Senses: Sing Your Heart Out

During American Idol auditions, there are the Kelly Clarksons of the world—and then there are the William Hungs, who sing off-key no matter how hard they try. But why do certain voices sound like bells, and others like foghorns?

Sean Hutchins, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research in Montreal, conducted a series of experiments to determine why crummy crooners sing so poorly. The conclusion? Many people actually perceive the note they are supposed to sing—they just can't produce it with their voices.

Experiment 1

What They Did: Musicians and nonmusicians tried to match a series of automated tones with both their own singing voices and with an instrument called the slider, a 15-inch strip of sensors that plays different notes when touched in different places.

What They Learned: Both musicians and nonmusicians performed almost perfectly with the slider. Musicians, however, were significantly better at belting out the same note as the automated tone, suggesting that the problem was not perceiving the pitch so much as matching it with one's own voice.

Experiment 2

What They Did: Hutchins recorded subjects singing five different notes. Then he had them try to match the notes in the recordings using their voices and the slider.

What They Learned: Participants could mimic the pitch of their own prerecorded voices more consistently than they could that of synthesized tones, but they were still most accurate with a slider. Some bad singers might struggle to match the pitch of a sound that is so different from a voice, Hutchins concludes, but most probably just "lack the motor command necessary to be able to sing."