Not able to make out lyrics in a song?

[Anonymous]

Having been recently diagnosed with ADHD, I wonder if this is the reason I cannot hear the proper words to any songs?

Example: any song I hear on the radio, most of the words I can’t make them out. The words I hear are no where close to what the actual words are.

Rhianna’s song “Under my Umbrella” , for example, i would hear “Under my Arms forever”…..much to the amusement of my wife, I was convinced thats what the lyrics were.

Only when I read the lyrics can I make out the words.

Opera: i was in shock when I found out that opera singers are actually saying words…..all the time I though they were just making musical tones with their voices.

I do not have any hearing problems, great health, not taking any meds for my ADHD(chose not to).

Anyone else experience this ? Any explanation as to why this is occuring?

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[Anonymous]

I have the same problem – much to my husband’s grand amusement. He gets the best laughs when I’m singing along in the car. There is something I’m looking into for myself, that is an overlap in ADD symptoms called auditory processing disorder (APS). You should

Google it. You’ll see misunderhearing of lyrics is quite common.

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[Anonymous]

Thank you for the info. Googled APS, and definitely explains it all.

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[Anonymous]

Let me ask you, when people talk rapidly to you, say… giving you spellings of their names or phone numbers, does you brain just break down and refuse to let you do anything with the information but hear it as it whizzes by? I have to take names and numbers at work, and if the customers talk to fast or faster than the brain can hear it, I don’t get any of it. Even after they repeat it, nada. Someone has to step in for me because I’m useless at that moment till normal speech timing is restored.

Also, do you get angry when more than two people talk to you at the same time? I despise talking to my in-laws who do this to me all.the.time. My husband isn’t much better talking to me as I’m trying to listen to someone say something to me on the phone. Both examples are rude, but even more frustrating than that for me.

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[Anonymous]

When it comes to rapid talk, i can somehow manage to absorb the info and can handle it.

In a crowded room, I can manage to have a converstaion with a person while simultaneously able to hear other conversations going on and understand the jist of everything going on in the room. Its as if my brain is processing auditory stuff so quickly that i can do this stuff with not that much effort.

However, there are times when in a simple one on one conversation with my wife (or anyone else), the words will whizz by totally over my head, and although i heard the words, my braid did not process them. Not sure if that makes any sense, but thats exactly what happpens.

Also, i’ve been told “you’re not listening!!!!” when i get some instructions like “”Get the system activated on Thursday “, I’ll then ask “When do you need this done by?”. But I can multi-task at an alarming rate.

Have you tried closing your eyes when on the phone taking the ames/numbers? That might help(as teh brain temporarily shuts off visual stimulation and may divert the effort to the auditory stream?).

Im a early 40’s Electrical Engineer (I really feel like a smarter and better looking version of Forrest Gump), and have managed to be successful by beingh petrsistent and using a brute force approach to studying and getting assignments done.

On a separate note: do you ever find yourself looking for somthing that is right in front of you, yet you don’t see it?

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[Anonymous]

Yes, sometimes, but only when I’m stressed. and it’s never funny as the other person who points out the item thinks it is, is it?

Our store is small, and customers tend to come in packs or waves, so when someone else is close by talking and the customer giving me information is talking too fast, my brain basically shuts down from too much stimuli at that moment, and I have to get someone else to take over for me. I will back away saying, I can’t do this right now, and my husband will jump in to take over. Customers look at me like I’m retarded but I don’t care. If my brain can’t process something, there’s just no amount of brute force I can implement that will get that information to get from my ears to my brain to my hands to type it in. I know it, and my husband knows it. He prefers that I back off rather that get mad in front of customers.

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[Tim]

I have never been able to understand song lyrics unless they are well enunciated, something very rare in the pop music world. I have accumulated the craziest lyrics to songs I have heard over the years but most songs just go by as if they were noise.

If I don’t work very hard at hearing what I am being told by a supervisor I usually miss everything after “Here’s what I want you to do.”. This isn’t good. In a crowded room like a pub or a party, I also have to expend a huge amount of energy to carry on a conversation. After a while I just go home or somewhere else. It’s just too much work.

And yes, the best place to hide something from me is to put it right in front of me.

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[Anonymous]

My boyfriend and I are both ADHD. We constantly crack one another up with our respective interpretations of song lyrics, so much so that we started doing a little research on the topic. A mondegreen is the English term for a misinterpretation of a song lyric or line in a poem. For example “Hold me closer, Tony Danza” would be a mondegreen for when Elton John sings, “Hold me closer, tiny dancer”. What are your best/ most hilarious mondegreens??????

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[dspicelady]

Pussy Cat Dolls-When I Grow Up. I thought the lyric said “I want to have boobies”, when in reality it says, “I want to have groupies”. It made sense to me. We live in a time/culture when many are getting plastic surgery for anything and everything. This amused my teenage girls to no end. They can’t hear the song now without hearing “my” peculiar take on it.

