Why can't we all sing well? Eurovision and the science of song

The Eurovision Song Contest, the continent’s annual carnival of the wacky and the weird, celebrates its 60th birthday in Vienna on Saturday night. Without it we would never have seen Russia in uproar over an Austrian drag queen, been introduced to Finnish death metal in its purest form, or witnessed the Irish attempt to win with an act called Dustin the Turkey.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that beneath the costumes, the theatrics and the tactical voting, lies a talent contest. All of the Eurovision entrants intend to make an impact through the power of song, with varying degrees of success. So why is it that some carry a tune better than others?

Far away from the Wiener Stadhalle and the preparations for tomorrow night’s Grand Final, Canadian researcher Sean Hutchins is studying the elements behind innate musical talent at the Toronto Conservatory of Music.

“We tend to find prodigies, people who are just naturally more gifted, when it comes to particular instruments like the piano or the violin,” he says. “Singing’s actually very different as everyone can produce a sound. Even if people don’t learn the technique behind how to sing, you use your voice for the purpose of speech so everyone’s reasonably adept at controlling it. The key thing which separates good singers from bad isn’t so much natural talent, but getting the training to use it in the right way.”

We’re all actually far more musical than we perhaps think. Around 2% of the population have a pitch perception deficit which impairs their ability to detect the fine differences between musical notes, but the remaining 98% of us are all pretty similar in our ability to perceive music and judge whether it’s in or out of tune.

Vocal ability largely comes down to largely comes down to being able to control the pitch of the sound and the main reason why some people appear to be poor singers comes down to lacking the right motor control.

“You can think of music production and singing in particular as a physical skill,” Hutchins explains. “It requires the ability to sync up what you’re intending to do with what you’re actually doing. And getting your body to learn and memorise that co-ordination takes practise. And I don’t necessarily mean formal voice training. People who’ve grown up singing along to their favourite songs will probably be better singers than average as they’ve practised hearing and reproducing those sounds.”

Controlling pitch requires a series of physical processes to be synchronized at the same time. It’s a highly intricate co-ordination between how fast the air is moving out of your lungs and how tightly your vocal folds are positioned so that the air passes through them, causing them to vibrate and create a pitch. We vary the pitch of the note by varying the tension of the vocal folds.

“It’s a little bit like when you pinch the ends of a balloon and then let the air out,” Hutchins says. “The way that noise is generated is quite similar to the air being pressed from the lungs through your narrow vocal folds. And that’s the basics of it. You can also vary that sound through the way you hold your tongue, lips, pharynx, nasal passages, the rest of your articulators.”

Some people may appear to be sharper than others at learning the complex physical mechanisms needed to vocalise what you want, but that can be a result of being exposed to music from a much younger age. As with anything involving muscle memory, it’s far easier for singing to become a natural, subconscious process if you’ve learnt how to do it while your brain’s still developing.

“Early childhood exposure is extremely important when it comes to all musical ability,” Hutchins says. “We know that children are able to hear and perceive musical qualities from even before they’re born. There’s really good evidence that if your mother exposes you to music pre-birth, these children are taking in these musical experiences and using them to subconsciously guide their ability to produce music later in life.”

Of course it isn’t just pitch control which defines what we perceive as a great voice. When it comes to choosing our favourite singers, a lot stems from the natural aesthetic of the voice and that seems to be defined at least in part, by our natural physiology. Recent research suggests that the varying shapes and sizes of our vocal folds, pharynx, nasal cavities and even our skull, means that some people can produce a more pleasing natural sound than the rest of us.

“We call this the timbre of the voice,” Hutchins says. “It’s the aspect of a note which doesn’t have anything to do with its loudness, duration or pitch. What makes a piano sound different to a voice or a guitar. To understand timbre, thinking about speaking in a large cathedral compared to speaking outside. The sounds you hear are ultimately quite different. And timbre is definitely natural to some extent but it can also be trained. You can learn to adjust your vocal tract to gain the type of timbre you’re aiming for.”

Our vocal timbres vary because the cavities inside of your mouth and nose act like a cathedral hull, setting up places for the sound waves to bounce off. The way that they bounce determines the particular shape of the sound. Some people have cavities which are more naturally suited for certain styles of singing, making it easier for them to create the types of resonances they want.

“At the end of the day, it really depends on what you want to achieve in terms of musical genre,” Hutchins says. “Everybody produces some type of sound, it’s just a matter of whether that’s the one you want to go with or not. There are some musicians who just go with the voice they have like Bob Dylan for example, and some who really work at what they’ve been born with to style it in the way they want.”

Singing ability is also heavily controlled by your state of mind and high anxiety levels can make it far harder to achieve the kind of pitch control you’re aiming for, which is why even professional singers are occasionally accused of being out of tune at a concert. Hutchins’ research has found that many people struggle with singing simply because they believe they’re a poor singer.

“The psychology involved can make a very big difference,” he says. “I’ve given talks where a number of people have come up to me afterwards and said that a teacher had told them they didn’t have any musical ability when they were young and they should just mouth the words in the school choir. And that just made them think, why bother to try. Which is tragic really, as trying is the only way you’re going to improve the skills you have.”