Why can’t we all hit riffs like Christina Aguilera, hit high and low notes like Mariah Carey, and sing a beautiful melody like Ariana Grande? According to research, there are many factors that contribute to the answer of why some people are naturally better at singing than others. In a study from the University of Montreal in 2012 on what prevented those who are not musically trained from being able to sing. This study found that 20 percent of the people that were studied didn’t have good control of their vocal muscles, 35 percent had trouble matching their voice to a specific pitch, and five percent completely lacked the ability to detect different differences in pitches between two sounds. These reasons for variety in why people do not have the ability to sing well, shows that it differs from person to person.

Mental abilities can influence our abilities to sing. We’re all born with the ability to sing but sometimes it is a “mental boundary” that keeps us from singing. People need encouragement to boost their self-confidence and mental state to help them be more willing and dedicated to improving their singing. People who lack confidence and encouragement are going to be much less likely to acquire a pleasant singing voice, due to their lack of a positive mental outlook in regards to singing.

Sean Hutchins who studied at BRAMS for neuroscience of music did a study on the two suspects that he felt had the biggest impact on why some people do not have natural vocal abilities. First, he explained perception as in “maybe people weren’t hearing the notes correctly.” He also had a theory that maybe it was difficulty with motor control, in other words, bad singers couldn’t control their vocal chords enough to duplicate what they heard. He tested musicians with at least seven years of experience and non-musicians and asked them both to replicate notes that he generated on his computer. First, they were able to match the notes with a slide (a device with a sliding button to change the pitch of a sound). Eventually both groups were able to make the sound, but when they were asked to try and match the notes with their own voices, the non-musicians were only successful 59 percent of the time. Hutchins concluded that this may be due to the imitative deficit, which means that the bad singers’ brains associate a note that we hear with the incorrect muscle movement in one’s voice.

Although some may say that singing lessons can help, many people lack the necessary mental abilities that make one able to sound good when they sing, maybe even to the caliber of Ariana Grande.