Singing from memory unlocks a surprisingly common musical superpower

Psychologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz wanted to study “earworms,” those songs that get stuck in your head and play on automatic loops. So they asked people to sing the earworms they felt and record them on their phones when they were asked to do so at random times throughout the day.

When the researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs on which they were based.

Specifically, 44.7% of the recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones and 68.9% were accurate to within 1 semitone of the original song. These results were published in the journal Attention, perception and psychophysics.

“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has some sort of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,” said Matt Evans, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology who led the study with support from psychology professor Nicolas Davidenko and undergraduate research assistant Pablo Gaeta.

“Interestingly, if you asked people how they thought they did on this task, they would probably be fairly confident that they had the right melody, but they would be much less confident that they were singing in the right key,” Evans said.

“It turns out that many people with very strong pitch memories may not have very good judgments of their own accuracy, and that may be because they lack the labeling ability that comes with true absolute pitch.”

Evans explained that perfect pitch is the ability to accurately produce or identify a given note on the first try and without pitch reference. Fewer than one in 10,000 people have this ability, and the list includes famous musicians like Ludwig van Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald and Mariah Carey. But scientists are increasingly finding that accurate pitch memorization is much more common.

Previous research has shown that participants in lab experiments who were asked to recall a familiar song and sing it from memory ended up singing it in the correct key at least 15 percent of the time, which is much more common than would be expected by chance. But there is still much that is unknown about how this memorization process works, including whether people have to make a deliberate effort to remember songs in the correct key or whether it happens automatically.

That’s where earworms came in handy. Since earworms are a type of musical memory experience that occurs involuntarily, the UC Santa Cruz team decided to use them to test whether pitch memory was still relatively accurate when music wasn’t deliberately recalled.

The team’s findings that the earworms actually followed the key of the original song very closely suggests that there may be something unique about musical memories and how they are encoded and stored in our brains.

“People who study memory often think that long-term memories capture the gist of something, where the brain takes shortcuts to represent information, and one way our brain might try to represent the gist of music would be to forget what the original key was,” Davidenko explained.

“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 it’s not ignored. These musical memories are actually very precise representations that defy the typical gist formation that occurs in some other areas of long-term memory.”

As researchers continue to work to unpack the mechanisms behind musical memory, Evans hopes the current findings will also help more people gain the confidence to participate in music.

He noted that the study participants’ vocal pitch was not predicted by objective measures of singing ability, and that none of the participants were musicians or reported having perfect pitch. In other words, no special ability is required to demonstrate this fundamental musical skill.

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

“But the truth is, you don’t have to be Beyoncé to have what it takes to make music. Your brain already does some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”