It is like the answer to that old question of how you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice! Practice! According to new research, if you want to sing better, you have to sing more often. It doesn't matter if you can't carry a tune in a bucket, singing more helps you learn to sing.
Being able to sing on-key is a learned skill. Singing is like playing a musical instrument in that it takes time to learn to do well. Not only that, but your singing will grow rusty if you don't do it for a long time.
"No one expects a beginner on violin to sound good right away, it takes practice, but everyone is supposed to be able to sing," said Steven Demorest, a professor of music education at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music in Evanston, IL. "When people are unsuccessful they take it very personally, but we think if you sing more, you'll get better."
Demorest and his colleague Peter Pfordrescher, director of the Auditory Perception and Action Lab at the State University of New York at Buffalo, evaluated the singing skills of children in kindergarten and in sixth grade and the skills of college-aged adults. The participants were given three singing tests. In one, they were asked to listen to listen to a sequence of four repetitions of a single pitch and then sing back the sequence.
They found that there was an improvement in pitch accuracy from kindergarten to sixth grade, which is when most children stop receiving music instruction. In the adults, the gains started to recede. Most of the college students performed at the level of the kindergartners.
Singing on key does comes more naturally to some people than to others. "But it's also a skill that can be taught and developed, and much of it has to do with using the voice regularly," Demorest said. "Our study suggests that adults who may have performed better as children lost the ability when they stopped singing."
