I never understood where this notion of ‘bad singers’ came from. In the other hemisphere of our world, everybody sings casually, whereas here, it’s more of a right reserved for a privileged elite. Why are we so hushed up?

I don’t think anyone can really be a bad singer any more than anyone can be a bad talker. Sure, there’s high talkers, low talkers, fast talkers, slow talkers, but nobody is bad at talking. You can be bad at talking in front of a crowd, but not bad at talking in general. In the same way, singing can have characteristics that are more pleasant but it’s all still possible.

After all, it’s just slow talking.

I think most people base it off a) vocal range and b) the ability to detect the pitch of a known song and replicate it. If you’re tone deaf, people will obviously think you can’t sing, although you could easily make your own melodies. If your voice has two pitches, people will think there’s no point in bothering.

Yet any layer of singing adds a new texture to the polyphony, no matter how many notes you can produce.

Maybe we’re all just afraid of being made fun of. Everyone does it in private, right?