This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Next time you find yourself at a karaoke bar, let me suggest a song.

Otis Redings sitting on the dock of the bay.

The reason, it's got whistling in it, so you'll sound better, because new research

out in the Journal Royal Society Open Science says it's easier to

accurately whistle a melody than it is to sing it.

And this is a bit of a surprise because I mean we spend all day using our voices. Most of the time it's for speech but we do all kinds of really

subtle and interesting things with speech.

Michelle Bellick is a neuroscientist at the Holland Blue Review Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Ontario, Canada.

So as I'm speaking now, I'm placing emphasis on certain words or stress in certain syllables.

You can tell that I'm making a statement rather than asking a question by the inflection of my voice.

And so these are all very subtle uses of the voice that we have tons and tons of practice

with much more so probably than whistling and yet people were a little better with

the whistle. For the study Bellick and his team asked 28 undergrads with varying

levels of music and singing experience to imitate a melody like this by either whistling or singing and

the singing was more consistently out of tune, regardless of musical level.

Michelle's theory on that...

So what I think is going on here is, even though we don't practice whistling quite so much we have a much longer

evolutionary history of having really fine-green control over the muscles of the

lips whereas control of the larynx is mostly evolved after humans split from other primates.

So next time you feel like you're really nailing that rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, just imagine

...