Can Everyone Learn To Sing?
Something that really troubles me as a professional teacher of singing is when I read or hear voice teachers exclaim “Anyone can learn to sing”! Especially when they are selling an online program and marketing to everyone for profit. This exclamation is disingenuous and, to me, points to greed as a motive. Everyone would like to be able to sing, right? This goes without saying. So telling people that if they buy this “learn how to sing’ program, that they may be able to someday sound like Kelly Clarkson, is hogwash and potentially destructive to somebody who is truly tone deaf.
What’s The Cause?
Yes, certainly everybody can learn to phonate on an elongated pitch, aka sing. And they can even learn to produce beautiful tones. But can people who suffer from the inability to hear the pitch accurately learn to phonate in tune? That is the big question. Can the ability to hear the pitch and then match that pitch be taught? The answer is no. If a person has amusia, also known as being tone deaf, they will never be able to sing in pitch, and hearing someone phonate off pitch is not a good sound to take in. Period.
Amusia effects 4% of the population and brain scans of people with amusia have revealed that there is a weakened connection between the part of the brain that processes sound and the part of the brain that is responsible for higher-level thinking. Brain imaging used to measure the density of connecting nerve fibers between the right frontal lobe, where higher thinking occurs, and the right temporal lobes, where basic sound processing occurs, showed thinner white matter, suggesting a weaker connection. There are varying degrees of tone deafness. People whose pitch-discrimination thresholds were worse than one semitone (around 32 Hz in this test which tests your threshold at 500 Hz) were identified as tone-deaf. Those whose thresholds were between half a semitone (16 Hz) and one semitone were identified as slightly tone-deaf.
Someone who is slightly tone deaf can learn, with aggressive ear-training exercises, to sing in tune, however it is a very tedious process and requires patience. A good, honest voice teacher will be able to speak candidly with their potential student, giving them realistic goals depending on their degree of amusia. I personally do not accept any student into my studio who has acute amusia, and I am very honest about the reality of their singing capabilities if they have even a mild case of tone deafness. Giving them false hope will only cause them pain and cost them money better used toward something that they truly can excel in.
