New research from the University of California has shown that many people have a hidden talent: they can actually sing perfectly, at least if they choose a song they know well.
The study analyzed the karaoke skills of 30 participants and found startling results: Nearly half of them had zero margin of error on pitch. In other words, they sang in tune. Nearly 70 percent were within a semitone of the original.
This is pretty clever, because so-called perfect pitch, or the ability to hit the right note without a reference, typically occurs in fewer than 1 in 10,000 people. “This shows that a surprisingly large portion of the population has some kind of automatic, hidden, perfect pitch,” says psychologist Matt Evans of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The researchers chose earwigs as their research subject because they are an involuntary form of memory. People don’t usually consciously remember these songs, but they are well stored in their memory.
Interestingly, many people with good memories seem unable to judge their own accuracy very well. Evans suspects this is because they don’t have absolute pitch, and so can’t hear whether something sounds perfect or not.
The research provides new insights into how memory and music interact and shows that there are more innate musical skills hidden in our brains than we thought.
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