More importantly, can you learn how to sing? 

I'm going to give you the short answer straight away - with a couple of asterisks**

Most people - even people who think currently, that they can't sing… 

Even people who call themselves tone deaf… 

Even people who have not done a lot of singing their life at all…

Even people who were told when they were at school that they can't join the choir, or that they should just shut their mouth and stop singing… 

The vast majority of all of those people absolutely can sing! 

**There is a very small percentage of the population who will actually have quite a lot of trouble learning how to sing. But I just want to emphasize that's probably not you. 

We're going to unpack all of this in this video so that you can find out once and for all you actually can learn how to sing.

We're going to unpack what human capacities you need to be able to sing.

We're going to talk about the differences between the people who seem like they're naturals at it, or talented at singing, and the people who don't seem that way.

And we'll talk a little bit more about the people who may actually really have considerable struggle and challenge with learning how to sing. 

Before we dive in, just make sure if you want more tips and tools on music practice - whether that's singing, piano, self accompaniment guitar, music theory, creative expression. Make sure that you subscribe to our channel so that you can be notified of all the new videos coming out.

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Here's the video on Youtube! If you prefer to read, continue scrolling...

So if you are asking the question, “Can anyone learn how to sing?” it's probably because you want to learn how to sing yourself. 

You've gone ahead and typed this into Google or YouTube because… you doubt yourself.

You're wondering if you've got what it takes. And you’re wanting to find out if it's worth your while embarking on that journey? 

It's also possible if you're asking this question that you might have had some negative experiences in your life around singing.

Maybe you were shamed in your family for singing when you're a kid. Maybe you were teased or ridiculed or maybe you tried out for a choir at school and the choir teacher said that you can't sing and that you couldn't join the choir. People have lots of different kinds of negative experiences around music, growing up, and usually that turns into doubts that we have about our ability to do these things.

The good news is that most of the time this has no reflection on your actual capacity to do it, and it has more to do with the environment and the culture that you grow up in. We're going to talk a bit more about that later. 

First, I want to dive into what are the innate human capacities that we need in order to be able to sing?

1. A functioning nervous system.

Now, I don't necessarily mean that you have to be neurotypical or that you can't have any kind of diversity in your nervous system, but you do need to have just a basic baseline level of functionality in your nervous system. 

2. A functioning auditory system

This is related to the nervous system. You need to be able to perceive sounds in a reliable way, and you need to have the capacity to distinguish between sounds and also to be able to perceive the relationship between sounds. At the most basic level, this involves the ability to perceive frequencies and tempo.

So in a musical sense, this is pitch: lower pitches, higher pitches, and subtle differences between pitches. Higher pitches as they move lower, and pitches as they jump larger distances.

We also need the ability to be able to perceive timing and tempo in music. This means where the sounds are placed in time, whether they're close together, whether they're far apart, whether they're long sounds, whether they're short sounds, and the kinds of rhythms that get created through the combinations of these.

Now, when I say perceive, I don't mean know about them musically. I don't mean that you have musical training in relation to this. It's literally just the most basic level. Being able to perceive these things, being able to hear them - and this is a lot simpler than you might think. These are things that we naturally hear in speech and conversation all the time.

These are things that we hear in the sound of a train going down the tracks. These are the things that we hear in traffic. These are things that we hear in our everyday life in all kinds of contexts. So these abilities are not necessarily musically related. It is thought that we have an a part of our neurology that is specific to music, but a lot of the qualities of music and the basic ability to perceive sounds that we possess are things that we experience in our everyday lives in all kinds of ways. 

So, if you have a functioning nervous system, a functioning auditory system, and the ability to distinguish the difference between one sound and another, and also the relationships between sounds and the the ways that sounds are different and the same as one another, then you're in a really good place to learn how to sing.

Now, as I had mentioned at the start, there are people who may have trouble learning how to sing, and these are people who have either a congenital condition or an acquired condition called ‘amusia’. This is something that has been researched at length by scientists and it's thought that around about 4% of the human population experiences amusia.

