Out Of Tune: When Words Get In The Way

In a series of listening experiments, an UdeM postdoc finds that having lyrics in a song—or even meaningless syllables that change—makes it more difficult to hear when the singer’s not in key.

Ever notice when someone’s singing out of key? Like when you’re in a karaoke bar and your best friend belts out her favorite Adele track but woefully misses the mark? Ever wonder how you know right away she’s singing flat? 

Well, Michael Weiss might have an answer for you.

A postdoctoral fellow of Professor Isabelle Peretz at Université de Montréal’s International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research, Weiss set up a series of listening experiments to see how humans process musical pitch.

Choosing well-known songs like “Happy Birthday” and “Over the Rainbow,” he wanted to know whether the presence of lyrics plays a role in detecting false notes: if there are lyrics, do we have more trouble detecting changes in pitch? If so, is it because we are processing the meaning of the words, or simply that lyrics have lots of changing syllables?

The results of Weiss’ study were published in May in the journal Psychology in Music. We asked him to tell us more about it, with some musical examples.

Publication: Michael W Weiss, et al., Detection of pitch errors in well-known songs, Psychology of Music (2022). DOI: 10.1177/03057356221087447.

Original Story Source:  University of Montreal