New research from the University of California, Santa Cruz, finally gives you the go-ahead to sing in the shower as loud as you want. Because, as it turns out, it probably sounds pretty good.
Psychologists wanted to study songs that get stuck in your head and automatically play on loop. So they asked people to sing along to songs they found catchy and record them on their phones on command at random times throughout the day. When the researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs they were based on.
More specifically, 44.7% of the recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate by 1 semitone relative to the original song. These findings were recently published in the journal Attention, perception and psychophysics.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a kind of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,” said cognitive psychology doctoral candidate Matt Evans, who led the study with support from psychology professor Nicolas Davidenko and undergraduate research assistant Pablo Gaeta.
“Interestingly, if we asked people how they thought they did on this task, they would probably be pretty confident that they sang the melody correctly, but much less confident that they were singing in the right key,” Evans said. “It turns out that many people with very strong pitch memory may not have good judgment about their own accuracy, and that may be because they don’t have the labeling ability that comes with true absolute pitch.”
Evans explained that true perfect pitch is the ability to accurately produce or identify a given note on the first try and without a reference pitch. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people possess that ability, and the list includes famous musicians such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald and Mariah Carey. However, scientists are increasingly finding that accurate pitch memory is much more common.
Previous research has shown that participants in laboratory settings who are asked to recall a familiar song and sing it from memory end up singing it in the correct key at least 15% of the time — which is much more often than might be expected by chance. But there are still many unknowns about how this memory process works, and that includes questions about whether it required a deliberate effort for people to remember songs in the right key, or whether it happened automatically.
That’s where the earworms came in handy. Since earworms are a type of musical memory experience that occurs involuntarily, the UC Santa Cruz team decided to use them to test whether pitch memory remained relatively accurate when the music was not intentionally recalled. The team’s findings that the earworms did, in fact, very faithfully follow the key of the original song suggest that there may be something unique about musical memories and the ways in which they are encoded and maintained within our brains.
“People who study memory often think of long-term memories as capturing the essence of something, where the brain takes shortcuts to represent information, and one way our brain might try to represent the essence of music would be to forget what the original key was,” Professor Davidenko explained. “Music sounds very similar in different keys, so it would be a nice shortcut for the brain to ignore that information, but it turns out that it’s not ignored. These musical memories are actually very precise representations that defy the typical gist formation that happens in some other domains of long-term memory.”
As researchers continue to work to unravel the mechanisms underlying musical memory, Evans says he hopes the current findings will also help give more people the confidence to engage in musical activities. 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 reported having perfect pitch. In other words, you don’t need to have any special skills to demonstrate this fundamental musical ability.
“Music and singing are uniquely human experiences that many people don’t allow themselves to experience because they think they can’t or because they’ve been told they can’t,” Evans said. “But in reality, you don’t have to be Beyoncé to have what it takes to make music. Your brain is already doing some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”