Turns out there’s a real difference between being tone deaf and not being a good singer. Who knew?
By: Rachel Cooper
I got a karaoke machine for my tenth birthday. And of course it came with every High School Musical sing-a-long track for movies one, two, and three. My birthday party that year was a girls’ slumber party with 15 of my closest screaming friends, all of them fans of Troy and Gabriella. I was singing into the microphone when suddenly my best friend called out “I’m glad you’re sporty. It really makes up for how bad your singing is.” I was humiliated. I blinked back tears.
From then on I told everyone that I was tone deaf. Elementary school music class when my classmates stared because I missed a note? “Oh, sorry. I’m tone deaf.” Bus ride sing-alongs on the way to tennis matches and soccer games? “I’m tone deaf. Good thing I’m athletic right?” I used tone deaf as an excuse for every badly sung tune. That was, until I was in my best friend’s FJ cruiser singing poorly when I used the same excuse. Then, I got a question I’d never heard before: Is tone deaf actually a condition?
I’d always assumed it just meant that I was bad at singing. It turns out, it’s a whole lot more complicated. So I set out to learn everything I could about tone deafness.
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Tone deafness or using its technical term, amusia, is “the inability to recognize musical notes or to reproduce them.” It can be present at birth or acquired later in life from brain damage. According to an article published by Harvard Medical School in 2007, 1 in 20 people truly have amusia. Most people who claim tone deafness can discriminate between pitches and tell notes apart. But they lack talent or musical training or the ability to transfer what they hear to the pitch that they sing.
I wanted to see which one of these I was. So I took an online test through Musical U, an online website run by musicians dedicated to teaching people about music and helping them become more musical, that assessed my ability to hear differences between musical notes. The test would play two sounds and I had to determine if one sound was higher than the other, lower than the other, or the same pitch. The test examined basic pitch discrimination ability, not how well I can sing. I made a 36/36 on the tone deaf test showing that I can hear the differences in notes.
In short, I am not tone deaf. I can hear differences in pitches and recognize the differences in musical notes. My ears work great I just cannot connect my voice to what I hear, and as I now know - tone deafness is primarily an ear issue, not a voice issue. The ears make up 80 percent of singing in tune, so if I could hear, why couldn’t I sing?
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According to Musical U, vocal control is important in singing well, but it is only 20 percent of singing in tune. If I change the tone of my voice to be higher or lower, then I can control some of my pitch. And to find the right pitch when I’m singing, I practice hitting the notes right the first time instead of just singing until I hit a right note.
The experts at Musical U say to figure out what the right note is first. So I listened for it amongst the people I was singing with and heard it in my head when I was singing alone. But how do I train my ears to hear these right notes? There are several ways to train your ears.
First, you must understand pitch ear training. Pitch ear training is honing your sense of pitch or how high or low a note is. In order to do this, sing back a note you hear. Match your pitch with the song. I did this with a digital tuner app on my phone so I could know if I was singing too high or too low. And then practice, practice, practice!
Second, practice audiation, the imagining of music in your head. It’s the musical equivalent of visualization. Try to play your favorite song in your head. You may not remember every note, but the more you practice playing it in your head, the more clearly you will remember musical notes and pitches. Imagining music makes your brain remember a song and connect its notes with your voice when you sing. Audiation makes your brain aware of every pitch in a song and teaches your brain and ears what a song should sound like before you go to sing it.
Lastly, actively listen to songs and other people when they sing. Do not focus so much on the words to songs or how you think you sound. Listen to the pitches of others and the musical notes behind the lyrics.
I had no idea if the note coming out of my mouth was the right pitch, so I had to practice listening to the notes I was singing to see if I was hitting the right pitch. I listened to the note coming out of my mouth versus the note coming out of my roommate’s mouth to see if they were the same note. I also recorded myself singing and compared it to the song to see if my note was the same. I even attempted to blend my note that I was singing with the notes in the songs. My notes still aren’t right and the same as the notes in songs but at least now I can hear that my notes aren’t perfect.
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I tried many of these tactics over a couple of weeks to improve my singing ability. It is definitely a process but I’m beginning to be able to hear when I do not hit the right notes when I’m singing. Unfortunately, I still can’t sing but I am working on, at the very least, being able to match pitches with what I hear. It’s getting better. My roommate (who is musically proficient and plays many instruments) told me today that my notes were much closer to the notes in a song.
After my research and taking the tone deafness tests and knowing what I now know, I don’t think I am going to be able to hide behind tone deafness anymore. I could not look my best friend in the face today and tell him that I am tone deaf now knowing that I am not. So I’ll tell him that I was wrong. I’m not tone deaf, I’m just a bad singer who is working on matching my notes to real notes in songs. I will just continue practicing active listening and pitch matching so that I won’t embarrass myself too much ever again. But honestly, I don’t really care if I’m not a great singer, and that’s okay too.