Are you “sintunado” (out-of-tune)? A recent University of California Santa Cruz study found that most have perfect pitch without realizing it.
Prior research shows laboratory volunteers asked to recall well-known songs can sing them correctly at least 15% of the time.
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In contrast, people are more likely to sing “earworms” properly, songs that stay in your head automatically on a loop. So keep belting out your favorite pop hits in the shower and have fun!
UC Santa Maria’s perfect pitch study
University of California psychologists wanted to study earworms, so they asked people to sing any they recall. Also, they prompted the volunteers to record themselves singing at random times throughout the day.
The researchers found that many participants matched the pitch of their favorite songs perfectly based on the original songs.
The official UNSC website says 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones. Moreover, 68.9% were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song.
The researchers published their findings in the “Attention, Perception & Psychophysics” journal.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,” explained Cognitive Psychology Ph. D candidate Matt Evans.
Evans led the study with support from Psychology Professor Nicolas Davidenko and undergraduate research assistant Pablo Gaeta.
Evans says that a true perfect pitch is the ability to produce or identify a note once accurately without a reference.
Scientists believe that less than 1 in 10,000 people had it. These include German composer Ludwig van Beethoven and US singer-songwriter Mariah Carey.
However, recent studies like the University of California’s are showing that perfect pitch is more common than previously thought.
“As it turns out, many people with very strong pitch memory may not have very good judgment of their own accuracy, and that may be because they don’t have the labeling ability that comes with true perfect pitch,” Professor Evans stated.
He hopes that his findings will encourage more people to participate in music. The study did not predict the volunteers’ pitch accuracy based on singing ability.
In other words, you don’t need to be special to have perfect pitch. “Your brain is already doing some of it automatically and accurately, despite that part of you that thinks you can’t.”