You can (probably) sing better than you think

The ability to identify or produce any musical note from memory without reference, aka true perfect pitch, is a rare gift. In fact, less than one in 10,000 people have it—but you don’t need the ability to spontaneously recall a melody with decent accuracy. If anything, you may not be as tone deaf as you think.

Past research in lab settings shows people tasked with remembering and singing a well-known song can do so at least 15-percent of the time, more than can be chalked up to chance. Even so, psychologists’ understanding of this recall process remains incomplete. For example, does it take a concerted mental effort to remember a song’s correct key, or does that data store in the brain automatically?

To begin filling in some of these gaps, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, turned to “earworms” for help. Their findings, published August 12 in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, also help highlight humanity’s innate musicality.

[Related: Our memory of music persists in old age.]

“People who study memory often think about long-term memories as capturing the gist of something, where the brain takes shortcuts to represent information, and one way our brains could try to represent the gist of music would be to forget what the original key was,” Nicholas Davidenko, a study co-author and UC Santa Cruz psychology professor, said in an August 14 university profile.

Davidenko explained that since music often sounds similar across different keys, an easy brain shortcut could be ignoring that bit of information during memory-making. In actuality, however, this does not appear to be the case.

“These musical memories are actually highly accurate representations that defy the typical gist formation that happens in some other domains of long-term memory,” he continued.

To test the accuracy of people’s average absolute pitch abilities, researchers utilized involuntary musical imagery, more commonly known as earworms. Over the course of a two-week study, 30 volunteers received six text notifications at semi-random intervals throughout the day. If a song happened to be stuck in their head at that moment, participants then recorded themselves singing the tune as accurately as possible. By the end of the two-week period, researchers amassed 462 field recordings of various earworms. From there, it was time to assess their musical expertise.

While most people aren’t necessarily ready to perform on stage at a moment’s notice, many can still carry a tune pretty decently. According to the team’s findings, 45-percent of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, while nearly 69-percent of volunteers remained within just 1 semitone of the song in their heads.

[Related: Metal music is good for you.]

“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,” Cognitive Psychology PhD candidate and study lead author Matt Evans explained on Wednesday.

But despite this, many people didn’t seem very confident in their pitch accuracy. While most believed they could correctly recreate an earworm’s melody, they weren’t as sure they did so in its original key.

“As it turns out, many people with very strong pitch memory may not have very good judgment of their own accuracy,” Evans continued. “[T]hat may be because they don’t have the labeling ability that comes with true perfect pitch.”

Evans hopes the study’s results may help some people embrace their inner songbird, calling music and singing “uniquely human experiences.”  

“[S]o many people don’t allow themselves to engage with [it] because they don’t think they can, or they’ve been told they can’t,” Evans said. “But in reality… your brain is already doing some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”