A math educator friend posted a fun 3-minute math puzzle on Facebook yesterday – it was fun for me to play, though I only got close to the right answer. (If only I was still calculus-adept…). Of the responses, several were by musicians/music educators, and in his replies, my friend noted the connections between music and mathematics, and asked, “But why can’t I sing?” I’ve been thinking about the question ever since; I think there are several ways of thinking about the answer.
First of all, there is the exceedingly rare incidence of amusia (let’s avoid the term tone-deaf, which has ableist connotations). Wikipedia has the number at 4%, but I think that the true number is a lot lower than that – particularly since the rate of amusia is much lower in people with tonal languages (languages where pitch affects meaning) – which means that, at least in many cases, amusia is acquired due to lack of exposure to music. Let’s assume that most people who “can’t sing” or “can’t carry a tune” don’t fall into the category of amusia.
By some accounts, 1 in 6 Americans sing in a choir of some kind. In my experience, the other 5 in 6 don’t simply not belong to a choir – they actively believe they can’t sing. Since we must agree that the vast majority of them aren’t suffering from amusia, here are my thoughts for them.
1. A teacher told them they couldn’t sing, and they believed them. I believe that we need to replace “can’t” with “currently unable” We all start unable to do things, but for whatever reason, certain things like singing we gather under the umbrella of “Talented Or Not” and when someone tells us, not, we stick with that. Forever. The truth is that singing is just like calculus – concerted effort, daily practice, and a good teacher will get virtually everyone from “can’t” to “can”.
2. The Dip. Seth Godin talks about The Dip as the period of time when you’re nowhere, in between when you start on a project and when you have something to show for it. The Dip for learning to sing is significant, and the result is that many people start learning to sing, and quit while they’re in The Dip – before they see any results from their labor. I think often about my former student who, when we started private lessons when he was 14, could match no more than two pitches on the piano. Two. We expanded it, week over week, painstakingly. Now he’s recording albums, playing in multiple bands, writing music that he sings and plays. His love of music and desire to sing, coupled with positive teachers who never told him he couldn’t, empowered him to hold on through his Dip.
3. Our modern culture has an unintended consequence of making people think they can’t sing. The truth is, singing is our birthright, and some argue is more deeply hardwired into our brain than speaking – Oliver Sacks thought that language was the unintended evolutionary side effect of music, not the other way around. A century ago, singing was a universal part of life. But high fidelity recordings has compelled people to think that singing is something only professionals do. That’s because we record the most remarkable of all singers, but when we listen, we tend to think that that’s what humans who sing sound like. If we play pickup basketball, we don’t expect ourselves to move like Michael Jordan, but for some reason, when we sing, we subconsciously compare ourselves to Beyoncé or Freddie Mercury.
I will add that I don’t think it’s ever too late to start singing. If you appreciate music (and almost everyone does), retirement is the perfect time to take up group singing in a non-threatening community choir. The stakes are low, the people are friendly, and the results are enormously positive. Among other things, as David Eagleman has been discovering, the brain remains plastic – open to growth – throughout our lives, and taking up new hobbies can be incredibly rewarding to our brain functions. Knowing that about our brains makes it even more convincing that anyone can learn to sing, and it’s never too late to start.
Now is not the time to join a choir – doing a virtual choir would be a painful and unrewarding task for a new singer. But when choirs come back, and come back they will, I hope that more people consider that the idea that they can’t sing is wrong, temporary, and the rewards that they would get from starting would far outweigh the Dip they’d experience.