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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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When most people think of someone who's tone deaf, they're likely to conjure up images of an American Idol contestant who's is shocked when the judges tell her she's got a horrible singing voice—or perhaps the man who belts out every hymn in church but always seems to be at least two notes off from the rest of the congregation.
Being tone deaf often doesn't refer just to poor hearing, but also to poor singing. But it's also possible that bad singing isn't actually caused by bad hearing. A recent report by cognitive neuroscientists Peter Q. Pfordresher at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Steven Brown at Simon Fraser University suggests that poor music perception is actually just one of four possible causes of tuneless warbling. Yes, bad hearing might be at fault, but poor control of the vocal system is another possible factor. In other words, even if you can hear the note, you still might not be able to produce it. Third might be an inability to imitate: you can hear the sound and you know what sound you want to produce, but you can't combine the two—just as a baseball player might see a pitch and know how to swing the bat, but still strike out. Fourth, it might be that awful singers have bad memory: between the time they hear a song and when they sing it back, they forget the notes.
Types of Tunelessness
Although there have been many studies of perceptual tone deafness, or amusia, few have compared people's ability to hear differences between musical notes with their ability to produce good music. This fact is what makes the recent study by Pfordresher and Brown so interesting. They tested 79 college students on both their ability to discriminate between musical notes and their ability to sing accurately. First they identified the poor singers. They asked singers to imitate recordings of a singer producing four notes in varying simple patterns: the singers repeated the same note four times, they repeated two notes twice, or all four notes were different. Such short patterns should be easy to remember, removing bad memory as a potential issue. Based on this test, 10 of the 79 singers were identified as "pitch poor" because their average error while singing was more than a semitone (equal to the distance between B and C on a piano, between "ti" and "do," or between any natural note and a flat or a sharp). These people aren't just a little off; they're singing a completely different note. The first graph above illustrates the difference between the poor singers and the good singers [to see the graph, click on the "next" arrow underneath the photo of the man with the boombox].
The bad singers were significantly worse than the good singers, and dramatically so. No matter the circumstance, they were off by more than two semitones, as far apart as any consecutive notes on the scale, even when repeating just a single note. In a second phase, where a recording of a professional was playing in headphones along with their own voice, the poor singers did even worse. They were off by as many as three semitones, or the distance between A and C on the scale! In other words, pitch-poor singers are worse when they accompany someone else; they can’t even match a simultaneously presented pitch.
But when they were tested on their ability to detect changes in pitch, the results were very different [to see the second graph, click the "next" arrow once again].
The second graph above shows how well listeners could distinguish between two notes that differed in pitch in variable amounts. There was no significant difference in the results for good singers and poor singers. So even though some of these singers' vocals were truly hideous, they were just as good at detecting changes in notes as the good singers. No relation appears to exist between amusia and singing ability.
A Second Experiment
Given the relatively small number of poor singers in this experiment, the researchers felt it was important to reproduce the findings with a larger group. In a second experiment, the researchers match a new set of poor singers with a group of good singers, and found the same results again. There was no relation between ability to perceive music and produce music. Indeed, some very good singers were quite awful at detecting the difference between musical notes. In this second experiment, the researchers also asked the poor singers to do a vocal sweep of their entire singing range. Good singers and bad ones displayed no difference in vocal range.
So what might be the cause of bad singing? Pfordresher and Brown say it's probably not amusia or poor perception of sound: if so, then bad singers also would have been bad listeners, and good singers would have been good listeners. Instead, there was no difference in the musical perception abilities of either group. It may be that some people with profound amusia also can't sing. But based on these results, in the general population, most bad singers can discern musical notes just fine. They also say it's probably not bad memory. Even when they were accompanying a professional, bad singers still sang badly. Finally, poor motor control doesn't explain the difference either: bad singers have a similar vocal range as good singers.
What bad singers don't seem to have is the coordination between music perception and music production. They're just like the batter who can see a baseball pitch and swing a bat, but still strikes out.
