Why does a crowd singing at a concert normally sound really good, but if you were to randomly pick one of those people to sing solo, it probably wouldn’t sound great.?
In: Biology
There’s this thing called a “resonate frequency” and what a frequency is, is air molecules or air atoms smashing together at a faster or slower pace, we measure this in something called “hertz” which is measured by “cycles-per-second” these cycles determine whether something sounds “high” or “low”.
The thing about sound, is that sound is 3 dimensional, meaning like your chair or anything you can see its not flat like a piece of paper.
So things like the shape that the air atoms/molecules make when they smash up against each other effect how the frequency sounds regardless of what the frequency is.
This is called “Timbre” and it refers to every other aspect of sound beside frequency.
When human beings speak their voices (because they are 3D) produce multiple frequencies because your mouth and your throat which pushes air molecules/atoms around pushes a lot of atoms around, so when it leaves your throat you not only have one frequency that appears, but multiple, so you might be wondering? What makes crowds able to sing on key then?
Well here’s the interesting thing, when your brain hear’s a frequency, it has to understand it, otherwise it would not be able to know the frequency and all sound would sound like pots and pans banging around (or think a crowded mall.)
(And interesting fact there are people like this who cannot tell the difference between keys and they describe drums as sounding like banging pots and pans and music as screaming).
And so your brain takes the loudest frequencies of that sound and majorly cuts out the rest of the other frequencies, and the way it does that is it takes the highest frequency, and the lowest frequency, and finds the middle (the mean) and that is usually what you hear.
(This is also how some people can sing “two notes” at the same time. By messing with their resonate frequency.)
So with a crowd of people although some people are “off key” if enough people are *fairly* on key what usually happens is it averages out the sounds and you hear what the notes are.
And there is also a bit of correction that goes on as well, for instance since you know the song you anticipate the notes and so notes that wouldn’t match up with the sound but get close enough in terms of frequency lets your brain usually auto-tunes it on key (but your brain, much like auto-tune can only do so much) there’s a similar phenomenon where if you are hearing a concert you haven’t gone to from like 2 or 4 blocks away you’re likely to just hear a bunch of random frequencies and not be able to determine the lyrics or the notes.
This is also *coincidentally* why when you hear someone speak in a foreign language that you aren’t familiar with hearing often (even if you *lets say* study the language) you have to ask them to speak slowly because your brain doesn’t recognize the pattern in their speech so it literally just sounds like gibberish until your brain starts making the nueral pathway which connects the words and phrases in your mind to actual speech.
There is a lot more on this topic that I could go into but this is really all you need.
Lots of the answers here are wrong. When you’re at a concert and listening to the crowd, they aren’t amplified. You are only hearing the people near you. If the people near you are singing well, you’ll think the crowd is singing well.
Also, when you’re at a concert, you’re “in” to the performance and don’t notice everything. I remember going to a concert and thinking that the crowd sounded awesome when they sang along to a sound. A few days later, I went to youtube to see if anyone recorded it. Found it. And the crowd sounded like crap.
Maybe the more confident singers sing the loudest?
the same reason that averaging out everyones guess for a count of jelly beans in a jar is always pretty close. the voices of a lot of the people in the crowd are off, but some are off below where they should be, and some people are off above where they should be, and it averages out to around the correct notes
All I can say is that it might be the result of the cheerleader effect from the perspective of sound.
Imagine drawing a circle by hand. It will turn out pretty wonky. Not a perfect circle.
Imagine asking 100 people to draw a circle on top of your wonky circle. Eventually the circle will look round.
Short answer to your question: Your ear can be fooled. If a pitch (or especially a large group of pitches) gets close enough to what we expect to hear then our brain will process the pitch as being correct. In the case of a large group of pitches our brain will simply muffle out the wrong ones, but even with a single pitch we are able to “snap” the pitch to the correct position if it is close enough. The fact that your ear can be fooled is in fact a core principle of western music.
I’m going to ramble on a bit about your ear getting fooled being a core part of western music which isn’t actually related to your question all that much but I like talking about it. This next part will not be ELi5 and I won’t fault anyone for getting out while they can or just checking the tl;dr and then moving on with their life. Trigger warning for people who are afraid of math.