This is characterized by the actual inability to distinguish and the differences between sounds. The inability to hear the difference between a low sound and a high sound. The inability to perceive the differences in textures or tones in sound. The difference between scratching a table and and crackling paper, for example.

In a very small - even smaller than four percent number of people - this is a congenital condition, meaning that it's something that they're born with. It is also thought that it can be environmental - so someone can present looking as if they have amusia because of the environmental conditions that they grew up in, more so than their innate abilities.

It can also be observed that, for people who come from cultures with highly tonal languages, like a lot of the Asian languages, congenital amusia is actually a lot lower in prevalence. This suggests the environmental and cultural and developmental causes of this condition. People who grow up needing to hear subtle differences in sound in order to understand a word's meaning correctly, need to develop their sound perception to more refined levels just in order to communicate on an every day level.

It is possible as well, if somebody, experiences some kind of brain injury and they sustain lesions to certain parts of their brain that have to do with musical processing, then these people can experience what is called 'tone deafness' (aka amusia). Again, this is a very small percentage of the population and a lot of the people who call themselves. ‘Tone deaf’ actually are not tone deaf. 

Which brings me to the next topic of this discussion, which is what it is that makes the difference between somebody who presents as a natural at singing or talented at singing, and someone who seems as if they're not.

For the vast majority of people, this is more about culture, family, and environmental factors than it has anything to do with the innate capacity of that human being.

I was incredibly fortunate to grow up with music around me. When I was in-utero in my mother's womb, she was actually singing, so I  was able to develop with this awareness of musical sound all around me. It's not really that surprising that I grew up with a natural ability to sing. 

Now, this is not everybody’s formative experience, and that's perfectly understandable. But that doesn't make me more innately capable of singing than another person. It just means that I had a really great environment to support that learning. And I was exposed to musical sound at a very young, early stage of my life.

So it's exposure, it's environment, it's culture. In some cultures, music is just a part of everyday life. In a lot of African cultures, Latin American cultures, music is just the water that people swim in. So it's just so natural for people to pick it up the same way that we pick up language. 

If you didn't grow up with this kind of exposure, these kinds of environments and this kind of experience, you simply haven't had the opportunity to explore this aspect of yourself and to bring out these innate abilites. So you could be forgiven for assuming that you're not musical, but actually that's not the case.

Musicality is there, these are innate capacities within the human being, and just because you didn't grow up in an environment that brought these capacities out doesn't mean they're not there. All it means is that you're just going to need to work on developing and bringing out those capacities yourself.

As I like to say, musical ability is a little bit like a cross between physical fitness training and brain training. Both of these forms of training, the mind and the body, have to do with developing capacities that we already have that may just lie latent and music is really the same. It's just bringing out capacities that lay dormant until we decide to use them or until we have an opportunity to do so.

So if you suspect that you have some kind of congenital condition such as amusia, you could find that out by going to see a medical professional to diagnose that. Or if you've had some kind of accident where you know you've had some kind of injury to your brain, which may have affected your ability to perceive and process sounds, then it’s possible that you are in that very small percentage of the population who may find it challenging to develop your singing ability. 

I just want to emphasise here that that doesn't mean it's not possible at all. Because as we know, the brain is plastic and with training and with the right kind of help, a lot more is possible than we think.

I just wanted to acknowledge that it could be quite challenging for that very small percentage of the population, but for the rest of the population who has a functioning nervous system, a functioning auditory system, and the capacity to, at a very basic level, tell the difference between one sound and another, you absolutely can train your ability to sing.

What will carry you through that process is the pure and simple love of singing, the love of making that kind of song-like sound, no matter what that sounds like at this point in time. Staying connected to the what you love about making that sound is going to carry you through the journey of learning how to refine it further.

So it's good news! More than likely, you absolutely can learn how to sing!

Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel because I'm going to be coming out with more videos about singing. You can comment there about what you would like to learn, what your questions are about singing, because I can create videos based on what you ask of me.

So drop me a comment, like and subscribe and share it with anyone that you think might benefit from understanding this about singing. 

As always, love the sounds you make. Practice the beauty of sound.