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My partner assures me, repeatedly and with great passion, that I cannot sing. And she’s right. My love of music appears inversely related to my ability to generate it.
Growing up, my family sang in the car – we still do when we’re together. My partner winces in horror as we howl along to Bon Jovi or Meat Loaf.
Are we born to sing or can we learn it?
But, reader, the strangest thing has happened at my house. I have a young daughter, two years old. And, I am told, she can sing.
She has learnt most, but not all, the words to her favourite songs – as well as the enthusiastic hand gestures. But her ability to nail the melody is uncanny, both my partner and my daughter’s classically-trained grandmother tell me.
A singer! In my family! It’s hard for me and my parents to believe.
My partner has a simple explanation: genes. Some people can accurately hear and recreate tones. If you can’t do that, you can’t sing.
I’m sceptical: most skills in life can be learnt. Why not singing?
A vibration from the deep
Let’s start with sound. Sound is vibration travelling through the air. The frequency of the vibration determines the pitch: the more vibrations per second, the higher the pitch.
“Most sounds are made up of a complicated mixture of vibrations,” writes University of NSW sound researcher Professor Joe Wolfe in his excellent guide to vocal acoustics.
A typical sound – such as the thud of a falling rock – comprises a large number of different vibrations that change over time; our brains combine them into a single sound.
“You can think of the sound spectrum as a sound recipe,” writes Wolfe. “Take this amount of that frequency, add this amount of that frequency, etc, until you have put together the whole, complicated sound.”
Laryngoscopic view of interior of larynx, showing the vocal folds.Credit: Anatomy of the Human Body / Henry Gray
How do we produce sounds? A simple way to think of singing is source + filter.
Our lungs drive air up into our voice boxes – the larynx, located at your Adam’s apple – where it runs between the vocal folds. We sometimes call these vocal cords, but a quick look at the anatomy tells you this is misleading.
The air passes the vocal folds, making them vibrate. “This is where I think the real miracle comes in,” says Melissa Forbes, an associate professor of contemporary singing at the University of Southern Queensland. “Say you’re singing at 440hz – the vocal folds are chopping up the air stream 440 times per second to sing one note. That’s kind of nuts, right?”
These vibrations – you can feel them by placing a hand against your Adam’s apple – are the source of our sound, and we use them to speak and sing. They generate sound waves at a range of different frequencies.
The spectrum of a human voice for the vowel sound in the word ‘heard’. Each peak and trough on the graph represents different levels of vibration at different frequencies Credit: Joe Wolfe
We can choose the frequency of the vibration, and the frequencies of the sound waves it generates, by varying the tension of the folds. For speech, we typically generate vibrations at a frequency of 100 to 400 per second; for singing, the frequency can get up above 1500.
Other tools – tongue, teeth, lips – select and modify the sound waves coming from our vocal folds. By opening or closing the mouth or moving the tongue, we change which frequencies are boosted in the sound radiating from our mouth.
The head also operates as a resonator, amplifying the vibrations. Without that amplification, “the sound is just a buzz, it’s nothing”, says Forbes.
Combining vibration, vibration selection and resonance, the human voice is an extremely flexible and powerful instrument, able to produce a wide range of tones.
Nature v nurture
So, mechanically, singing seems possible – you simply need to generate the right spectrum of vibrations.
Why can’t everyone do it, I ask Forbes. “Stop right there – my whole shtick is everyone can learn to sing!” she says.
“Singing is a physical function of the human body – just like going for a run or playing basketball. Sure, basketball players have genetic advantages, but they also have to couple that with skill.”
Is this true? Can everybody learn to sing? Or do my genes doom me to tonelessness?
We now have, for the first time, an elegant study that can answer this question.
The gold standard for understanding the role of nature and nurture on a particular attribute is studying twins.
If you compare a group of identical twins – those who share identical DNA – with a group of non-identical twins, you can effectively eliminate the role that nurture plays, as (theoretically) each set of twins is exposed to the same experiences.
If non-identical twins display similar attributes, but genetically-identical twins do not, you can say nurture plays the bigger role – and vice versa.
Last year, Daniel Yeom, a PhD candidate at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, published a study looking at the singing ability of 1189 Australian twins.
This graph shows correlation between singing ability of pairs of twins; if one twin sings well, the other twin is more likely to also sing well. The data in blue is for identical twins, and the data in red comes from fraternal twins.Credit: Daniel Yeom/iScience
The data showed that genes play a big role. About 40 per cent of singing ability is heritable – shared between the twins with identical DNA.
But there is also a correlation in singing ability in twins who do not have identical DNA, and it is almost as strong. This suggests shared environment – that is, family life and childhood – plays just as big a role as genes.
Looking deeper, the strongest environmental predictor was whether the twins sang with their family in childhood.
So it’s not nature or nurture – it’s both.
What’s probably happening, says Yeom, is an interplay between genes and environment. Children born with more natural ability are more likely to get sent to music class by their parents.
“Extreme positions on nature versus nurture are silly,” he says. “It’s the interplay between both. It’s how these things work together throughout our lifespan.”
Liam Mannix’s Examine newsletter explains and analyses science with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Sign up to get it each week.
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