**tl;dr of what is to come: On any twelve tone instrument eleven out of the twelve tones are fundamentally out of tune. For example in the key of A (A=440 Hz. This 440 is arbitrary, it is simply what we have chosen as a reference pitch) the note E is supposed to be 660 Hz. But we instead tune it to 659.26 Hz. The reason we do this is that any twelve tone system can only possibly be in tune for one single key, so instead we compromise and make every single key equally “out of tune” in a way that makes them all sound so close to the real thing that our ear deceives us into accepting them as the real thing**
You know how an octave on a piano or guitar has 12 notes? Would you like to know how many of them are actually in tune? It’s only one of them. Only the note that determines the key that the song is in is actually in tune (because it’s impossible not to be, that note decides what the reference pitch even is).
And I’m not even talking accidental minute tuning differences, I’m saying that any note except for the root and its octaves are actually fundamentally out of tune. They have to be, otherwise each piano would only be able to play in one single key. (That is how instruments were tuned in medieval times, but let’s not get into that for now).
The twelve notes of our equal-tempered system are essentially metaphors for the notes that they actually represent. In order for our twelve tone system to work we need all twelve notes to be exactly an equal distance to each other. Making 6 steps of two notes should come out at a perfect octave (double the frequency), and so should 4 leaps of three notes, and three leaps of four notes, and two leaps of six notes. Or any combination thereof: 3+4+5=12 therefore if I move upward by three notes, then four notes, then five then the resulting frequency should be double the frequency (an “octave”) of where I started. The same goes for 8+4 or 11+1 or any other combination you can think of.
Because of this we have tuned each note on a twelve-tone instrument to be the twelfth root of 2 higher than the previous one, so if my A = 440 Hz then my A# needs to be 440*2^(1/12) and my B needs to be 440*2^(2/12) and the next note has to be 440*2^(3/12) etc. Because that’s the only possible way that we can cover the same distance 12 times and then end up on double the frequency (“octave”).
But that isn’t the “real” frequency of the sounds that these notes represent. Because the actual sounds that make up music are derived from what are called “overtones”. When a string vibrates they are not only vibrating at their root frequencies, they are also vibrating at what is known as “overtones”. [Wikipedia has a nice graphical representation of what those look like if they were all isolated](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Vibration_corde_trois_modes_petit.gif).
I know that it’s a little difficult, but you need to imagine that a vibrating string will produce all three of these motions at the same time. And not just the motions pictured in the wikipedia gif, it is actually overtones all the way down. Each new overtone vibrates at a higher frequency but with a smaller intensity, so the higher your overtones get the harder it becomes to hear them. If you go deep enough you could argue that the intensity of the vibration is so low that the wave might not exist at all, as far as the human ear goes this happens somewhere in the region of overtone ~10 but it depends on the sound and the listener (meaning 10 times the original frequency). (very rough approximation).
In other words: If I’m playing a song in the key of A and I play the note E, what I am actually doing is resonating with the third overtone of my root note (A). My root note vibrates at 440 Hz, its second overtone (octave) vibrates at 2*440=880 Hz, and its third overtone (dominant) vibrates at 3*440=1320 Hz. So the note E played in the key of A should in theory have a frequency of 1320 Hz, or any doubling or halving thereof. So 660 Hz when we reduce it back to the octave of our original A.
But the A in our equal-tempered twelve-tone system isn’t 660 Hz. It’s 440*2^(7/12)=659.26 Hz. This may seem like a small difference, but that is because the “dominant” note has the frequency that is closest to the real deal. It only gets worse from here. And in any case this still means that we have fundamentally tuned our instrument to the wrong pitch, but our ear does not mind. Our ear will gladly snap it into the right position for us. This is the mechanic that we exploit to be able to build twelve-tone instruments that can use all twelve of its tones as root notes: By creating a system of compromise where every note we play is slightly out of tune, but never so much that it becomes offensive to the ear.
In a perfectly tuned system every note should be an elegant multiplication of prime numbers 2, 3 and 5 based on this overtone sequence discussed above. (Some music also uses frequencies based on the prime 7, but I’ve never heard music going as deep as the prime 11 though I have no doubt that somebody has tried). Below I will include a table of how all twelve notes should have been tuned if we wanted a perfect key of A versus how we tune them in our equal temperament. I will start with the formulas and then add a second table with absolute values and how much % they are “out of tune”. (Using linear % here is actually not good because it’s a logarithmic scale but let’s settle for it for now):
Keep in mind here that the 440 Hz that we base this off is completely arbitrary. It is simply the global standard for reference pitch, and any other number would be just as valid.
