Tone Deaf Test
Here's a test to measure your tone-deafness. It plays two sequences of music and asks you whether the two are identical. There's 36 sequences and it is purposefully very difficult. Over 85% means you have potential as a world class musician - although I wonder why you'd have to score less than 50% to be 'tone-deaf' - a tone-deaf monkey randomly pressing the buttons will score better than 50%, 50% of the time. Maybe using a 'don't know' button here would help to improve the accuracy.
Posted by Alexander at November 10, 2006 10:47 AM
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Comments
Hi Alexander,
I made the tonedeaf test. In principle, I agree with your criticism: 50 percent doesn't make much sense as the cutoff for being tonedeaf. In reality, however, people with pitch perception abilities tend to score worse than 50%. I can't explain why this is.
The descriptive cutoffs were based on data from our lab of about 50 subjects of varying musical abilities: some professional musicians, and about 25 "tonedeaf" individuals. We used a 2 hour standardized test to confirm tonedeafness. Even though the correlation was not perfect, people with severe tonedeafness tended to score below 50% on this little screening test. For our research, in order to make sure that there were no monkeys, we reviewed the answers to every question. There are about five "very easy" comparisons which even a tonedeaf person should get right: If 4/5 of these cues were correct, we counted the test as valid even if the total score was hovering around 50%.
In a perfect world, I would have made the test easier so that a tonedeaf person could score about 60 or 70% - but that would mean redoing most of the musical phrases, and it would mean that most "normal" people would score in the high nineties.
Anyway, thank you very much for featuring the test in your blog, I really appreciate it.
Take care!
Jake
Posted by: Jake Mandell at November 10, 2006 01:36 PM
I think you're right to go with what you've observed rather than what you might expect statistically. However it's an interesting effect if it's not just a random effect - some people might get a better score by entering the opposite of what they think is the correct answer!
Posted by: Alexander McCabe at November 10, 2006 02:45 PM
I took the tone deaf test and got 91.7%, with no guessing (I knew i would get a high score, i seem to have a photographic memory when it comes to music). I think it has more to do with memory than musical training, i've had no training, but have an excellent memory, I play most instruments by ear (I can read music but i figure if i can remember how the tune goes, why bother). Just makes me curious as to whether someone with little or no musical ability, and an exceptional memory could score highly.
Posted by: Brooke at July 4, 2007 04:56 AM
