having done a lot of church music over the years, it was interesting to see the level of musicianship of the cathedral choir, and I was in the larger amateur group rather than the smaller professional group—where in most church choirs, each section would have their part played at the piano and they'd sing it back, the cathedral choir would have all four parts played together at the piano and everyone would sing back in harmony. The professionals didn't bother with the piano part and just sight-sang everything, including some really tricky harmonies, like having the sopranos sing a high F against an E minor chord in the lower voices.) At my peak, I was able to work on writing music while walking without any instrument and come home and transcribe what I'd written including all the harmonizations. I've lost some of that skill from lack of practice in the years since and I had to use Capo to recover the chord progression of a piece I wrote where I couldn't remember one of the chords in the middle 8.
So bottom line, there are some people for whom this comes naturally but it is absolutely a learnable skill.