How to sing in tune
You CAN learn to sing in tune. This article unpacks the process.
Everyone sings out of tune
You’re probably here because you want to learn how to sing in tune. Here’s the most important point I want you to know: There isn’t one single thing I can tell you that will fix out-of-tune singing in 20 minutes. But, I will tell you that you can improve your pitch with practice.
By the way, professionals sing out of tune ALL THE TIME! Here’s just one YouTube result from a search on “out of tune singing compilation.” You may have to listen carefully in a few cases, but live, unprocessed singing is never perfectly in tune.
Why is it difficult to sing in tune? I checked at least a dozen classic books on singing pedagogy—how to teach singing—and guess what?
Almost none of these experts directly discuss how to fix out of tune singing.
I was flummoxed by this, so I decided to see what scientific research there is on musical pitch. Turns out there’s a lot. Everything from 19th century acoustics to modern neurology. In this article I want to give you a sense of the enormous number of processes involved in singing in tune. Then, you can make a decision about what kind of path you would like to pursue in your own singing. That may be simple exercises you can do on your own, seeing an audiologist to get your ears checked, or getting one-on-one voice lessons.
Singing in tune – the Big Picture
Singing in tune and hearing pitches correctly involves many, many processes in the brain. Oliver Sacks puts it this way:
“There are many levels in the brain at which perceptions of music are integrated and many levels, therefore, at which integration may fail or be compromised.” [1]
Whenever I try to think about something with a lot of parts, I need to visualize it. Here’s a chart of the research I read. It maps out all the factors involved in hearing and singing musical pitches:
Figure 1: Factors in hearing musical pitch
Every little box is a concept I found in scientific literature related to musical pitch.
Most of the items at the top of the chart are things you can’t really change, like an injury to your ear, childhood music experience, and so on. Then there are aspects of the tone itself. How loud is it? Is it a complex sound with a rich tone or timbre, or is it a simple sound like a test tone? What is the acoustic of the room like? Muffled or reverberant? This sound is processed by your ear and your brain, and this happens in many places in your brain at once. Your ability to accurately sing that same pitch depends on a lot of those things you can’t change, but also, to a very large degree, on things you can change. The strength of your voice and the efficiency with which you use your breath are examples of things you can change.
This chart is likely incomplete. You just wouldn’t believe how much research there is! In the future, I’ll unpack more of these specific areas. If you have any questions, though, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to find you the answer.
You’re reading this article because you want to improve your singing in tune, so I think it will be helpful to discuss the stuff you can change…the training part of the process. Before I do that, I’ll mention briefly that tone-deafness, or “amusia,” is exceedingly rare. I’ve written a separate article about that, which you can read here.
Improve Your Pitch with Training
“One’s ear, one’s cochlea, cannot improve as one gets older, but…the brain itself can improve its ability to make use of whatever auditory information it has. This is the power of cerebral plasticity.”
As I said at the beginning of the article, I checked a dozen different books on vocal pedagogy, and very few of them directly addressed how to sing in tune.
Weird! You’d think that singing in tune would be a major part of a book on teaching singing, right? I have a theory about that, which I’ll explain in a moment.
Science has proven many times over that people with musical training have higher skill with pitch, or singing in tune [3], [4], [5]. Musical training actually alters your brain [6]. This can lead to a more accurate brain “map” of pitch and a greater ability to hear tones in your mind [7], [8], [9]. On the other hand, many poor-pitch singers hear the tone accurately but have not yet developed the fine motor skills needed to sing in tune [10], [11]. Brain plasticity, which is in the big chart above, means that your brain responds to training, which improves your singing, which elevates your training, which leads to a feedback loop of increasingly accurate pitch.
Figure 2: A developmental “feedback loop” of improvements in singing. Singing improves through work rather than simply occurring as a byproduct of development over time.
In one of the few singing books that specifically mentions fixing out-of-tune singing, Richard Miller suggests that pitch problems come about for two main reasons:
vowel mismatching
unbalanced airflow [12]
Each vowel has a unique sound or timbre, and the ears of beginning singers can be easily confused when they sing multiple vowels in succession. This is pretty much always going to happen in any normal singing, unless you’re singing something without words, like Rachmaninoff’s beautiful “Vocalise.” It’s also a reason many vocal exercises are based on a single vowel.
We also know that we hear pitch more accurately when the tone is richer [13], [14], [15]. Training will typically create a richer tone, one that has more acoustic energy in upper harmonics. Think of it as the difference between Michael Keaton’s two characters in the movie “Birdman.” Birdman’s voice, which appears as voiceover, is gravelly, whereas Riggan Thomson’s is clear. The clear voice is richer because the breath is energized and well-coordinated with the tone. That’s partly what Miller is referring to with “unbalanced airflow.”
