Earworms Reveal Musical Memory

This is a UC news story, published by PsyPost, that relates primarily to Evans news.

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involuntary musical memories

PsyPost

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Surprising precision: Nearly half of "earworms" match original pitch perfectly

Summary

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75% Informative

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz found that nearly half of the sung renditions matched the original pitch of the songs.

This degree of accuracy is much higher than would be expected by random chance.

Results suggest that our brains may retain a detailed “absolute pitch” memory for familiar songs, even in people without perfect pitch.

Additionally, because many participants had some musical training, the results might not apply to people with no musical experience at all. “I look forward to collecting more data from a wider body of participants—there are so many questions left to investigate, and this type of dataset is uniquely useful,” Evans said. The study, “Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery,” was authored by Matthew G. Evans , Pablo Gaeta , and Nicolas Davidenko ..

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informal

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English

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