Formulas:
Note | Formula in equal-tempered intonation | Formula in just intonation
—|—|—-
A | 440*2^(0/12) | 440*(1)
Bb | 440*2^(1/12) | 440*((2*2*2*2)/(3*5))
B | 440*2^(2/12) | 440*((3*3)/(2*2*2))
C | 440*2^(3/12) | 440*((2*3)/5)
C# | 440*2^(4/12) | 440*(5/(2*2))
D | 440*2^(5/12) | 440*((2*2)/3)
D# | 440*2^(6/12) | 440*((3*3*5)/(2*2*2*2*2))
E | 440*2^(7/12) | 440*(3/2)
F | 440*2^(8/12) | 440*((2*2*2)/5)
F# | 440*2^(9/12) | 440*(5/3)
G | 440*2^(10/12) | 440*((3*3)/5)
G# | 440*2^(11/12) | 440*((3*5)/(2*2*2))
A | 440*2^(12/12) | 440*2
Absolute frequencies and percentual differences:
Note | Frequency in equal-tempered intonation | Frequency in just intonation | % difference
—|—|—-|—-
A |440.00 |440.00 |0.00%
Bb |466.16 |469.33 |-0.68%
Bb |493.88 |495.00 |-0.23%
C |523.25 |528.00 |-0.90%
C# |554.37 |550.00 |0.79%
D |587.33 |586.67 |0.11%
D# |622.25 |618.75 |0.57%
E |659.26 |660.00 |-0.11%
F |698.46 |704.00 |-0.79%
F# |739.99 |733.33 |0.91%
G |783.99 |792.00 |-1.01%
G# |830.61 |825.00 |0.68%
A |880.00 |880.00 |0.00%
So as you can see every single note on a piano (except for the root note of our scale) is out of tune by around 1% in frequency. If we didn’t do this then we would have to tune our piano to for example a “just A” tuning, where all twelve notes sound absolutely perfect in the key of A, but they are going to sound atrocious in the key of D#. So instead we compromise: We make all twelve keys sound equally “out of tune”, but just enough so that our mind can trick is into thinking that they are perfect.
If somebody actually made it this far then I am proud of you for spending your time listening to some passionate guy on the internet talk about something that they know a lot about.
One final bonus round for musicians: You know how we often say things like “C# and Db are the same note”? Well they actually aren’t. That same black key represents both the C# and the Db, but a just C# and Db have different frequencies, even within the same key. In the key of A=440 for example a C# would have a frequency of 440*(5/(2*2))=550 Hz, whereas a Db would have a frequency of 440*((2*2*2*2*2)/(5*5))=563.2 Hz. So on our piano we play the frequency 554.37 Hz, but that frequency is actually a metaphor for either the frequency 550 Hz or 563.2 Hz depending on context. That is why we call them “enharmonic equivalents” and not “the same note”
I disagree with the common answers here. No, sound and pitch do not “average out”. That’s not at all how music and tonality works.
The truth is that the people who *can* sing WILL sing, and, here is the important bit, even those who aren’t great singers can still match pitch. Tone deafness doesn’t actually exist; it’s just a general term for someone who is bad at singing. It isn’t a scientific term, because literally every person (as long as you aren’t genuinely deaf or mute) can sing and match a pitch with their voice.
People who are not good solo singers sound bad because they aren’t using the right techniques or mechanics. We sing differently when we sing solo, or when we sing the leading part in a group. When we sing as a chorus, our mechanics and techniques are different, and all the “bad” parts of people’s voices go away. We can blend our sound, even if you aren’t a trained musician. Even if you rarely every sing, everybody has this innate ability.
https://youtu.be/tq1zkXtNbXw this is Choir Choir Choir, a NYC singing club where anybody can just show up and sing. This time with David Byrne singing Heros. It’s pretty great.
I’ll explain it like you’re five.
It averages everyone’s voice together. Some people are gonna be flat, and some sharp. But the average will be correct.
Latest Answers