Requiem for a Voice

Or, The Day Dunning and Kruger Came for Me

Kate Winslet performs really bad karaoke in her role as dictator Elena Vernham on Max’s The Regime.

Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It’s a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for people to evaluate their own competence in any given area. Mismatch between actual and perceived ability is greatest among the least competent. Because they don’t have the skill or knowledge to evaluate their own performance, people in the bottom 25th percentile of a given group tend to evaluate themselves as much more competent than they truly are.

On the other hand, highly skilled people, while recognizing their own abilities, often underestimate their excellence because they’re all too aware of their shortcomings and assume that many other people must be as competent as they are.

In my last letter, I wrote about the joys of being part of my band, Local Honey, and also about my lifetime love affair with singing. This week I am realizing that I have fallen prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and I don’t mean that I’m a musical genius who underestimated my talent.

Damien has been investing heavily in recording equipment for the band, and he’s been learning how to capture, isolate, and mix separate tracks for each member of the band. He finally finished the painstaking process of producing all the tracks from our last show, and he sent them out to the band today.

I left that gig feeling elated. After a year working together, I felt that Local Honey became a real band that night. We felt both loose (at ease) and tight (in synch). I sang my guts out and felt like a bona fide rockstar.

Except that when I listened to the playback, my voice sounded like actual guts.

I’m not exaggerating. I was pitchy. Notes wobbled and died as I held them. The growls that seemed so sexy and tuneful at the time were harsh and grating, nobody’s idea of music. I was flat through whole phrases and straining in others. If I had heard my performance on The Voice or American Idol, I would have run to the kitchen for a snack and said to Damien, “I can’t stand it. Call me when it’s over.”

For example, I sang a song by the band Lake Street Dive called “You Go Down Smooth,” and I honestly thought that I was doing a great job of covering Rachael Price’s vocal. I knew I didn’t sound just like her, but I thought I was hitting the same notes she does, just with my own flavor. Instead, “You Go Down Smooth” goes down like turpentine.

There’s some good news. The band was tight, and Cheryl (our other lead singer) was fantastic, as was Sher, who mostly sings backups right now but had a couple of stellar leads during the evening. And I was able to hold my pitch and blend with the others on my harmonies, so I don’t feel like I have to fire myself outright.

Why didn’t I know sooner that I was sounding so bad? Well, I’ve had clues. For example, in rehearsal I sometimes sounded pitchy, but I convinced myself that it was because I wasn’t trying my hardest. I assumed that I would rise to the occasion at a gig. That’s a classic cognitive bias to have, but in reality the opposite is true. Practicing in a low stress, comfortable environment is much easier than dealing with the pressure of performance. I move around a lot more when I sing on stage, and that makes it harder to catch my breath and stay in tune. Our gig was outside, which meant that it was chilly, and there was a lot of ambient noise to compete with. I’m not used to singing under those conditions, so I don’t know how to compensate for them and I did worse than in practice, not better.

I’m also pretty sure that my mild to moderate hearing loss is having an effect on my ability to hear myself. I have tinnitus all the time, and maybe the cacophony in my head is robbing me of the ability assess my pitch accurately. That doesn’t explain why I can hear my mistakes so clearly on the recording, though.

By the way, these aren’t excuses. My bandmates were able to sing on pitch and with beautiful depth and resonance. I wasn’t. It’s going to take some work to figure out why that happened and whether there’s anything I can do about it.

Having discovered that I’m not nearly as good as I thought I was, I’m faced with a choice. I can give up on singing and lick my wounds. I can continue to lie to myself and keep singing - after all, I’ve gotten away with it so far. Or I can do what I plan to do: ask my bandmates to cover my leads for a while and go back to the drawing board by taking voice lessons, practicing more, and recording my voice more often so I can get a real sense of what I’m doing. It may be too late to retune this poor old instrument, but I figure it’s worth a try.

This sense of vulnerability has been a theme in my life lately. Recently, I subbed for a tennis team I don’t usually play on. My partner for the match is a friend in her early seventies. She was so excited to play with me, a relative spring chicken, because she felt I would help her to win her first match of the season. She was convinced that she would do better with a younger, faster player. Except we didn’t win - the other team dispatched us pretty quickly. My partner was devastated. Playing with me, as opposed to her regular partner, helped her to recognize her own shortcomings. After the match, she said, “I think maybe I’m not cut out for competitive tennis anymore.”

I told her that lots of my friends play just for fun now, that there’s something liberating about giving up the need to compete. I didn’t want to reassure her that she’s good enough to play competitive tennis, because that’s not my decision to make. She has to decide. She could choose to work really hard at getting better. She could make peace with losing a lot. But it would be unkind and unfair to suggest that the evidence she’s getting about her level of play is untrue. Part of why we compete is to know where we stand.

Music isn’t competitive, exactly, but we get feedback, too, both literal and figurative. Just as my tennis friend can’t lie to herself about her abilities, neither can I.

Back in Maine, in early days of my garage band career, I was hanging out with my friend Jake, a gifted athlete and physical education teacher who had taken up the fiddle at about the same time as I started to sing. She said, “It’s funny how we throw ourselves into hobbies that we’re just okay at and neglect our greatest gifts.”

Maybe Jake was finding a kind way to tell me that I shouldn’t quit my day job all those many years ago. But I can’t help but feel it’s been worthwhile to spend almost two decades performing with my scratchy, flawed voice. After all, my new novel features a singer in a garage band, and she’s as amazing as I am (in my imagination). I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be a diva, if I hadn’t been a legend in my own mind.