Study: Brain draws exact picture of catchy tunes

More people than expected hit the right key when singing catchy tunes, a study shows. Talent does not play a decisive role here.

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Child holds a radio over his head, from which notation characters come out

According to a study, people have a hidden, absolute sense of hearing - regardless of their musical education.

(Image: Shutterstock.com/Sunny studio)

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Even the word "earworm" makes many people roll their eyes in pain - well? Is something sticking already? There are numerous tips and tricks on the Internet on how to get rid of the annoying jump in the body's own jukebox. If you are already singing or humming along to a song while reading, you can compare the pitch of the melody in your head with the original. A study now suggests that our memory stores a song with astonishing precision - even if it is not consciously recalled, but instead circles in our head as an earworm. This means that significantly more people can spontaneously accurately reproduce earworms than previously assumed - and have a kind of hidden absolute pitch.

Until now, scientists assumed that around one in 10,000 people had what is known as absolute pitch. These people can sing a certain tone on command without having a reference tone or recognizing a sounding tone. Famous personalities with this gift include Ludwig van Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald and Mariah Carey.

An example: If a person with absolute pitch memory is asked to sing a pitched A, they will hit this note straight away - without having heard any other note beforehand to guide them. And yet studies have shown that test subjects who are asked to remember a familiar song and sing it from memory sing in the correct or almost correct key in 15 percent of cases - i.e. at the same pitch as the original. This is almost twice as much as would be expected by chance. In an earlier study, this figure was even higher than 20 percent.

A research team from the University of California – Santa Cruz now wanted to know whether people can subconsciously hit the right pitch, or whether they have to make a conscious effort to do so. To find out, they made use of earwigs. These pests are an involuntary memory experience. As earwigs occur randomly and their victims do not consciously recall them, the researchers were able to find out whether the pitch memory is still as accurate when a song pops up randomly in the head. "The findings that earworms actually followed the key of the original song very closely suggests that musical memories and the way they are encoded and maintained in our brains may be something unique", the university shares.

For the study, the 30 participants were randomly asked throughout the day to sing their current earworm and record it with their smartphone. The research team received up to 42 recordings per person within two weeks. Just under 45 percent of the recordings matched the key of the original; almost 70 percent deviated from the original by no more than a semitone.

"What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability", says Matt Evans, head of the study and doctoral student in cognitive psychology Matt Evans. "Interestingly, if you were to ask people how they thought they did in this task, they would probably be pretty confident that they had the melody right, but they would be much less certain that they were singing in the right key", Evans suspects. Many people with an excellent pitch memory are not as good at estimating their accuracy, the study leader explains further. This may distinguish them from people with absolute pitch, as they can also determine the tones they hear.

Memory researchers assume that the long-term memory stores the core information for memories, psychology professor Nicolas Davidenko explains. The brain takes shortcuts to map information. One of these could be that the memory forgets the original key; after all, music also sounds similar in different keys. However, this is not the case. "These musical memories are actually highly precise images that escape the typical nucleus formation that takes place in some other areas of long-term memory," says Davidenko.

Study leader Evans hopes to encourage people to make more music. None of the test subjects were musicians, and the pitch accuracy of the test subjects could not be predicted by how well they could objectively sing. Evans makes it clear that many people don't get involved in singing because they think they can't do it. But nobody has to be a star to make music. "The brain already does some of it automatically and accurately, despite the part of you that thinks you can't." The results were published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics.

If you want to try it out, you can find inspiration in playlists on music streaming services or in this list - a selection from ChatGPT4o:

  • "YMCA" - Village People (1978)
  • "Take On Me" - a-ha (1984)
  • "Macarena" - Los del Río (1993)
  • "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" - Eiffel 65 (1999)
  • "Mambo No. 5" - Lou Bega (1999)
  • "Dragostea Din Tei" - O-Zone (2003)
  • "Call Me Maybe" - Carly Rae Jepsen (2011)
  • "Gangnam Style" - PSY (2012)
  • "Despacito" - Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee (2017)
  • "Blinding Lights" - The Weeknd (2020)

And here's another catchy tune tip from the editors.

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This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.