WHY DOES MY SINGING SOUND SO GOOD IN THE SHOWER?

When you sing in a room, the sound lingers as it reflects back and forth between the walls. Each time the sound bounces off the room’s surfaces, it gets a bit quieter as energy is lost. A bathroom contains lots of tiling and other surfaces that are hard and non-porous to make them easy to clean. These happen to reflect sound very efficiently, so it reverberates in the shower longer than in most other rooms. For example, a bedroom has soft furnishings, curtains and carpet that dampen the sound; these porous materials remove a lot of the sound energy at each reflection.

The strong reflected sound in the shower amplifies your voice, making you sound like a more powerful singer. Experiments have shown that louder music that surrounds you has a stronger emotional punch. But if you’re a regular shower singer, you might have noticed that some notes are more impressive than others. This happens because some notes coincide with resonant frequencies in the bathroom and get more of a boost. (This is resonance of the air in the room, not the materials in the walls.)

The opposite of a shower, and a more extreme example of the plush bedroom, is an anechoic chamber. Every surface is covered with sound-absorbing foam wedges to ensure there are no reflections. Singing in there is hard work, and your voice sounds muffled and distant. Also, you can hear every tiny deficiency in your voice, because there’s no other sound to hide them. In a shower, the reflections cause sound to linger. This creates a bloom that subtly smooths the transitions between notes, helping to hide imperfections and making you sound like a better singer.