Happy New Year!
Happy 2018, writers! I hope everyone had a fun, enjoyable, and safe New Year’s celebration, doing whatever it is you most enjoy doing. For our family, it meant leaving the scientists-in-training with a babysitter for a very rare date night/ New Year’s Eve party, which turned out to have a Karaoke machine. I always tell people that I am tone deaf, and most of the time they tend to believe me without having to prove it to them, which means that my singing career has been pretty limited to date. Nonetheless, something about good friends, just the right amount of partying, and fun songs from my childhood were enough to keep the singing going, probably far longer than most of the other party guests wanted to hear.
But is there really such a thing as tone-deaf people, I started to wonder, or is this just a way of saying, “Your voice is awful please don’t sing in public”? This is particularly confusing for me, because one of my hobbies from my past was playing classical music on the piano, a hobby which I was actually able to do rather well. So could I really be tone deaf if I played piano well? What does it all mean?
It turns out that you can do an online test to determine if you are tone-deaf (http://tonedeaftest.com/), so after much trepidation, I tried it….and…I got 100% correct! Hurray for me!
After more internet research, I found out that true tone-deafness only affects about 5% of the population (which is a much lower percentage than the percent of people whom you don’t want to hear sing). Truly tone-deaf people, apparently, listen to music and it sounds to them like the banging of pots and pans. A shame for them, but then at least they aren’t bothered by their own attempts to sing.
Check out some links below for more information on tone-deafness:
What about my bad karaoke, then? It turns out I may just have to come to terms with the fact that I have a bad voice. Or I haven’t been trained in signing. Or both.
Cheers, readers! Here’s to a 2018 with lots of singing, whether or not you sound good doing it, as long as you are having a good time!
