This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

The average person seems to have a remarkable memory for tempo. In an experiment that Perry Cook and I published in 1996, we asked people to simply sing their favorite rock and popular songs from memory and we were interested to know how close they came to the actual tempo of the recorded versions of those songs. As a baseline, we considered how much variation in tempo the average person can detect; that turns out to be 4 percent. In other words, for a song with a tempo of 100 bpm, if the tempo varies between 96–100, most people, even some professional musicians, won’t detect this small change (although most drummers would—their job requires that they be more sensitive to tempo than other musicians, because they are responsible for maintaining tempo when there is no conductor to do it for them). A majority of people in our study—nonmusicians—were able to sing songs within 4 percent of their nominal tempo.