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19 Comments
Add CommentI could have told them this. I know I'm off but I can never adjust, even though I can tune an instrument perfectly. Just can't sing . . .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is me. I can hear a tune, I can reproduce it in my head, I just can't make it come out my mouth in anything approaching the right notes, rhythm or timing. As I told a musical friend of mine, I'm not tone deaf -- I'm just tone dumb.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSometimes, it's just a matter of practice. I never had trouble learning new instruments, but singing a single note on key? Not if my life depended on it. Eventually, though, I got to the point where I could sing passably well in public -- my voice isn't finely tuned, but it can carry a tune nonetheless.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, most of the time. :-)
Classic me - I can hear a tune reasonably well; can clearly hear an off note. I know my own singing is way off -- very flat. I can generally whistle right on, which is shocking to people who have heard me sing. My voice however -- wow. Not only can I not accurately produce a note, I can't produce the note in my head first to then get it out my mouth. Its wrong before it ever gets out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've been saying for years that I'm something much worse than tone deaf...I'm tone mute.
It still doesn't seem to answer the question of why the people that can distingush the tune properly, but can't sing it, THINK they can sing it.... can't they distinguish how poor they are too?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan't carry a tune to save my life or yours ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHave perfect hearing though - can tell you when even one note it off.
Glad to know it isn't just me sucking...
Finally, an reasonable explanation; I can hear the notes, and tell when one is wrong, but have never been able to carry a tune...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTHARRISS:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it has more to due with people being desperate to sing - singing is a joyful sort of thing and everyone wants to be able to do it. You'd be surprised at how well someone can ignore facts when they so choose. Look at the Montauk Monster if you doubt me, lol.
Lol. Personally, I would much rather hear the bad singers try than not sing. I remember being a bad singer as a child, and consciously making an effort to get better, because I loved to sing so much. I think I've improved! So how are we supposed to learn how to be good singers if we don't practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLol. Personally, I would rather hear bad singers sing than not, if it makes them happy. I remember being a bad singer as a child. I could hear the right notes, but I couldn't produce them. I love to sing so much, that I practiced like crazy, and drove my family nuts. Now I've been singing for years, and have even received a few compliments! :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistharriss: Keep in mind that everyone's voice sounds different to them than it does to anyone else. The echo of your own voice in your head can complicate your perception of how you sound to others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisApparently, there's an inhertited grammar for music and math in some deep structure of our brains. This is obvious for speech, which permits any normal human being to reproduce the sounds of any language to which he is exposed in the formative years (impossible afterwards). The difference is not everybody inherits music sensibility. Mozarts are born, not made.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy question is whether anything can to alleviate this condition. I have the ability to hear music, perhaps even exceptionally well, but at the same time I sing off key. I can, for example, often tell who is playing the trumpet or the piano in a jazz band or a classical orchestra, but I can't carry a tune!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBrings me back to 7th grade when our music teacher had us sing notes back to her in order to determine if certain instruments were good choices for us. I did terribly -- but I could definitely hear that my singing was off, in which direction, and by how much. I was pretty bitter. I knew it wasn't a fair test.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe voice can sing only what the ear can listen. this is the Tomatis effect, pubblished by Alfred Tomatis in 1953. This is a new old finding!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen our ears cannot hear certain frequencies, our voice does not contain them either. This is known as TOMATIS EFFECT and was discussed by dr. Alfred Tomatis at the Academy of Science in Paris in the far 1952. The second law is: if we modify the hearing, the voice changes immediately. Singers as Maria Callas and many other had great improvment of their voice through the Tomatis Method which is equally usefull for learning difficulties and to improve the understanding of foreign languages.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYup - I've always said. "I'm not 'tone-deaf', I'm 'tone-mute'" - I can hear the notes just fine, I just can't make them come out of my mouth....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople who sing or play wind instruments often improve when they learn to relax their throats and control their breath better. This has definitely helped me. I would expect people who have been told they sing badly might be so stressed about singing around others that it would tighten their throats and shorten their breath in a harmful way. A vicious circle or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother theory of why some people in musical ensembles sing or play out of tune is that it is a way that they can hear themselves. If they are in tune, they blend in and can't hear their own sound. Conductors try to get people past this by exhorting them to listen to the group and not to themselves.
As a prime example of tone deaf singing, see hear:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cObEiUZKKcY&feature=plcp