In this article we report evidence that memory for musical pitch and tempo might not be as absolute as stated in pre-vious studies. In an experiment 72 subjects were asked to imitate familiar songs. Analysis of the recordings revealed that participants did not imitate the pitch of the original songs correctly, rather a random distribution within the octave was found. Also for the imitation of the tempo, the precision is clearly poorer than what has been found in previous studies. Therefore we suggest that people do not generally possess an absolute memory for musical pitch and tempo. Rather, they imitate songs starting with a pitch that assures them a comfortable singing range. The ‘im-age ’ of a song seems to be preserved regardless of the pitch and over a broad range of tempi