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[Anonymous]

sounds very familiar. I tend to hear dirty words, vulgar phrases, or sexual terms in place of lyrics with a very impulsive desire to repeat such lyrics aloud. My wife says I can’t enjoy music without ruining it

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[Anonymous]

I might be dating myself here, but when I was in my teens I loved the Doors. One song has the lyric, “Yeah, my knees got weak.” I was singing to it one day and my brother overheard me, broke out laughing and quite publicly told everyone in my family I sang it as, “Yeah, my name is Jean Guy.” Sooooo, so… SO embarrassed. And that’s not the first or the last time I have misheard lyrics and made people bust a gut. There is one song that plays a lot on the radio called “Black Hole Sun” by Sound Garden that, no matter how many times my husband laughs and corrects me (and he loves to do this, esp to this one song in particular), I still keep singing it as, “Black on white…” It’s like my brain skips or gets stuck in a groove with that one song. Most others that I have been corrected on, I have taught myself to sing the correct lyrics to. Just not Black Hole Sun. It’s a mental block for me.

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[Anonymous]

The worst ones for me is whenever I hear a song by Elvis, Elton John, or Bruce Springsteen. Elton John has to be the worst. His lyrics are at times incomprehensible. The song “Philadelphia Freedom” is a good example. In it, he sings about “I used to be a hard beatin’ photon won”. What the hell is a hard beatin’ photon won? I don’t thnk it’s my ADD or anything like that, the guy just can’t elucidate!

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[billd]

Frankly, I don’t think it’s limited to ADD. I know non-add folks who have the same problem, some of it’s the song mixing itself, and some singers just suck at “enunciating” – of course to do so takes from the song. Many artists don’t care if you get the lyrics or not, and how often have lyrics made sense in songs from when some of us grew up? Some are regional things, have meaning where they were raised, but mean little elsewhere.

Check out some of the lyrics sites and see just how wrong many of them are. I’ve seen lyrics incorrect in album liners, too.

If you ask the general population you’ll get a mix of “interpretations” from people. I used to be really into music, and be really intent on knowing the proper lyrics, etc. – and found that most people simply do not know, or they FAKE IT, pretending to know because they don’t want to appear “dumb”.

ADD may make it worse, I can’t say for sure, but I find that often I tell my friends what the lyrics are, other times, I simply GOOGLE ’em, and hope the lyrics sites are right. Usually I compare 2 or 3 different sites.

BTW – Bob L – that’s a device used by Luke Skywalker if I recall………

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[Anonymous]

I have the same problems with song lyrics this is why I prefer listening to instramental music. Does anyone else find that easier on their brain? To learn song lyrics I need to see them. I can deal with multiple conversations and generally follow along but just listening to song lyrics? 9 out 10 times I’ll ge it wrong… it’s frustrating.

Whats also embarassing is occasionally I would zone out on friends when they talk to me its like I would miss whole sentences and end up saying blankly “what?” or “huh?” the strange thing it happens to only a select few; not everyone thats what makes it extra embarassing

K

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[Patte Rosebank]

Opera lyrics are tricky to understand, even in English, because the vocal technique is more about producing a particular vocal sound, than being understood. In opera, the voice is meant to resonate in the chest and in the “mask” of the head, producing very round, full tones, which can be heard in the back row of the balcony, without amplification. That sound is very different from the sound we’re used to hearing in everyday speech—which means the brain has to work harder to understand the words. I suspect that the widespread use of Auto-Tune nowadays to give singers’ voices a weird robotic sound, has the same effect.

In popular & Broadway singing, amplification is used to carry the sound to the back row, so the voice is meant to be more crisp & clear, coming through the teeth, so that the words can be understood. You can really hear the difference between opera & pop singing when an opera singer tries to sing a popular song. The clash between the style of the singer and the style of the song is very jarring.

Comprehension of lyrics gets trickier in both opera & pop, when you have multiple people singing together. Each person must over-enunciate, and hit all consonants at the exact same time. If even one person is a fraction of a beat off, you get an echo effect, which makes the lyrics even harder to understand.

But it isn’t just singers who are hard to understand. Most people are simply too lazy to speak clearly.

When my brother and I were just learning to talk, my mom was always telling us to speak clearly, and correcting any mispronunciations. Instead of laughing at them, she’d always correct them, because, as she told us, “‘Wed cow’ instead of ‘red car’ is cute coming from a 3-year-old, but isn’t cute coming from a teenager or adult.”

Where I have trouble in music is when I have to sing a line other than the melody. I have a hell of a time focussing on that harmony line, picking it out of the accompaniment, and following it along. And trying to find my note, relative to a note someone else is hitting, is also fiendishly difficult. This is why I usually sing soprano, despite having a voice that can go all the way down to contralto range. Sopranos usually carry the melody.

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