Perfect Hearing for Catchy Rhythms? – Even non-musicians can hit the right note with catchy tunes.

Singing License: “Perfect pitch” is a rare thing. But when it comes to catchy tunes, a surprising number of people can sing songs accurately from memory, a new study has shown. According to this, about half of us hit exactly the right pitch when singing catchy tunes, and so we may have a kind of hidden “perfect pitch.” This seems to be made possible by our brain, which, unlike events, stores music and its details in memory.

Anyone with perfect pitch can recognize and sing a particular note instantly, without a reference note. However, it is estimated that at least one in 10,000 people have this ability, including famous musicians such as Ludwig van Beethoven and singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Mariah Carey. They remember not only the melody and thus the relative pitch sequence of a piece of music, but also the absolute pitch.

A special case of catchy tunes?

But many people probably have this “perfect hearing,” as previous studies have already suggested. According to this, about 15% of people sing famous songs accurately from memory and hit the right key—far more than would be expected by chance. But did they put in extra effort or did they just hit the right spot automatically?

A team led by Matthew Evans of the University of California, Santa Cruz, investigated this question. To do so, psychologists examined how well test subjects could remember and sing catchy tunes. These songs stick in our memory involuntarily and play on loop for a long time.

For the experiment, the 30 participants were asked to sing or hum whatever catchy tunes popped into their heads and record their singing on their smartphones. The recordings were made spontaneously at different times of the day, without any specific request to sing a particular song. Evans and his colleagues then evaluated the recordings, checking how accurately the test subjects had recorded each note.

The hidden “perfect display” is common.

A significant proportion of the catchy tunes sung spontaneously matched the pitch of the original songs exactly. The psychologists found no pitch errors in 44.7% of the recordings, and 68.9% of the songs deviated from the original by a maximum of one semitone. “This suggests that a surprisingly large proportion of the population has some kind of automatic, hidden ‘ideal pitch’,” Evans explains.

None of the participants were musicians or reported having perfect pitch. The test subjects didn’t hit notes more accurately even if they could sing objectively better, comparison tests showed. Accordingly, no special musical skills were required to sing catchy tunes accurately, the researchers assert. Even people who aren’t musically gifted can achieve this basic “perfect pitch.”

Our brain remembers music differently than events.

“These results provide the first evidence that absolute auditory memory occurs automatically and does not require conscious effort,” the researchers wrote. But how is this perfect hearing achieved? When events occur, our brains typically store information in shorthand and without detail in order to capture only the gist of the experience in long-term memory. But with music, things can be different, the test suggests. Accordingly, musical memories can be encoded and preserved in our brains in a special way.

“Music sounds very similar in different keys, so a good shortcut for our brains is to simply ignore information about the original pitch and remember only the melody,” says lead researcher Nicholas Davydenko of the University of California, Berkeley. But as the experiment showed, our brains don’t ignore pitch. On the contrary, Davydenko concludes, “musical memories are actually very precise representations that defy typical memory formation.”

More courage for music

Evans and his colleagues now want to investigate why this is in more detail in follow-up studies. They also want to explore whether there’s a link to tempo. Because on social media like TikTok, it’s common for songs to be played faster or slower than usual, which also affects pitch. That means the catchy tunes in our heads could theoretically exist in different versions.

The researchers hope their findings will give more people the confidence to make music. Because music has been shown to be good for the body and mind. “A lot of people don’t engage in the experience of music and singing because they think or have been told they can’t,” Evans says. “But the truth is, you don’t have to be Beyoncé to sing. Our brains already do some of this automatically. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0)

Source: University of California – Santa Cruz

August 20, 2024 – Claudia Crabbe