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biology, evolution, Human, Melody, music, Musical instrument, Popular science, science, Singing, Vocal music
Humans are remarkably talented musicians. We can recognize a tune despite changes like being slowed down or sped up or even if all of the notes are shifted to a higher or lower pitch. Though these may seem like trivial feats, most other animals can’t manage them. Experiments have shown that six-month old human babies can already distinguish musical pitch and recognize shifted melodies. These exceptional abilities suggest that humans might have some innate capacity to perceive and understand music, something like our hypothetical language faculty. Given that we’ve been able to sing for much longer than we’ve had musical instruments, it seems reasonable that any music capacity we evolved would be more attuned to vocal than instrumental music.
To test this idea, Michael Weiss, Sandra Trehub, and Glenn Schallenberg investigated whether people remember vocal or instrumental melodies better. They made a collection of 32 folk tunes recorded in four different ways: a singer repeating the syllable “la” and three instrumental versions played on a piano, a banjo, or a marimba. Participants in the experiment listened to four melodies of each type, for a total of 16 melodies; to make sure that the results weren’t affected by how memorable individual songs were, the songs were shuffled so groups of participants heard different songs as vocal or instrumental. After a short break, they listened to all 32 melodies (16 of which they hadn’t heard) and had to rate how familiar they sounded. The difference between the familiarity of the new songs and the old ones told the researchers how well people were remembering them.
The trio found that people remembered the tunes they had heard sung significantly better than those played on an instrument. This was true even after the team used a computer program to even out differences between the versions, so it wasn’t a consequence of the vocalist being more expressive or other differences in performance. It also wasn’t because people are more used to hearing voices — the instrumental versions were all equally memorable even though people said the piano sound was more familiar. It seems that something about the timbre and quality of the human voice simply makes it more memorable.
The scientists don’t really know why that’s the case, but they speculated that it might be because the biological significance of the voice — the fact that we recognize it as the sound of another human — makes us respond more attentively and process it more than we do an instrument. Regardless of the exact hows and whys of the matter, it’s clear that humans remember vocal music better than other kinds. In addition to warning researchers to distinguish between vocal and instrumental music in future studies, these results also provide one more piece of evidence that a prediliction for music may have been shaped by evolution, an important part of being human.
Ref
Weiss MW, Trehub SE, & Schellenberg EG (2012). Something in the way she sings: enhanced memory for vocal melodies. Psychological science, 23 (10), 1074-8 PMID: 22894936
Trehub SE (2003). The developmental origins of musicality. Nature neuroscience, 6 (7), 669-73 PMID: 12830157
Inspiring Science 
As a music lover and instrumentalist, I’ll be thinking about this post when I listen to or play music – it’s really a fascinating topic. Thanks for sharing!
I work with children, many of whom sing and make up songs. I also know that children usually remember things that are sung, like the alphabet, than if it is just spoken. It seems like for myself if I can sing something I will remember it better. I can remember long complicated lyrics to songs that I do not hear very often.
This is a really interesting topic, and this post explained a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about. Songs have always been really important in my life. I used to improvise songs and sing them to my relatives when they visited. I also remember the lyrics to songs I haven’t heard in several years, and I learn the lyrics to songs I don’t even want to listen to but hear fragments of anyway (on the radio, for instance).
I also find human voices to be very soothing and satisfactory in songs. I love instrumental music, but when someone starts singing after a long time of purely instrumental music, it has a very special effect. It almost makes the piece of music feel more familiar, more complete.
Great post, thanks for bringing this up! 🙂
Hello! I’ve found your article to be very true. I sat here and thought to myself how I can most often recognize a song if someone sings it verbally in comparison to as if I were to just here the instrumental version of it. In regards to the brain’s functioning with this, it seems like the inhibitory messages your brain experiences (or lack there of impulses) that we are more able to recognize a solid voice rather than just an instrument that plays the same song. Our initial impulse seems that we would recognize a voice over an instrument because of the fact that we’ve been able to recognize another human voice since our developmental stages of infantry. Not too many musical instruments were being played when I was an infant. This seems like it could also be due to our brain’s amount of acetylcholine. This in which controls our memory processes, therefore, if someone lacks this neurotransmitter than it’s quite possible they couldn’t recognize a song by voice much better than they could by an instrument. Just a thought and contribution as to why that sort of thing may occur!
Yes, human voices do seem to have a special place in our perception. I think some studies have shown that children are more likely to wake at the sound of a voice than a beeping alarm. Anyway, I’m glad you thought the post was interesting!
We process auditory and sensory information in the midbrain. Those auditory sensations from both the ears is processed and helps you to orient toward one direction of a sound. After passing through the midbrain both the auditory and visual information is taken to sensory processing centers farther up the in the forebrain. In the forebrain, located near the temples, is the temporal lobe which contains the primary auditory cortex which recieves all of the auditory information. With out this we would not be able to enjoy the sweet sounds of human voice