Humans Are Made to Sing

The other day I was talking to Handy Woman about classes we are taking; I was taking ukulele and am still taking Irish, and she is taking French and voice classes. I had thought about taking the same voice class, but I said it might have been kind of awkward if we had both been in there, and she said, “More so for me, since you have such a good voice.” Somehow that got us onto a discussion of how at my last job a doctor was giving a talk on sinuses and what to do about them, but none of the doctors in attendance could figure out why on earth humans have sinuses. I didn’t say anything at the time, but all I could think was, “To have a resonant space for singing!” Handy Woman and I reflected on that wondrous thought: humans are built to sing! I said in my experience most people can sing reasonably well, and scientists actually did a study a couple of years ago that concluded the same thing: most people can sing a tune with reasonable approximation of pitch and rhythm. Of the small percentage of people who couldn’t, they were about equally divided into two types: those who realized they were terrible singers, and those who had no idea. The article I read noted that the researchers couldn’t answer the question of why so many of the latter type ended up on those “Make Me a Famous Singer” reality shows, just to hear in utter disbelief that they are awful, but this does go to show that some of these people are not putting us on. They genuinely think they sound wonderful.

Famous Hat