A surprising number of us can sing with perfect pitch, according to a new study that analyzed the karaoke skills of 30 people — as long as we sang one of our “favorite songs,” those songs that get stuck in our heads.
Analyzing statistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz) team, 44.7 percent of the recordings had a zero pitch error margin, while 68.9 percent were accurate to within a semitone of the original melody (that’s the smallest of musical intervals, for non-musicians).
Absolute pitch – the ability to play a note with complete accuracy on the first try without any reference – is thought to describe less than one in 10,000 people.
This statistic may not take into account people who sing a song they know intimately.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has some kind of automatic, hidden ability to be in perfect agreement,” says cognitive psychologist Matt Evans of UC Santa Cruz.
“It turns out that many people with very strong pitch memories may not have very good judgments of their own accuracy, and that may be because they lack the labeling ability that comes with true absolute pitch.”
Eager to analyze the interactions between memory and music, researchers have considered earworms to be an involuntary form of recall. To our frustration, they are not usually memories that we voluntarily invoke at will.
Participants were encouraged to record on their phones whenever songs came to mind for two weeks. None of the group were professional musicians or thought they had perfect pitch, but the recordings suggested otherwise.
This is another area that researchers hope to study more closely in the future: how well we can judge our own singing ability and our own memory power, and how the brain might be wired to offer help.
“Interestingly, if you asked people how they thought they did on this task, they would probably be fairly confident that they had the right melody, but they would be much less confident that they were singing in the right key,” Evans says.
These findings also offer clues as to how musical memories may differ from other memories. It seems that the brain stores earworms entirely intact in our minds, right down to the right pitch, rather than taking shortcuts.
Beyond the science of memory and music, research suggests that your singing voice might be better than you thought — and that there are more innate musical abilities locked away in our brains than previously believed.
“Music and singing are unique human experiences that many people don’t allow themselves to have because they think they can’t do it or because they’ve been told they can’t,” Evans says.
“But the truth is, you don’t have to be Beyoncé to have what it takes to make music. Your brain already does some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”
The research was published in Attention, perception and psychophysics.
