Tonal Knowledge and Embracing Singing in the Shower
Have you ever found yourself, in the middle of an unrelated task like cooking or cleaning, humming a tune to yourself? Not necessarily one that’s been stuck in your head or from your favorite Top 40/indie rock/Baroque/R&B/post modal hard bop track — but instead, a melody that kind of comes out of nowhere?
If you’re raising your hand, you’re not alone. Humans are known to randomly create songs and spontaneously improvise sung melodies. In fact, one survey of undergraduate students showed that 74% of participants indicated they did exactly this when alone and not already listening to music (Weiss & Peretz, 2022). I know that I am personally guilty of this — when I was a kid, this was often something I did in the face of a particularly excellent meal, like Lunchables.
Sublime dining aside, you may be surprised to find that there is a remarkable amount of structure that underlies these seemingly random phrases and licks. When we take a look at this idea from a neuroscientific perspective, it becomes clear that a lack of musical training does not mean an inability to reproduce proper, musical form. Interestingly, it turns out that asking people to improvise melodies in this sort of way is revealing of this underlying structure.
Researchers Michael W. Weiss and Isabelle Peretz conducted a study where 33 Canadian adult participants sang 28 of these improvised vocal melodies. 15 of the total 33 comprised a control group consisting of those without any musical training or experience. The remaining 18 participants had all been diagnosed with a condition known as congenital amusia, which is essentially just tone deafness. They either sang in response to a prompt indicating a particular quality (i.e. a happy song, or a sad song, etc.) or to continue a partially developed, pre-existing melody. To get a look under the hood of each of the 924 recordings that followed, Weiss and Peretz analyzed each with two key concepts of tonality in mind: one, whether a given melody’s notes all belonged to the same key, and two, if a melody ended on the tonic note (Weiss & Peretz, 2022). The tonic can be thought of as the “home base” of the scale; it’s the first note you’ll find in a particular scale, and Western musical tradition often associates resolving to this as conferring stability and form to a particular piece of music. Recordings collected from the group with congenital amusia were contrasted against the remaining non musician control group (Weiss & Peretz, 2022).
The above graph represents several key trends revealed by the data. Graph A shows how for both groups, we tend to see smaller intervals between notes sung in the recorded improvisations. This sort of makes sense when we think about the type of music we tend to hear day to day: we don’t often hear songs whose melodies jump all around the place. Instead, they tend to flow more smoothly between notes that are relatively closer to each other in pitch. Graphs B and C depict the prevalence of notes in a particular melody relative to a given major or minor key (Weiss & Peretz, 2022). Here, we can see that for both groups, there is a higher tendency for the notes of a given melody to fall on one of the scale degrees (indicated as any number I-VII), indicating that there was a trend for melodies to stay in a key.
While generally speaking, data revealed that the nonmusician group tended to produce melodies that were rated as being more tonal (by the authors’ definition), about half of the congenital amusia group produced melodies that were determined to be confined to a key in a way that could not be attributed to chance. This is reminiscent of another study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America by researchers Simone Dalla Bella, Jean-François Giguère, and Isabelle Peretz (same one!) that found that in tasking participants with congential amusia to sing a well known vocal melody, a few were able to proficiently reproduce accurate pitches. There, they concluded that this reinforces and may relate to that auditory processing pathways are discrete from those that actually are associated with the physical act of singing (Dalla Bella et al.)
Going back to the first paper, this trend is really interesting when you consider the fact that historically, key aspects of tonality have only been considered possible from the lens of tonal induction (Weiss & Peretz, 2022). To define this simply, tonal induction posits that the way we internalize music and its rules is fundamentally shaped and created by what we hear throughout our lives. If people with congenital amusia are able to internalize such complex structures underlying music and produce original melodies that conform to them despite being hindered in their ability to process pitch, it suggests that a map of tonal knowledge can be constructed in the absence of awareness. In other words, to quote the author directly: “even some of the least musical among us spontaneously produce the learned tonal regularities of music” (Weiss & Peretz, 2022).
So don’t be afraid to sing your heart out. Do it for you (and do it for science too, because we need more data).
References:
Weiss, M. W., & Peretz, I. (2022). Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality. Scientific Reports, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15312-5
Simone Dalla Bella, Jean-François Giguère, Isabelle Peretz; Singing in congenital amusia. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 July 2009; 126 (1): 414–424. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3132504
