The case for singing badly

Somewhere this morning, a person sat at a red light with the windows up and sang the bridge of a song they have known for twenty years. They missed the high note. They went for it anyway. When the light changed they stopped, a little self-conscious, and glanced at the next lane to see whether anyone had noticed.

Nearly everyone has a version of that drive. For a lot of adults, the car is one of the last places they still sing at all, and the reason usually given is privacy: nobody can hear. The research on singing has a good deal to say about that drive, most of it encouraging, and very little of it depends on hitting the note.

What singing does to the breath and the heart

In 2013, Björn Vickhoff and a team at the University of Gothenburg put heart monitors on a small group of young singers and asked them to do three things: hum a single tone, sing a familiar hymn, and chant a slow mantra. They published the results in Frontiers in Psychology under a plain title, “Music structure determines heart rate variability of singers.”

The finding sits in that title. A sung phrase asks you to take a breath, spend it slowly across a line, and take another at the end of the phrase. Long, regular phrases slow the breath and even it out. The heart follows the breath: it speeds up slightly on the inhale and slows on the exhale, a normal rhythm called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. When the singers’ breathing was guided by slow, steady phrases, that rise and fall grew larger and more regular. The mantra, with the longest and most even phrases, produced the strongest effect.

Larger, steadier swings of that kind are associated with the calming branch of the nervous system, the side governed in part by the vagus nerve. The study measured heart rhythm, and it was small. What it shows clearly is a mechanism: the structure of a song organizes the breath, and the breath carries the heart along with it.

There was a second finding, the one that made the paper travel. In a smaller part of the study, when five singers sang slow, steady phrases together, their heart rhythms began to rise and fall together too. We wrote earlier about how moving in time with someone changes how infants treat them. The Gothenburg singers are a grown-up version of the same coupling, measured in the chest.

None of this asked the singers to be good. The breath has no way of knowing whether the note was in tune.

How rare true tone deafness is

Ask a room of adults whether they can sing, and a good number will say no with real conviction. Lola Cuddy and colleagues at Queen’s University put a version of that question to university students in a 2005 study, and roughly one in six described themselves as tone deaf. When the researchers tested them, most showed no real difficulty hearing pitch. Genuine pitch deafness, the condition researchers call congenital amusia, turned out to be rare.

Peter Pfordresher and Steven Brown looked at the other half of the question in 2007, in Music Perception. They studied people who sing noticeably off pitch and found that most of them told pitches apart as accurately as the good singers did. The trouble sat in the link between hearing a pitch and producing it with the voice. That link is a coordination between ear and voice, and like other coordinations (the two hands at a piano are another), it can improve with practice. A 2022 study from Pfordresher’s lab found that adults who sang off pitch improved over a short course of focused training, most clearly when they could see their pitch as they sang.

So the voice most people describe as bad is usually an ordinary voice that has not had much use. The ear is fine. The connection between the ear and the voice is out of practice.

Where the singing goes

Young children sing without asking anyone’s permission. Somewhere between early childhood and adulthood, many of them stop.

Graham Welch and his colleagues at the Institute of Education in London (now part of UCL) watched this closely through Sing Up, a national singing program in English primary schools. In a 2014 paper drawing on assessments of thousands of children, they reported that children whose singing was more developed tended to hold a more positive view of themselves and a stronger sense of being included socially. Singing ability itself kept developing with age and experience. An earlier baseline study from the same program found the attitudes running the other way: older children were less positive about singing than younger ones, and boys less positive than girls at every age.

The direction of cause is hard to settle in a study like that, and the authors are careful about it. What the study does describe is a familiar arc. Singing is a skill that grows when it is used, and a self-description (“I can’t sing”) forms early and then keeps a person from using it. By adulthood, the car is one of the few rooms where the old voice still gets out.

What happens when the singing is shared

In 2015, Eiluned Pearce, Jacques Launay and Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford followed a set of adult education classes over seven months. Some of the classes were singing groups. Others were crafts and creative writing. At intervals, they asked participants how close they felt to their classmates.

The singers bonded faster. In the first month, a single singing class drew people closer far more than a craft or writing class did. The other groups got there more gradually, and by the seventh month everyone felt about equally connected. The authors called it the ice-breaker effect and published it in Royal Society Open Science. Singing got people to the same place sooner, at the point when a room full of strangers is at its most guarded.

Stephen Clift and Grenville Hancox at Canterbury Christ Church University have spent years asking choir members what singing does for them, including a 2010 survey of choristers in England, Australia and Germany. The answers come back in a consistent set: a lift in mood, steadier breathing, a feeling of belonging, a reason to leave the house on a weeknight. These are self-reports from people who chose to join a choir, and the researchers treat them that way. They also held up across all three countries.

Back at the red light

The person in the next lane probably did notice, and probably has a song of their own for the drive home.

The research offers no verdict on whether the high note landed. It has a fair amount to say about what happened anyway: a breath drawn in and spent slowly across a line, a heart that rose and settled with it, a voice that got some use. The note missed. The breath, the heart, and the voice all did what the song asked of them.

If you’ve been meaning to sing somewhere other than the car, here’s where we usually start.