Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
Got a song stuck in your head? Chances are it’s in the right key.
Earworms are evidence that people are very good – perhaps too good – at remembering tunes. (My current earworm is In the hall of the Mountain King, which might tell you something about how my week is going.)
But a study has found that when people are asked to sing an earworm, they usually sing it at the correct pitch – or very close by – as well.
The research, published by US researchers in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, suggests that most people have some level of “absolute pitch”.
Perfect pitch or absolute pitch is the ability to identify, or produce, a note of a certain pitch correctly without needing a reference note. Roughly 1 in 10,000 people are estimated to have the rare talent, with famous examples including Beethoven and Mariah Carey.
Previous research has shown that people can be more accurate than random chance when recalling the pitch of songs they know well.
This study set out to examine involuntarily remembered tunes – earworms – to see how they compared to voluntarily recalled music.
The researchers recruited 30 undergraduate psychology students from the University of California – Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz) to participate in the study.
Participants were texted a prompt to complete a survey at random times between 9am and 9pm over a 2-week period.
The first survey question asked them whether there was music playing in their head when they received the SMS notification.
If participants responded ‘yes’, they were asked to sing the tune into their phones. Then they answered a series of questions about what they were doing and their mood at the time.
In total, the researchers collected 1,928 responses from the 30 participants.
They found that 44.7% of sung recordings exactly matched the pitch of the original song, with a pitch error of 0 semitones. An even larger proportion – 68.9% – were within 1 semitone of the original song.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,” says first author Matt Evans, a PhD candidate in psychology at UC Santa Cruz.
“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.
“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 labelling ability that comes with true perfect pitch.”
The researchers say that this finding has implications for our understanding of musical memory.
“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,” says co-author Professor Nicolas Davidenko, also from UC Santa Cruz.
“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. These musical memories are actually highly accurate representations that defy the typical gist formation that happens in some other domains of long-term memory.”
The findings are also good news for those who fear they sing out of tune.
“You don’t have to be Beyonce to have what it takes to make music,” says Evans.
“Your brain is already doing some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”
