Last night I killed it at Heardle.

My wife was playing the game, which — for those who aren’t familiar with it — begins by playing a mere second of a pop song. You try to guess which song it is. If you can’t, it’ll give you increasingly longer chunks until you (hopefully) finally figure it out.

Anyway, last night when wife played the one-second clip, it was only two notes on a piano — DUM-dum …

… but I instantly knew what it was.

“Don’t Stop Believin’ — by Journey!” I blurted.

Nailed it.

Now, I’m not here to brag about my mad skillz at Heardle. I’m actually only a middling player; my wife and sons are much better than I.

But what I’m interested in is the question of why anyone can play Heardle so well. What is it about pop music that lets us so readily identify an artist, and a song, after hearing only the tiniest snippet of the recording?

One word, folks:

Timbre.

I first learned about timbre back in 2006 when I profiled Daniel Levitin, the cognitive psychologist famous for studying why our brains seem to enjoy music so much. He’d recently released a book about his findings.

Levitin spent his early adulthood in the 80s as a music producer, working with artists ranging from Blue Öyster Cult to Stevie Wonder and Chris Isaak. By the 90s he was becoming disenchanted with the music industry, but fascinated by the neuroscientific mysteries of why humans can be so amazing at recognizing melodies and picking out incredibly fine gradations of tonality in music.

He left the music industry to pursue a PhD in music perception and cognition, doing all manner of cool research to test our abilities to apprehend music. One of my favorite Levitin experiments was one of his first: He’d take a tape recorder, stop random people in the street, and ask them to sing — from memory — one of their favorite songs. Levitin discovered that everyday people were astonishingly accurate. Most were able to hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin of error; two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch. “When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” as Levitin told me.

Later in my visit to Levitin’s lab, we went to his recording console and we did a low-fi version of Heardle, with him playing me incredibly short snippets of pop songs. I accurately picked out “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones after two raspy notes, then got “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John after hearing only the single, initial chord on the piano.

Then Levitin explained precisely why we’re so good at doing this.

It’s because pop music has incredibly memorable timbre.

Okay, cool, but what is timbre?

GLAD YOU ASKED. Timbre is the particularqualityof a sound that makes it different from other sounds — even if they’re playing the same melody, at the same tempo.

As I wrote back in 2006 …

Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are playing the same melody in the same key.

So a tuba has a timbre that’s distinct from that of a flute, or from a harmonica or a banjo. Play “Happy Birthday” on each, and you’ll recognize the same melody, the same key, the same tempo. But each sounds different.

And here’s the thing: When a pop act is really memorable, it too has an extremely distinct timbre.

With a famous singer, their voice often has a timbre that makes them instantly recognizable, from Beyoncé to Johnny Cash to Regina Spektor or Lizzo. With bands, or with producers known for crafting a particular sound, things get even more complex, because an entire group can have a timbre — the way their voices and instruments and production combine. When I hear a song by the Beatles, it’s recognizably a Beatles song. When I hear literally any track by Public Enemy, that sound is unmistakably theirs. The same goes for, say, Phoebe Bridgers or Vampire Weekend or, really, any of your favorite performers. There’s an alchemical blend of all the parts that makes the entire act’s sound unmistakeable.

What’s more, the architecture of that overall timbre isa key part — maybe the key part — of what makes a musical act stand out.

Obviously, their songwriting has to be good, as does their ability to perform. But what makes them unique? What makes them lodge in our minds in a fashion distinct from all other musical acts?

It’s their timbre. Or, as Levitin put it to me …

Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song. [snip]

“Pop musicians compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are becoming less important.”

“Pop musicians compose with timbre.”

So this is why we’re so good at Heardle.

When a pop song has distinct timbre, it sounds like no other pop song. This means means we can identify it with only a fraction of a second. Timbre, as Levitin noted …

… explains why, for example, I could identify a single note of Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.”

“Nobody else’s piano sounds quite like that,” he said.

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Clive Thompson publishes on Medium three times a week; follow him here to get each post in your email — and if you’re not a Medium member, you can join here!

Clive is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.