Picture this: you’re out on the town, having the time of your life with a group of your closest friends. One thing leads to another, and your merry little band finds themselves singing karaoke—a classic activity for a stress-free night.
After a few strong openers from the musically inclined among you, it’s your turn to sing. You pull up a song of your choice—I’m Still Standing by Elton John—it was the first thing you could think of after racking your fatigue-addled mind. Approaching the microphone, you clear your throat and begin to perform…
…And it goes terribly. Your so-called friends cover their ears in disgrace, patrons from around the rather sparse karaoke bar look up to marvel at the anomaly before them, and you’re filled with a debilitating sense of shame. As the final notes leave the speakers, you toddle back to your seat, before one of those traitors sends a playful jab your way:
“Geez, I didn’t know you were that tone-deaf!”
Wait. Tone-deaf?
You might not be musically inclined, but you’ve certainly never been diagnosed with amusia. All the niche facts you’ve learned scrolling through social media seem to prove their worth to you, and you strike back with a powerful retort:
“…Actually, I’m not tone-deaf. I don’t have amusia; I’m just… bad at singing.”
The crowd goes silent—not just because that was a weird response, but because you’ve accidentally stumbled upon a rather common misconception in everyday conversation. When people accuse themselves or others of being “tone-deaf”, they typically mean that the person in question struggles to sing in tune. Scientifically, though, the picture is much more complicated.
Poor-pitch singing and amusia (a condition often associated with what people call “true tone-deafness”) are not the same thing! Some people struggle to reproduce pitches accurately despite perceiving the differences between them (Pfordresher & Brown, 2007), while others have difficulty perceiving musical pitches in the first place. These difficulties can overlap with each other, but they aren’t interchangeable. That begs the question, then… where does typical bad singing (like yours) end, and where does a genuine disorder of musical perception begin?
The most logical avenue to begin our investigation asks how singing even works. Much like speaking, singing involves three interacting physical components: the lungs, the vocal folds, and the vocal tract. Our lungs provide the air we need for vocalization, after which this air is modulated by our vocal folds. Finally, our vocal tracts fine-tune the frequency and timing properties of those sounds, creating the noises we come to know as the sung voice (Bella et al., 2011).
There are a variety of ways to judge “singing proficiency”. Just to list off a few: first, you could have someone sing a well-known song, either in its entirety or by its melody. You could present someone with a single pitch, an interval, or a melody and ask them to imitate it. You could even ask expert musicians to give their subjective ratings of someone’s recorded voice (Bella et al., 2011).
With the perfunctory details out of the way, we can begin your “diagnosis”—and so we’ll present some possible conclusions behind your terrible performance!
- Give yourself some more credit!
A survey given to 1,000 university students revealed that almost 60% of them believed they could not accurately imitate melodies. More than that, about 17% of the student population declared themselves as “tone-deaf individuals”, reporting that they cannot sing proficiently (Bella et al., 2011).
Contrary to their popular belief, though, a systematic assessment of singing proficiency in the general population concluded that 85% to 90% of individuals can sing in tune (give or take a few percentage points, when considering the different ways to judge singing proficiency) (Bella et al., 2011).
While it’s far too general to claim that it’s simply an issue in confidence, there’s a chance that you simply don’t have the best perception of yourself. If you concern yourself with the thought that “you’re not a good singer”, you could be unnecessarily holding yourself back!
- You’re a poor-pitch singer…
Let’s suppose that you’ve worked on your self-image. While you might look like a rockstar while belting out your favorite Beatles song, what if you still have a pitch deficit while singing? Well, we’d call that a case of “poor-pitch singing”. The next steps, of course, are to figure out what causes this!
Research has proposed four potential classes of causes: perceptual deficits, motor deficits, imitative deficits, and memory deficits (Pfordresher & Brown, 2007).
Perceptual deficits predict that poor-pitch singing is a result of being unable to perceive relationships between pitches, while motor deficits argue that poor-pitch singing results from a lack of precision in motor control.
Imitative deficits suggest that the problem lies when mapping pitch information to the appropriate motor actions, while memory deficits reason that poor-pitch singing comes from the vague understanding of musical structure in memory (Pfordresher & Brown, 2007).
It’s hard to definitively say what can be done if you’re a poor-pitch singer. Even still, being able to attribute your poor pitch to one of these four classes of causes can make it easier for you to plan your next steps!
- You have amusia.
If even poor-pitch singing is too generous to describe your abilities, then perhaps you might have amusia. Amusia is characterized by a deficit in perceiving tune, melody, or rhythm (Szyfter & Wigowska-Sowińska, 2021). It can be congenital—which arises from birth—or acquired, which happens as a result of trauma to the brain.
Musical inputs begin as sound waves, which are transformed within your inner ear into electric signals. Those same electric signals are processed across both the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Within amusic individuals, however, research has shown that this process can happen with diminished communication between the hemispheres of the brain. This is one of the many possible reasons behind the issues characteristic of amusia (Szyfter & Wigowska-Sowińska, 2021).
If you don’t particularly align with either of the first two “diagnoses”, though, don’t fret. There are a lot more potential reasons behind your poor singing…
- What if you’re just special?
…In a bad way, to clarify. That is to say that we can’t give you the most specific of reasons (mostly because this is a static article, and we can’t parse through the minutiae of your brain), and perhaps you’ll just have to live with the knowledge that you’re terrible at singing.
That isn’t that bad, though. Living with that reality will only bog you down if you let it, after all. (Out of all the ways we expected this article to end, a rather shoddy attempt at a motivational speech wasn’t one of them). In the end, that karaoke night is what you make of it… and you’ll surely make it something to remember, right?
Reference List
Bella, S. D., Berkowska, M., & Sowiński, J. (2011). Disorders of pitch production in tone deafness. Frontiers in Psychology, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00164
Pfordresher, P. Q., & Brown, S. (2007). Poor-pitch singing in the absence of “tone deafness.” Music Perception, 25(2), 95–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2007.25.2.95
Szyfter, K., & Wigowska-Sowińska, J. (2021). Congenital amusia—Pathology of musical disorder. Journal of Applied Genetics, 63(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13353-021-00662-z
