Maybe you think you can’t sing. Singing is a talent you just don’t have. Some people can sing, like, you know, Adele:
But you? You can’t sing.
The authors of this study would argue that that is, probably, not true! You can sing! You…just really suck at it.
Bella et al. “Singing proficiency in the general population” J. Acoust . Soc. Am. 2007.
The authors of this study were interested in singing in the general population. They are interested in looking at a hypothesis of why we sing. The idea is that singing is not just some fluke that some people are really born with and others are really…not born with. Rather, the authors hypothesize that we can all sing, to at least some extent. That singing is something innate to human nature. Babies and children, for example, begin trying to carry a tune around 1 year, and can produce recognizable tunes by 18 months. Singing is something that is thought to be important in human nature, for things like creating group cohesion. If this is in fact the case, then most people should be able to carry a tune somewhat, and what makes up the rest is experience and training.
To test this, the authors recruited about 20 university students, and then another 42 random people in a public park (they apparently had the person conducting the study pretend it was his birthday and that he had bet a friend he could get 100 people to sing to him on his birthday. Clever!). They recuirted participants deliberately without regard for their singing ability. They had them sing the refrain of “Gens du Pays” the song of Quebec.
They then compared them to 4 professional singers (VERY young ones, between 8-17!), and the composer of the song, recruited for the purpose, and analyzed all the recordings with regard to pitch, tone, rhythm, etc.
(These are the kinds of errors they were looking our for)
The songs were then rated by another group of nonmusicians who had not participated in the previous parts of the experiment.
As you might expect, the random people picked off the street had more trouble keeping the tune, singing far more out of pitch notes than the professional singers. But they also sang much FASTER. If you listened to the song above, you’ll notice it’s very slow, but the “occasional” singers sang it, on average, twice as fast (who knows, maybe they were just trying to get away?). The authors hypothesize that this might contribute to the increases in errors. The authors also note that those who sang slowly sang just as well as the professionals, and that therefore the tempo was associated with more errors.
When ranked by their peers, the results were very clear. Normal nonsingers can generally carry a tune, at least, according to their peers. And what’s more, when compared with common professional recordings of the song, the general population has a pretty good memory of absolute pitch. Most of them started in the range of the right note, being only about 2 semitones (two half steps) off.
But what about those people who sang slowly, and made fewer errors? The authors hypothesized that singing slowly would improve your singing (is this why “happy birthday” always turns into a dirge?). They took 15 non-singers, and asked them to sing the same song, first at their own tempo, and then at a steady 120 tempo marked by a metronome. When forced to a slower tempo, the nonsingers did better, making fewer mistakes.
The authors argue that the ability to sing is natural, and indeed it might be. But I’m not sure about the songs they picked. These were professors from the University of Montreal, and they had the participants SING the unofficial Quebec anthem. That’s all well and good, but presumably all of their native Quebecois had previous exposure to the song, and parts of it were learned. I wonder if the normal distribution would have persisted had the participants been told to learn a new song. Not only that, all the participants sang accapella. How would this vary if people had to sing with someone else?
Finally, the authors observed two people who made even more pitch errors than the general population. These people KNEW the pitch was off, and much more off than the general population, knew they were not singing well, but could not change their own pitch. The authors suggest that this means there could be a purely vocal form of tone deafness, an inability to produce the pitch even though you can hear it. It’d be interesting to pursue this and find out if there’s a disconnect between hearing and singing, of if there are some people who really CANNOT hear the pitch (and I think there probably are).
So for most of you, you may be able to sing! Or at least, you can sing about as well as the rest of the population…who can also sing. The authors argue that this study shows support for the hypothesis of singing as a near-universal human trait, but I’m more inclined to think it’s support for the Quebecois knowing their song.
