A question for people who can’t sing….

I know I’m not singing in tune, but I don’t know how to replicate the notes so I do my best. If you played me a middle C I don’t think I’d be able to echo it back to you, and I certainly couldn’t identify it if you played it to me.

It doesn’t stop me singing loudly and often, but mostly when I’m alone in my car.

I can't sing, I have no appreciation of music and I don't recognise different notes.

I can hear a tune and pick it out on a piano, and I try to sing it but what comes out is flat and out of tune!

The noise in my own head is deeper and more in tune. I am very sad about this!

I can’t sing in tune. My actual vocal range isn’t bad, but none of it is actually pleasant to hear! I just listened to middle C on a piano and wouldn’t be able to replicate it vocally if I tried.

Doesn’t stop me singing my way through the day, though

I'm a good singer. XH was one of the worst I've ever heard.
I'd play a note on the piano and ask him to sing it. He was nowhere near it - sometimes too high, sometimes too low. He just couldn't do it.
As a musical person, I found it really hard to understand.

I’m not tone deaf but my voice doesn’t always obey the sound I want to come out it crackles into another note or a croak

I can't sing. In my head I sound fine but I know from others I am horribly out of tune. I just mime when singing is required. I imagine most people who sing out of tune can't hear and no one has told them. After all who would deliberately sing badly.

Why would someone not be musical because they can't sing to pitch???

I play 3 instruments, used to be in a band and consider myself very musical, but I sing flat and its out of tune. I can hear that for myself and would never inflict it on anyone else.

I can sing, I find it easy to replicate notes, and have always been told I have a good singing voice, but I don't know what middle C is. I mean, I know what it is in that I know how to find it on a keyboard, and I can play chords on the guitar, but I can't recognise or produce notes individually like that. I can reproduce a tune but you need to give me the starting point or I'll sing it transposed by mistake :D

I sing in a choir and our director usually gives us a reference note to start out and I can sort of "hold" that note in my head by imagining the position my throat would be in to sing that note. I have always wondered whether this is weird or not.

Our director is excellent though, I am often quite in awe at how she can listen to a whole load of us singing different parts at once and she knows which part is off and she knows how to sort of "tune" that group up and get them to hit the right note without making people feel bad or that they have made a mistake.

I do think singing in tune is a skill and you can get better at it. I have noticed through choir where I also have the natural tendency to miss things - it's usually either when a phrase has shifted so you typically won't go far enough, or sometimes it's where the vowel sound slightly encourages a flat (too low) tone - for more closed mouth vowels like O or eh can have this effect - there are tricks you can do like singing the line but replacing the vowel sound with ee or oo, and then sort of singing the ah/oh/eh "in" the space where you'd sing an ee/oo.

Also at a singing workshop we did a magic thing once where you imagine where the breath is in your body so you breathe into your tummy vs chest (this is quite normal of course) but then you can imagine that this is continuing further up, breathing into your neck/mouth/head and then out of the top of your head. This can also help your pitch especially for higher notes.

And yes I am also good at accents and people say my languages are good and sound very natural, I think this is because I tend to mimic how I hear others speak rather than translating in my head. I take bits of the language that I know and assemble what I want to say, rather than thinking of it in English first.

I can't hear the difference between good and bad singing unless it's really bad. When people on x factor used to get feedback that they were 'flat' I couldn't tell what that meant, they sounded fine to me.

When I sing, on the rare occasions I hit the same note as anyone else I feel a vibration which makes me cringe. It's like when someone drags fingernails down a blackboard.
This started in a primary school assembly where we all had to hum a note. Nope, not for me.

I may be out of tune most of the time, but I like to sing so just go for it.

Same

I can hear that I’m off key but can’t make my body do the right thing. I can hear that musical instruments are out of tune and retune them by ear but you can’t do that with your throat unfortunately 😂 I am good at speaking foreign languages, but have never been able to pronounce a rolled r in Spanish.

Ah this is interesting because I suspect I am AuDHD as well (I am diagnosed with ADHD and I go back and forth on the ASD part) and I wondered if this is why I can do it!

