When I tell my partner, friends or family that I’m a terrible singer, nobody says “What? We’ve never noticed!” or reassures me that I’m overreacting.
In my tiny primary school, where choir had to be mandatory to fill even one church row with little voices at Christmas, I was the sole excused child.
It’s fine. I really, truly cannot sing, which means I haven’t been able to master TikTok’s recent “Perfect Pitch” challenge (a game which involves helping a virtual ball through some obstacles with your singing voice).
Insofar as anyone can count themselves “medically tone deaf”, I think I’m a candidate.
But as it turns out, that’s actually a thing.
A tiny percentage of tone-deaf people may have ‘amusia’
Most people who can’t sing well can be trained, voice coaches at Ramsay Voice Studio say.
And while that’s generally true, a rare condition called “amusia” may affect up to 4% of the population.
A 2017 paper on the topic explained that amusia is “an accident of nature that affects musical abilities”.
People used to think it only arose following brain injuries, which is sometimes the case, but rarely the condition also comes about congenitally.
Congenital amusia, which isn’t acquired due to brain damage, affects roughly 1.5% of the population, the Handbook of Clinical Neurology says.
It’s often referred to as “tone-deafness”, Brain: A Journal Of Neurology says, but “congenital amusia is related to severe deficiencies in processing pitch variations”.
This processing disorder in your brain does not allow you to distinguish one pitch or tone from another, and it “extends to impairments in music memory and recognition as well as in singing and the ability to tap in time to music”.
It only seems to affect people’s ability to process parts of music and doesn’t seem to change how they hear voices and other noises.
How can I tell if I’ve got it?
Easy Ear Training has a Tone Deaf Test (there are others online too) which asks you to differentiate between tones.
Annoyingly, I got 100% on it, meaning my terrible singing is of my own making.
Tone deaf tests aren’t a diagnostic tool, but if you really struggle to tell one sound apart from the other, it can reveal some pitch discrimination skills may be missing.
The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) has been specially designed to test for amusia.
“Those with amusia should be able to improve [their ability to recognize tone] if they start early enough,” Isabelle Peretz, a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, told LiveScience.