Many people roll their eyes in discomfort when they hear the words catchy tune – right? Is something still sticking? Numerous tips and tricks can be found on the Internet to get rid of the annoying crackle in the body’s own jukebox. If you sing or hum a song while you read, you can compare the pitch of the tune in your mind to the original tune. A study now shows that our memory stores a song with astonishing accuracy – even if it is not consciously remembered, but rather continues to roll around in our minds as a catchy tune. Accordingly, significantly more people than previously thought are able to reproduce catchy tunes with accuracy instinctively – and have a kind of hidden absolute pitch.
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So far, science has believed that about one in 10,000 people have perfect pitch. These people are able to sing a specific note on command without a reference tone or are able to recognize ringing tones. Famous personalities with this gift include Ludwig van Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mariah Carey.
Accurate pitch memory, even with catchy tunes
An example: If someone with perfect pitch is asked to sing a primed A, they hit that note immediately – without having heard any other notes beforehand that they could use as a guide. And yet studies have shown that when subjects were asked to memorize a famous song and sing it from memory, they sang in the correct or nearly correct key – in the same pitch as the original – 15 percent of the time. That’s almost twice what would be expected by chance. In an earlier study, the value was even higher, at 20 percent.
A research team from the University of California – Santa Cruz wanted to know whether people are subconsciously able to hit the perfect pitch or whether they have to make a conscious effort to do so. To find out, they used catchy melodies. These afflictions are an involuntary memory experience. Since catchy melodies occur randomly and their sufferers do not consciously remember them, the researchers were able to find out whether pitch memory is as accurate when a song randomly comes to mind. “The finding that the catchy melodies did indeed closely follow the key of the original song suggests that musical memories and the way they are encoded and retained in our brains may be somewhat unique,” The university says,
“Automatic, hidden perfect pitch”
For the study, 30 participants were randomly asked to sing their current catchy tune and record it on their smartphones throughout the day. The research team received 42 images per person within two weeks. About 45 percent of the recordings matched the original key; about 70 percent deviated from the original by a maximum of one semitone.
“This suggests that a surprisingly large portion of the population has some sort of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch,'” says study leader Matt Evans, a PhD student in cognitive psychology. “Interestingly, if people were asked how they performed this task, they would probably be quite confident that they got the tune right, but they would be much less confident that they sang in the right key,” Evans theorizes. Many people with very good pitch memory can’t even estimate their accuracy, the study leader explains. This may set them apart from people with perfect pitch, as they are also less able to determine the sounds they hear.
Psychology professor Nicholas Davidenko explains that memory researchers believe that long-term memory stores core information for memories. The brain takes shortcuts to represent information. One of them could be that the memory forgets the original key; after all, music sounds similar in different keys. But that’s not the case. “These musical memories are actually highly precise mappings that avoid the typical core formation that occurs in some other areas of long-term memory,” says Davidenko.
Performance is usually better than self-evaluation
Study leader Evans hopes they will encourage people to make more music. None of the test subjects were musicians and the pitch accuracy of the test subjects cannot be used to estimate how well they could sing objectively. Evans makes it clear that many people do not get into singing because they think they can’t do it. One doesn’t have to be a star to make music. “The brain already does some of it automatically and accurately, despite the part of you that thinks you can’t do it.” The results appeared in the journal Music Attention, perception and psychophysics,
If you want to try it out right away, you can find inspiration on music streaming services or in playlists like the one in this list — a selection from ChatGPT4o:
- “YMCA” – Village People (1978)
- “Take On Me” – A-Ha (1984)
- “Macarena” – Los del Rio (1993)
- “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” – Eiffel 65 (1999)
- “Mambo No. 5” – Lou Bega (1999)
- “Dragostea Din Tei” – O-Zone (2003)
- “Call Me Maybe” – Carly Rae Jepsen (2011)
- “Gangnam Style” – PSY (2012)
- “Despacito” – Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee (2017)
- “Blinding Lights” – The Weeknd (2020)
And here’s another cool tip from the editors.
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