Am I tone deaf?
The answer is almost certainly “no.” With the exception of a very small percentage of the population, research has shown again and again that music is a universal human ability.
You probably know someone who describes themselves as tone deaf. In fact, it’s likely you know more than one such person.
Perhaps you're reading this article because you are one of these people.
Actually, “tone deaf” is not a medical diagnosis. The clinical term is “amusia.” Amusia is a blanket term describing a whole bunch of different situations. “A-” means “without” and “-musia,” well, you can guess what that means. This condition includes not only poor pitch perception but also faulty rhythm, as well as much stranger things like a piano sounding like a “hammer on sheet metal.” [1]
A recent, large study of 20,000 people found that only 1.5% of the population has some form of congenital amusia—an impediment you’re born with—so it’s pretty rare [2]. Additional cases of amusia acquired from brain injury are even rarer. Despite the rarity of real tone-deafness, a staggering 59% of respondents in one survey said they couldn’t sing [3].
So, what's going on? If only a tiny number of people have a true musical deficiency, then why do so many think they do?
Why you think you can’t sing
Somewhere along the way, some of us begin to believe that we're tone deaf. Does the following story sounds familiar to you?
“They got you to stand up to sing something and I croaked out something and he said ‘thanks a lot – go away’ and that was it. It was just a traumatic experience, and you thought ‘well, I’m not a singer, I know that now,’ and you’re hurt naturally, because you just thought that you could sing and now you know you can’t and that’s it.
– “James,” recounting school choir audition when he was fourteen [4]
One problem with this story is that the coordination required for singing, though it generally develops before the age of 11, may not appear until 14 [5]. It can develop earlier. It usually does. But during these critical years, children develop at their own pace. Any early childhood specialist knows this, but so many people believe that singing is inborn that the myth is perpetuated.
The author, before his career in baseball was tragically cut short.
Just like so many other abilities in young kids, some can sing and some can't. But wait a year and it'll be totally different.
I’m convinced that this is why I dropped out of baseball. I had played on the neighborhood tee ball team for three seasons, and it was time for me to move up to baseball. But after the first practice, the coach called my mother and said, “We’re not sure Oliver’s ready for baseball. It may be a good idea for him to stay in tee ball.”
Rather than suffer the humiliation of being “held back a grade,” I quit. It wasn’t until years later after I graduated from college that I actually hit a baseball in mid-air for the first time in my life.
Now, I’m pretty sure that year of baseball wouldn’t have made me a Babe Ruth, but I finally learned that I can hit a baseball. It’s the same with singing. There are child prodigies and late bloomers alike, and a skilled teacher meets you at your level. We all grow at our own pace, and we must be encouraged along the way if we’re to realize our potential.
“Discrimination can be brought about by the sympathetic teaching of singing. This will take account of the singing ability or lack of it, which the child brings to the lesson. And the teacher will start from where the child is vocally rather than from where he thinks the child ought to be.”
Why people sing out of tune
Although it’s only a tiny percentage of people who are actually tone-deaf, about 10 – 15% of people don’t naturally sing in tune [7]. If you have difficulty singing in tune, there are a number things that would explain this:
Poor motor coordination
Errors with auditory feedback
Inaccurate musical memory [8]
All of these things can be addressed with training. Motor coordination is important. Like a golf player perfecting her swing with repetition, singing requires fine adjustments of muscles in your throat, chest, abdomen, and face.
All singers use auditory feedback to correct pitch, but skilled singers rely more on muscular sensations to sing in tune [9]. Beginning singers rely mostly on what they hear while singing. A beginner, by definition, hasn’t used his singing muscles very much, so these muscular sensations, being new, aren’t yet a reliable guide.
And beginners often sing out of tune when they haven’t thoroughly internalized a new melody in their memory. Again, this is something that practice can easily fix.
Another cause of poor-pitch singing is one that singing teachers often encounter: negative self-belief. If you think of yourself as tone deaf you probably don't engage in musical activities as much as other people do. This leads to a reduced experience in listening and making music [10]. In this case, what you need is someone to prove to you that you do have musical skills.
All humans are musical
The vast majority of humans score in the normal range on the standard amusia test, the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia. This is an hour-long session, normally given by a neuropsychologist, in which you listen to various musical examples for identification [11].
In one study, people who were not professional musicians only required four to eight hours of training to perform in the same range as professional musicians on a pitch discrimination exercise [12].
Most people are able to sing with correct rhythm and with accurate pitch [13], and singing proficiency is normally distributed in the population in general [14].
