Surprise! Many of us have a perfect “hidden” vocal ability without knowing it: ScienceAlert

A surprising number of us can sing along. ideal pitchAccording to a new study that analyzed the karaoke skills of 30 people — as long as we're singing one of our “earworms,” ​​those songs that get stuck in our heads.

When analyzing statistics from the UC Santa Cruz team, 44.7 percent of the recordings had a zero margin of error on pitch, while 68.9 percent were accurate within one semitone From the original melody (this is the smallest musical interval, for non-musicians).

Perfect pitch – the ability to hit a note with perfect accuracy on the first try without any reference – He thinks he describes Less than 1 in 10,000 individuals.

However, this statistic may not take into account people who sing a song they know well.

“What this shows is that a surprisingly large percentage of the population has some kind of hidden automatic ability to master the perfect voice.” He says Cognitive psychologist Matt Evans of the University of California Santa Cruz.

“It turns out that many people who have a very strong memory for sound may not have a very good judgment of the accuracy of their own voice, and this may be because they do not have the categorization ability that comes with a truly perfect voice.”

In an attempt to analyze how memory interacts with music, the researchers considered earworms as an involuntary form of remembering. To our frequent frustration, they are usually not memories that we deliberately conjure up with our will.

Participants were encouraged to make recordings on their phones whenever and wherever songs popped into their heads for a total of two weeks. None of the group were professional musicians or thought they had perfect vocal skills, but the recordings suggested otherwise.

This is another area that researchers hope to look at more closely in the future: how well we can judge our singing ability and even our memory abilities, and how the brain can provide some help.

“Interestingly, if you ask people how they felt about performing this task, they will likely be quite confident that they have mastered the melody, but they will be less confident that they are singing in the correct key.” He says Evans.

The findings also offer clues about how musical memories differ from other memories. The brain seems to keep earworms intact inside our minds, right down to the right note, rather than taking any shortcuts.

In addition to memory and music science, research suggests that your singing voice may be better than you thought — and that there's more innate musical ability locked away inside our brains than previously thought.

“Music and singing are unique human experiences that many people don’t allow themselves to engage in because they don’t think they can, or have been told they can’t.” He says Evans.

“But in reality, you don’t have to be like Beyoncé to be able to compose music. Your brain already does some of these tasks automatically and accurately, despite the part of you that thinks you can’t.”

The research was published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.