If you ever have a song stuck in your head, you know how annoying it can be to “hear” the same melody over and over again. But these earworms were surprisingly helpful for researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz, who discovered that people can often sing along with their earworms in the right intonation.
The research team asked a small group of 30 people to record themselves singing along to songs that got stuck in their head and send a recording to the research team. This might sound like a recipe for disaster, but it was surprisingly okay. Almost 70% of the recordings stayed within a semitone of the correct notes and more than 40% had no mistakes at all.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,” said Matt Evans, who led the study, in a statement to UC Santa Cruz.
But many people have no idea that they could sing so well. “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,” said Evans. “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.”
By ‘labeling ability’, Evans means the skill of being able to name a note when you hear it. Some musicians that can do this include Ella Fitzgerald and Beethoven (before he lost his hearing, presumably). Not every musician has this ability, though. Many others who don’t have perfect pitch instead have “relative pitch”, which means that they can correctly hear the distance between tones even if they don’t necessarily know which note the melody started on.
Previous studies that looked at how well people could recall a song asked volunteers to think of a song from memory and sing it. Even in that setting, people did pretty well, with about 1 in 6 picking the right key. But in that setting, people were really trying their best to sing on the spot. To make it a bit more organic, this new study used earworms (more formally called “involuntary musical imagery”) to find out if singing in key was something that people did automatically, or whether it required deliberate effort.
When earworms get stuck in your brain you’ve got a pretty good sense of the melody – at least for the part of the song that is stuck on a loop in your head. But there was no reason to believe that we all remember these earworms in the correct key. “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 Nicolas Davidenko, one of the researchers involved in the research. So to find that people in this study, none of whom were musicians, not only remembered the melody of a song but also the correct key was quite a surprise.
There is still a lot more to explore about the way that we remember and reproduce music correctly, and this study only had a very small group of participants, but Evans is encouraged by these early findings but he also hopes that this will make people less shy about singing. “You don’t have to be Beyoncé to have what it takes to make music,” he says. “Your brain is already doing some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”