In other words, it is simply not true that music is a special talent only for a few people.
But still, many people refer to themselves as “tone deaf.” As I said earlier, that term has no clinical meaning. Because the term tone deaf is such a fuzzy idea in most people's minds, some writers have called for it to be abolished!
“The vague and virtually meaningless term ‘tone deaf’ should be avoided because it encourages students to be incorrectly labeled as hopeless.” [15].
We tend to think of tone deafness as a lifelong condition, but we know now that your brain is capable of changing throughout your entire life.[16] Plus, singing is a natural and innate behavior. All infants sing soon after a birth [17]. Mothers sing to their infants universally across cultures and continents [18]. Children reproduce recognizable songs as early as 18 months [19], and singing accuracy appears between the ages of five and eleven [20].
Music and singing are developmental skills. Instead of thinking “I either have it or I don’t,” we should think “How much can my skills grow?” Except for that 1.5%, everyone can sing.
Notes
[1] Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), chap. Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysharmonia.
[2] Isabelle Peretz and Dominique T. Vuvan, “Prevalence of Congenital Amusia,” European Journal of Human Genetics 25, no. 5 (May 2017): 625–30, https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2017.15.
[3] Peter Q. Pfordresher and Steven Brown, “Poor-Pitch Singing in the Absence of Tone Deafness,” Music Perception 25, no. 2 (December 1, 2007): 95–115, https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2007.25.2.95.
[4] Susan Dyer Knight, “A Study of Adult ‘non-Singers’ in Newfoundland” (Ph.D., Institute of Education, University of London, 2010), https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10006515/.
[5] Arnold Bentley, “Monotones”: A Comparison with “Normal” Singers in Terms of Incidence and Musical Abilities., Music Education Research Papers 1 (London: Novello, 1968).
[6] Graham F. Welch, “Poor Pitch Singing: A Review of the Literature,” Psychology of Music 7, no. 1 (1979): 50–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/030573567971006.
[7] Pfordresher and Brown, “Poor-Pitch Singing in the Absence of Tone Deafness”; Simone Dalla Bella, Jean-François Giguère, and Isabelle Peretz, “Singing Proficiency in the General Population,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121, no. 2 (February 2007): 1182–89, https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2427111.
[8] Pfordresher and Brown, “Poor-Pitch Singing in the Absence of Tone Deafness.”
[9] Cohen, A. J., Levitin, D., and Kleber, B., “Brain Mechanisms Underlying Singing.,” in Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing: Vol I, Development, ed. F. A. Russo, B. Ilari, and A. J. Cohen (Routledge, 2020), 79–86.
[10] Karen J. Wise and John A. Sloboda, “Establishing an Empirical Profile of Self-Defined ‘Tone Deafness’: Perception, Singing Performance and Self-Assessment:,” Musicae Scientiae, March 1, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1177/102986490801200102.
[11] Isabelle Peretz, Annie Sophie Champod, and Krista Hyde, “Varieties of Musical Disorders. The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 999 (November 2003): 58–75, https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1284.006.
[12] Christophe Micheyl et al., “Influence of Musical and Psychoacoustical Training on Pitch Discrimination,” Hearing Research 219, no. 1 (September 1, 2006): 36–47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2006.05.004.
[13] Dalla Bella, Giguère, and Peretz, “Singing Proficiency in the General Population.”
[14] Dalla Bella, Giguère, and Peretz.
[15] Daniel Kazez, “The Myth of Tone Deafness,” Music Educators Journal 71, no. 8 (1985): 46–47.
[16] M. C. Pellicciari et al., “Increased Cortical Plasticity in the Elderly: Changes in the Somatosensory Cortex after Paired Associative Stimulation,” Neuroscience 163, no. 1 (September 29, 2009): 266–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2009.06.013.
[17] Magdalena Berkowska and Simone Dalla Bella, “Acquired and Congenital Disorders of Sung Performance: A Review,” Advances in Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 69–83, https://doi.org/10.2478/v10053-008-0068-2.
[18] Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor, “Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs,” in Advances in Infancy Research, vol. 12 (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998), 43–78.
[19] Graham F. Welch, “Singing and Vocal Development,” in The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development (New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, 2006), 311–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198530329.003.0016.
[20] Dalla Bella, Giguère, and Peretz, “Singing Proficiency in the General Population”; W. Jay Dowling, “15 - The Development of Music Perception and Cognition,” in The Psychology of Music (Second Edition), ed. Diana Deutsch, Cognition and Perception (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), 603–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012213564-4/50016-0.
