This October I sent a short questionnaire, Can you sing? to the whole school. More specifically, to all pupils at our senior school, and staff of both senior and prep schools.
*Sorry about the sensational title! This figure comes from a sample of 359 replies [69% of the pupil body returned the questionnaire] but nonetheless it is a significant number of people, and the data makes for fascinating reading.
My initial intention was to discover how many might call themselves tone deaf, and I’ll come to that in a moment; but what has shocked me is this: 44% have been told by someone that they can’t sing. And in response to the question ‘Can you sing?’ (answer either yes or no), 34% said no, they can’t sing.
I wonder how many of those 122 people who say that they can’t sing have come to that conclusion because they’ve believed someone who has told them that, even if it might not actually be true. Of course teenagers can have a tendency to be down on themselves, and so that figure of 35% might be exaggerated: but then again, look at the numbers for our adult population – 31% of the school staff also say that they can’t sing. In a recent assembly the headmaster talked about the importance of developing into the person we want to be, not into the person which other people want us to be. Thought-provoking, as always, but not easy when those around us can have such a big influence on us, perhaps more often than not without us even realising it.
Arguably, ‘Can you sing?’ might be understood in a number of different ways. Maybe the implication here is ‘Are you allowed to sing?’ In other words, do those around you enable you to sing by allowing you to express yourself, or do they, either deliberately or otherwise, resign you to keeping quiet until singing becomes something you ‘can’t do.’
If it’s not bad enough being told that you can’t sing, 56 people (16%) in this sample described themselves as tone deaf. Of those, 10 have been ‘diagnosed’ by their parents, 25 by friends and 10 by …. their music teacher. How depressing. Sadly I know all too many people who have been silenced by those closest to them. Perhaps they think it’s funny, but I’ve seen reactions from boys in the ‘Choir who can’t sing’ which would suggest otherwise. Please don’t ever tell anyone they can’t sing – you might just be sentencing them to a life without all of the richness which singing brings.
Wikipedia will tell you that about 4% of the population suffer from tone deafness, aka Congenital amusia. Don’t believe it. I’d love to know where this statistic comes from – maybe it’s the proportion of people who think they are tone deaf. But I’m up for proving them wrong either way! Of the 56 in my survey, 19 say that they’d love to be able to sing, and 26 describe themselves as ‘hopeless’. From my experience with the Choir who can’t sing and others, I’d be very surprised if most of these aren’t prepared to permit me to give them a slightly more professional opinion on their ‘diagnosis’.
Not sure when I’m going to find the time to do this, but the plan now is to see as many of these so-called tone deaf people as possible, and to see whether I can bring that supposed 16% down to a realistic much less than 4%. I’ll report back in due course….
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