A question for people who can’t sing….

Yes I’m a singing teacher and professional musician and I can’t pluck middle C out of thin air. So a bit of a brutal comparison there OP!
@ValleyofHumiliation About 4% of the population are actually tone deaf. Everyone else can improve! Even the 4% will be able to improve the quality voices, just may always struggle with pitching!
Very interesting question and the whole ‘is my blue the same as your blue?’ concept always absolutely boggles my mind!

Have some lessons! 🫶 you’re right, if you can hear that you’re not on the right pitch then by definition you’re not tone deaf. It’s a coordination of the vocal cords thing, which can be trained.

This is me too

I can hear it’s wrong but can’t make my voice do the right note. Even when I really try, I just cannot make the correct sound.

I also struggle to sing in tune or recognise when a note is in tune (which is problematic, as I’m trying to learn the viola).

But I also have the accents thing - I just can’t recognise them at all! I’ve been interested to see from this thread that I’m not the only one, as I’ve never heard of anyone else with this issue.

What you are describing - being able to think of a note and then sing it with no external reference - is perfect pitch. The vast majority of musicians don’t have that, it’s not relevant to a discussion of whether people can sing or not.

Yes it is perfect pitch. I’m also a music teacher, including leading kids choirs. I have a decent tone, and a good sense of relative pitch. But I can’t always sing back a note that I hear. I get by ok, and my kids sound awesome.

This is the difference between chest voice and head voice. Normal speaking is mostly head voice, which is what you are describing as the voice being ‘in your mouth’. Both singing and stage speaking use both chest voice and head voice and a good singer (or stage actor) swaps between the two as required. Many pop songs for example will use a head voice for the verse and chest voice for the chorus. There is also the belt when the chest voice ‘overflows’ into the head voice - this is generally the most powerful voice that a singer will have.

I sound awesome to myself 🤣 not so much to anyone else

I bet if you had some singing lessons you would find you can learn to follow a tune, because as this thread shows, being able to hear whether a note is in tune is half of the ability. I'm sure that whatever some mean-spirited nuns said to you decades ago, your skill level at anything at age 5 is absolutely not set for life. I think it was really awful of them to say that to you.

I terrible too. And yes, genuinely can’t hear the difference in notes.

Yes - I think being truly 'tone deaf' is a specific condition that affects the way people hear music as well as their ability to sing.

It's possible not to be tone deaf, even, as with some of the pps here, to be highly musical and accomplished at playing an instrument, but to be unable to make your voice obey your brain when it comes to singing. People in that camp tend to know their singing is off key, out of tune or flat!

I can hear the song, hear middle C but cant get my voice to do it! I wish I could, I love singing along and would love to be in a chior or theatre group or something. Maybe lessons would help. Probably best from a young age.

I know that when we hear our own speaking voice, it sounds slightly deeper and more rounded to us compared with what other people hear, which is why a recording of your own voice can sound uncomfortable and weird.

I wonder if people who are able to reproduce a note from something else are sort of aware of this and know how to compensate for it. I feel like if I really concentrate, I can hear both parts of my voice - both the internal resonant bit which only I can hear, which part of this is the feeling of vibration, I think - and the outer bit which is sort of "thinner" and higher, which is the part that I hear on a recording.

If you lie your head on someone's chest/tummy while they talk, you can hear something which might be close to the inner resonant part of their voice as well, children often find this game fascinating/funny, hearing how their (or your) voice changes and it's quite nice to do it with a partner if you're cuddled up together - a man's voice often sounds v sexy when it's deeper like that.

I can hear a note, I can reproduce it in my head, I can identify tunes. But when I try to reproduce the sound with my voice it's like my voice is too deep and hoarse. I know what I am aiming at but it's like I can only get halfway there - this is true of low notes as well as high ones.

I have never been able to sing well but when my DD studied singing she and I could harmonise pretty well, so I think in my case it's more that I haven't sung (except to the dog) for years and my vocal chords have got lazy.

