Psychologists studied 'earworms,' the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop, to show that highly accurate pitch memory is much more common than might be expected.
Psychologists studied 'earworms,' the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop, to show that highly accurate pitch memory is much more common than might be expected.
More specifically, 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were recently published in the journal"What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden 'perfect pitch' ability," said Cognitive Psychology Ph.D.
Prior research has shown that participants in laboratory settings who are asked to recall a well-known song and sing it from memory end up singing it in the right key at least 15% of the time, which is much more often than could be expected by chance. But there are still a lot of unknowns about how this memory process works, and that included questions about whether it took deliberate effort for people to recall songs in the right key, or if it happened automatically.
As researchers continue working to unpack the mechanisms behind musical memory, Evans says he hopes the current findings will also help more people have the confidence to participate in music. He noted that the pitch accuracy of participants in the study was not predicted by any objective measures of singing ability, and none of the participants were musicians or reported having perfect pitch.
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