Singing from memory demonstrates general musical ability

New research from UC Santa Cruz finally gives you permission to sing in the shower as loud as you want. Because, as it turns out, you’re probably pretty good at it.

Psychologists like to study „earworms,” ​​the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop. So, people were asked to sing the earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when they heard them at random times throughout the day. When the researchers examined the recordings, they found that a significant proportion of them exactly matched the pitch of the original songs on which they were based.

More specifically, 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate to within 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were recently published in the journal Attention, perception and psychology.

„What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a kind of automatic, hidden 'correct pitch’ ability,” said cognitive psychology Ph.D. candidate Matt Evans led the study with support from psychology professor Nicholas Davidenko and undergraduate research assistant Pablo Caita.

„Interestingly, if you ask people how they did on this task, they’re more confident that they got the melody right, but less confident that they’re singing in the right key,” Evans said. . „It turns out that many people with very strong pitch memory don’t have a good judgment of their own accuracy, and that’s probably because they lack the labeling skills that come with true correct pitch.”

Evans explained that true correct pitch is the ability to accurately produce or identify a given note on the first try and without reference pitch. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people have that ability, a list that includes famous musicians such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald and Mariah Carey. But scientists are increasingly finding that accurate pitch memory is more common.

Previous research has shown that participants in laboratory settings recall a well-known song, hear it sung from memory, and end up singing it in the correct key at least 15% of the time, more often than expected. opportunity. But much is still unknown about how this memory process works, including questions about whether people make a deliberate effort to recall songs in the correct key or whether it happens automatically.

That’s where earworms come in handy. Since earworms are an involuntary type of musical memory experience, the UC Santa Cruz team decided to use them to test whether pitch memory is more accurate when music is not being deliberately recalled. The team’s findings that earworms actually follow the key of the original song very strongly suggests that there may be something unique about musical memories and the way they are encoded and maintained in our brains.

„People who study memory often think about long-term memories, capturing the essence of something, where the brain takes shortcuts to represent information, and one way our brain tries to represent the essence of music is by forgetting what the original key was,” Professor Davydenko explained. „Music is very similar in every key, so ignoring that information would be a good shortcut for the brain, but it turns out that it’s not ignored. These musical memories are actually very precise representations that defy conventional abstract formation in some other domains of long-term memory.”

As researchers continue to work to unlock the mechanisms behind musical memory, he hopes the current findings will help more people participate in music. He noted that the study participants’ pitch accuracy was not predicted by any objective measure of singing ability, and none of the participants were musicians or had been told to have perfect pitch. In other words, you don’t have special skills to demonstrate this basic musical ability.

„Music and singing are uniquely human experiences that many people don’t allow themselves to engage in because they don’t think they can, or they’ve been told they can’t,” Evans said. „But really, you don’t have to be Beyonce to make music. Even if there’s a part of you that thinks you can’t, your brain is already doing some things automatically and accurately.”