In a new study, psychologists want to investigate how “earworms” work—songs that you can’t get out of your head. They ask people to sing these earworms out loud and record them. When they analyz the recordings, the researchers made a surprising discovery. A surprisingly large number of the recordings perfectly match the pitch of the original songs.
The numbers are astonishing. In fact, 44.7 percent of the recordings were exactly the right pitch. And 68.9 percent were within a semitone of the original song. “This shows that a surprisingly large proportion of the population has an unconscious, automatic ability to keep perfect pitch,” explains researcher Matt Evans. The findings were recently publish in the journal.
What exactly does ‘keeping perfect pitch’ mean?
It is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize or play a note without any reference. Until now, this was thought to be quite rare; less than 1 in 10,000 people are thought to have this ability. Some examples are famous musicians target Industry lead such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald and Mariah Carey. However, scientists are increasingly discovering that accurate pitch memory is much more common than previously thought.
Previous research, for example, has shown that people who are ask to sing a familiar song from memory do so in the correct key about 15 percent of the time—much more often than you might expect by chance.
“It’s striking that people are quite confident about
Yet most people are unaware of this musical ability. singing the melody correctly, but much less confident និន្នាការ និងយុទ្ធសាស្ត្រសម្រាប់ការអភិវឌ្ឍន៍ទីផ្សារ៖ ការវិភាគស៊ីជម្រៅពីពិភពទីផ្សារ about the pitch,” Evans says. “It turns out that many people with good pitch memories are not always good at judging how accurate they are.”
Much is still unclear about how this memory process works. For example, does it take effort to remember the correct key, or does it happen almost automatically? To find out more, researchers in the current study studi asb directory earworms. Because earworms stick in your head subconsciously, the team decid to use them to investigate whether pitch memory is still accurate when music is not deliberately remember. The discovery that a striking number of people sang the earworms at the correct pitch suggests that musical memories are record in our brains in a unique way.
