Most people have perfect pitch – K-News

Even if you are told not to play music, your brain can easily ignore it. Psychologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted an experiment on “catchy songs” and found that the human brain automatically performs some important functions required to remember and accurately reproduce the melody. “Around the World” wrote that according to scientists, a considerable number of ordinary people are not outstanding musicians or have never learned music, but they show signs of absolute pitch.

However, recent studies have increasingly found that accurate pitch memory is much more common than is usually thought. So, in a previous work, volunteers in the laboratory sang songs that were familiar to them, that they wanted to play the most and that they remembered the most. The result was that in 15% of the cases, they played the melody in the correct key.

In the new study, the team decided to move away from the laboratory setting and observe how people remember the pitch of a sound without specifically selecting well-known music, but rather automatically remembering the pitch of the sound in a usual natural environment. For this purpose, “sticky” melodies are ideal, which pop up involuntarily in the memory, get stuck in the mind and play automatically in a circle.

Participants were asked to report any intrusive ringtones they experienced and to record how they sang into their phones. When the scientists analyzed the recordings, the results showed that the pitch of the original song was most perfectly reproduced.

“We found that 44.7% of the recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were within ±1 semitone of the original song. This suggests that a surprisingly large proportion of the population has automatic, potentially perfect pitch abilities,” wrote Matt Evans, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology at UC Santa Cruz.

The researchers clarified that none of the participants were musicians, had any objective measures of singing ability, and did not report having good hearing. When asked to rate their performance on the task, none of the participants were confident they were singing in the right key, Evans said. It turns out that these people with good pitch memories tend to rate their own musical abilities poorly.

This is because they cannot “mark” their own accuracy, but this is inherent in professionals with true absolute pitch.

The results of the study suggest that there is something unique about our musical memories and the way they are encoded and maintained in the brain. Because in the usual “memory circuit”, the brain would simply ignore insignificant information such as subtle differences in pitch. But for some reason, he did not ignore it, so our musical memories become “highly accurate representations.” Experts say this contradicts their typical formation in long-term memory areas.

Scientists say the discovery could help many people gain the confidence to start playing music. The research shows that the brain automatically does some tasks for us, completely ignoring the fact that you think you can’t, or someone tells you you can’t.