DS2 (same diagnosis status as me) can do it as well. He is extremely sensitive to sound, and can identify sounds that absolutely astonish me - one of his favourite things is trams, there are two models of tram where we live and he can tell which one is coming round the corner before we see it because of the sound. I can sort of tell that they sound different, but I can't remember which sound is which, I suppose the newer one sounds heavier and the older one sounds rattlier. And then he plays bus driving simulation games, and when we go on a bus IRL he will tell me which model (from the games) the doors sound like, and whether it matches up with what actual model the bus is, and he'll ask me which door sound I prefer, which I find the most baffling question 😆but I love it.

He completely refuses any kind of music tuition which I am itching to get him into because e.g. recently he has been noodling around on a keyboard we have at home and reproducing some of the songs from Minecraft, including some simple chords, which blows me away. I could pick out simple tunes by ear like Happy Birthday, but I don't think I could identify a chord just through trial and error.

I can't sing in tune at all. I can hear music in my head, but it doesn't translate to what comes out of my mouth.
A life long regret, both parents were/are beautiful singers, as is dd, so it must have skipped a generation.

Whaat that's so odd. I also have constant internal radio but the entire song is reproduced in my head, all the instruments and vocals. If I don't know the words that part will just be a bit less clear, or the part I do know will loop and the part I don't know won't play at all.

Actually thinking about this some more - some songs I don't know as well will have missing parts. But for any song I do know well, the full thing will be playing as though there is a CD playing inside my head.

I’m a dreadful singer. But I know this. I can also hear when a singer is even slightly off key, it really jars. I’m good with languages too.

I can’t sing.

I can hear the notes correctly in my head, but I can’t replicate them vocally. I can hear that some notes are wrong when they come out my mouth.

I can't sing. I can hear the right note precisely in my head and know what it is, but some other honking drone comes out of my mouth. I know it is wrong but not how to right it. However much I think about the exact right note, what co,es out of my mouth is utterly random. No control over it whatsoever. I could aim for a top C and come out with an A on one attempt, or a B flat on another. It is a mystery to me how other people can produce the right note. How? I know what it is, but not how to make my body reproduce it. How do you do it?

A singing teacher friend of mine said it's about muscular control. But still I'm lost.

It's interesting isn't it!

Equally weird to me is you saying you can 'hold' a note in your head by imagining your throat position.

I've no idea what that means, my throat is no different regardless of what sound I'm making. It's just the same always, like when I'm talking. The sound is in my mouth, not my throat.

I cant work out where I need to sing from. If I sing quietly from my throat and only sing slow songs without too many different notes I think I just about sound ok. I couldnt tell you what a note should sound like or how to project it in tune

I play brass instrument reasonably well but cannot sing in tune. I can hear the note and play it but cannot sing it. I hear that my singing is out of tune. When I had did music exams I could do as well as the next person on the aural but flunked the oral. Technically I am not tone deaf as I can hear I just can't reproduce with my voice.

Yes. I get this sometimes, my voice just doesn’t come out right. Other times I think I’m a brilliant singer. This is generally if I’m in the car with the radio loud, or if I’ve had a few drinks and then you can’t shut me up, no embarrassment. When I was at school I was told by my Head Teacher to mime as I was off key.

I'm tone deaf. It was pointed out to me repeatedly by the nuns in my school when I was very small and I always had to mime and haven't sung since I was about 5.
I love music but often don't recognise songs I know well by the intro and only recognise them when the lyrics start.
On the other hand, I'm really sensitive to sound. Sometimes when I'm places with live music I can hear that the speaker or something isn't tuned correctly and it almost causes me physical pain. It doesn't happen at professional concerts but often happens in pubs.
I would love to be musical and able to sing in a choir. It looks like a wonderful hobby to have.

I have just listened through to this, is it the shift up in the chorus like on the syllable ra in PappaRAzzi? It is a really difficult shift to make, I actually wonder if it's autotuned rather than natural.

Hmm. I have now gone down a reddit rabbithole and found these two versions from the same live performance:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LadyGaga/comments/1h02xnc/paparazzi_vma_2009_without_autotune/