I play the piano - I can understand the notes as they come together, and play by ear, but when I sing it’s mainly awful apparently. What I hear is quite good, even when played back 🤷‍♀️

In the choir that I am in, not everyone gets the notes perfect straight away and the director is pretty good at finding exercises which help pull the right notes out - I think anyone who feels regretful or sad about their singing should consider trying a choir, as I suspect you would probably do better than you think you would. There is usually no pressure to sing solo unless people want to, and it's easier to blend in to a group sometimes than be the one lone voice.

Somebody said that young children can often sing in tune naturally, and I don't know that this is exactly true, I just think that the songs we sing with young children tend to be extremely simple melodies which are very easy to follow because they (particularly nursery rhymes) are often are a variant on scales. And nobody especially polices young children's singing (perhaps apart from nuns ) so it doesn't matter if they don't hit the note exactly because being enthusiastic and cute is basically enough, and because for a simple melody like most nursery rhymes and children's songs are, it's recognisable even if it is quite a bit out of tune.

It's when you have more complex melodies like some pop music can be, and it's harder to make the jumps between different notes because it doesn't feel as "logical" of a progression, that it gets harder to recreate it recognisably unless it's accurate. And then for a lot of traditional choral music, it sounds best when everyone hits the note they are supposed to accurately, because those notes blend into a chord (which sounds amazing when done well). And as said, a skilled choir director can bring this out, usually by starting with exercises like scales which are easy to follow in order to practice the jump between two notes. Or you can sometimes practice a sequence of notes an octave higher or lower to get the feeling of the shape of it, or separate the lyrics from the tune in order to practice, slow things down etc - there are lots of tricks and most choirs have people with a mixture of musical/singing ability and knowledge.

I know a few people said they don't understand this description of "feeling the shape" of the music but I do think that it's probably something which gets easier with practice. Sort of like driving - when you first learn to drive nothing is instinctive, but when you've been doing it for months/years, the majority of it is, you don't need to think about how to move your hands and feet, you just know what you want to do and they go to the right places in the car, and it's a pain when you change car and aren't used to the new one yet. Or writing is muscle memory as well, we don't really think about how to form the letters unless we're doing some kind of calligraphy, we just think about what we want to write and the letters sort of come automatically.

But actually even choral singing when not especially well-tuned can give an overall impression which is recognisable and sounds nice, which you can hear at big concerts etc when a lot of people sing along at once, or football chants, or carol singing, anything like that.

It sounds great in my head if I think of a song. That’s not what comes out though if I try to replicate it.

Most speaking is ‘chest voice’ which in itself is an outdated concept as everything is just one voice 😁 singing is full of contradictions! Engage! Relax! Think about it! Be free, don’t think!

I can’t sing. (I’d love to be able to!)

I think I can hear when I hit the right note — which happens very, very occasionally, and is more likely with some songs than others (but even then, it’ll literally be one line from the chorus or something, no more than that) because it sounds to me, in my head, as though my voice kind of melds with the singer’s. I’ve never actually put it to the test though — that is, recorded myself and then played it back, or asked someone else if I’m in tune — so for all I know those few and far between moments might be as awful as the rest of them…

I also have no idea how songs are meant to sound — even when I know them/the lyrics really well. I have no idea whether you’re meant to go up or down at any point, for example.

Fascinating thread, OP!

This is me in the car
But I can't sing

https://www.tiktok.com/@wanderingandrew/video/7696959091599510798?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7693229660214478358

Nope, many/most women speak in their head voice. And literally every singing teacher distinguishes between the different voices. I’d much rather think about things than not think thanks very much.

Ooh, this could be me — apart from the nuns; in my case it was my parents!
I sometimes say to my DH that a sound almost hurts my ears (driving on certain road surfaces with the windows down, for example), and he just doesn’t get it… Interesting you have that too; I’ve never heard anyone else say that before!

Put a finger in one ear, and sing. You’ll be able to hear where you’re potentially going wrong.

You’re wrong but you do you!