About the only other explanation for out-of-tune singing I could find in singing pedagogy books comes from Cornelius Reid. He just says this it’s due to “imperfect muscular coordination of the vocal mechanism.” [16]
So, two major writers are basically saying that singing in tune comes from “vowel matching” and “coordinating breath and muscles.” Sounds pretty basic, right? In fact, vowel work and coordination are the foundation of any singing training, and these will affect the entire voice, not just tuning.
This is why I think I couldn’t find much direct advice on “how to sing in tune” in those singing pedagogy books. These books are written by experienced singing teachers, and they know that there isn’t one single exercise that is a silver bullet to fix everyone’s pitch problems. In fact, focusing only on pitch at the expense of general voice development probably won’t work. The voice is a holistic thing. If you seek improvement in one area, it’s likely that you’ll want to train the whole voice.
In summary: Train your whole voice, and your pitch will improve.
You CAN learn to sing in tune
I realize I just touched on a few of the boxes in the flowchart. Like I said before, I’ll save some for later articles. Mostly, I want you to understand that singing in tune involves a lot of stuff going on in your ears, brain, and your voice.
Highly skilled singers don’t necessarily know all this stuff. They just sing in tune (most of the time!). Believe it or not, pitch correction circuitry, popularly known as “auto-tune,” is applied to nearly every commercial recording these days.
Experienced singing teachers might know more of the research I mentioned in this article, but they certainly don’t need to know all of it in order to train your voice. If you’re a beginner, a skilled singing teacher who hears your actual singing is in the best position to recommend a training approach. You can find a singing teacher in your area by going here.
Notes
[1] Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), chap. Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysphonia.
[2] Sacks, chap. In Living Stereo.
[3] Mari Tervaniemi et al., “Pitch Discrimination Accuracy in Musicians vs Nonmusicians: An Event-Related Potential and Behavioral Study,” Experimental Brain Research 161, no. 1 (February 1, 2005): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-2044-5.
[4] Liat Kishon-Rabin et al., “Pitch Discrimination: Are Professional Musicians Better than Non-Musicians?,” Journal of Basic and Clinical Physiology and Pharmacology 12 (February 1, 2001): 125–43, https://doi.org/10.1515/JBCPP.2001.12.2.125.
[5] C. Micheyl et al., “Difference in Cochlear Efferent Activity between Musicians and Non-Musicians,” Neuroreport 8, no. 4 (March 3, 1997): 1047–50, https://doi.org/10.1097/00001756-199703030-00046.
[6] Krista L. Hyde et al., “Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 10 (March 11, 2009): 3019–25, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5118-08.2009.
[7] Christo Pantev et al., “Representational Cortex in Musicians : Plastic Alterations in Response to Musical Practice,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 930, no. 1 (2001): 300–314.
[8] Daniel J. Bosnyak, Robert A. Eaton, and Larry E. Roberts, “Distributed Auditory Cortical Representations Are Modified When Non-Musicians Are Trained at Pitch Discrimination with 40 Hz Amplitude Modulated Tones,” Cerebral Cortex 14, no. 10 (October 1, 2004): 1088–99, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhh068.
[9] Hans Menning, Larry E. Roberts, and Christo Pantev, “Plastic Changes in the Auditory Cortex Induced by Intensive Frequency Discrimination Training,” NeuroReport 11, no. 4 (March 20, 2000): 817–22.
[10] Hutchins S and Peretz I, “Amusics Can Imitate What They Cannot Discriminate.,” Brain and Language 123, no. 3 (October 30, 2012): 234–39, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2012.09.011.
[11] 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.
[12] See Richard Miller, Solutions for Singers: Tools for Performers and Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 228–29 for a full discussion.
[13] Brian C. J. Moore, Brian R. Glasberg, and Michael J. Shailer, “Frequency and Intensity Difference Limens for Harmonics within Complex Tones,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 75, no. 2 (February 1, 1984): 550–61, https://doi.org/10.1121/1.390527.
[14] Dennis H. Klatt, “Discrimination of Fundamental Frequency Contours in Synthetic Speech: Implications for Models of Pitch Perception,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 53, no. 1 (January 1, 1973): 8–16, https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1913333.
[15] James L. Flanagan and Michael G. Saslow, “Pitch Discrimination for Synthetic Vowels,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 30, no. 5 (May 1, 1958): 435–42, https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1909640.
[16] Cornelius L. Reid, Bel Canto: Principles and Practices, 5th printing (New York: The Joseph Patelson Music House, 1990), 141.
