Psychologists from UC Santa Cruz wanted to study “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop. So they asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day.
When researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs they were based upon.
More specifically, 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,”
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“Interestingly, if you were to ask people how they thought they did in this task, they would probably be pretty confident that they had the melody right, but they would be much less certain that they were singing in the right key,” Evans said.
“As it turns out, many people with very strong pitch memory may not have very good judgment of their own accuracy, and that may be because they don’t have the labeling ability that comes with true perfect 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. […] scientists are increasingly finding that accurate pitch memory is much more common.
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“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,” explained Professor Davidenko.
“Music sounds very similar in different keys, so it would be a good shortcut for the brain to just ignore that information, but it turns out that it’s not ignored.
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He noted that the pitch accuracy of participants in the study was not predicted by any objective measures of singing ability, and none of the participants were musicians or reported having perfect pitch. In other words, you don’t have to have special abilities to demonstrate this foundational musical skill.
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Source: Singing from memory unlocks a surprisingly common musical superpower
Robin Edgar
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