A group of psychologists from UC Santa Cruz has uncovered an intriguing musical ability that many people possess without even realizing it.
This hidden talent was discovered during a study on “earworms,” those catchy songs that get stuck in your head and seem to play on repeat.
To explore this phenomenon, the researchers asked participants to sing any earworms they were experiencing and record themselves on their phones whenever prompted at random times throughout the day.
When they analyzed the recordings, they found something remarkable: a large number of people sang the songs in the exact pitch as the original versions.
Specifically, 44.7% of the recordings matched the original pitch perfectly, and 68.9% were within just one semitone of the original song.
These findings, published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, suggest that many people have a kind of automatic, hidden “perfect pitch” ability.
Matt Evans, a Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. candidate who led the study, explained that while true perfect pitch—where someone can accurately identify or produce a note without any reference—is extremely rare, many people have a surprisingly strong memory for pitch without even realizing it.
“If you asked people how they thought they did, they’d probably feel confident about the melody but less sure about whether they were singing in the right key,” Evans said. Yet, the study shows that many people have a natural ability to remember and reproduce pitch accurately, even if they don’t think they do.
True perfect pitch is incredibly rare, with fewer than one in 10,000 people possessing it. Famous musicians like Beethoven and Mariah Carey are known for having this skill.
However, the UC Santa Cruz study suggests that while true perfect pitch might be rare, accurate pitch memory is much more common than previously thought.
Previous research had shown that people asked to sing a well-known song from memory often did so in the correct key about 15% of the time—much more often than chance would suggest. But what wasn’t clear was whether this pitch memory required deliberate effort or if it happened automatically.
This is where the earworms came in handy. Since earworms are an involuntary type of musical memory, the researchers used them to see if people still sang accurately when they weren’t trying to recall the music on purpose.
The findings showed that even in these cases, people’s pitch memory was highly accurate, suggesting that musical memories might be encoded in a uniquely precise way in our brains.
Professor Nicolas Davidenko, who collaborated on the study, noted that while our brains often take shortcuts in other types of long-term memory, musical memories appear to be different. They seem to retain very accurate details, like the original key of a song, rather than just the general idea or “gist.”
As researchers continue to study musical memory, Evans hopes these findings will encourage more people to participate in music. The study showed that pitch accuracy wasn’t linked to any formal singing ability, and none of the participants were professional musicians. This means you don’t need to have special skills to enjoy and engage with music.
“Music and singing are uniquely human experiences,” Evans said. “Even if you think you can’t sing, your brain is already doing some of it automatically and accurately. You don’t have to be a superstar to make music—you’re more capable than you might think.”
