For many years I have been telling people that I cannot sing and that I cannot readily identify well known pieces of music. I have been told that it is only a matter of finding myself a good music teacher and then I would blossom musically. Rubbish. I have the proof in the form of an online test that I took today.
Apparently, I placed lower than 99.84% of the 61,036 people who took the test. The test measures the subject`s pitch discrimination and musical memory by having them determine whether or not two musical phrases were identical. According to the designer of the test, being tone deaf does not impair musical memory. My score in the test was 44.4%, which is worse than chance. A subject with normal pitch discrimination should score above 70%. For those stats people out there, the scores are normally distributed but skewed to the left. The mean is 73.9% and the standard deviation is 9.99.
Since many or, perhaps, all of the subjects were self selected, I would expect more tone deaf people to have taken the test. The graph does show this. I cannot reproduce it, but if you take the test, you will get your results indicated on a graph of all of the results to date. It only takes about five or six minutes to do the test.
I probably would have gotten a higher score if I had done the test with better speakers, but I doubt that the results would have been much different.
I do have great difficulty in recognizing music, but that does not stop me from enjoying it. I know what I like and I will keep on listening to those old favourites of mine that I can`t name.
2 comments:
I achieved a 77.8 percent correct - closer to very good performance but in the high range of normal performance. I was impressed. And somewhat surprised by how low the results can be for some people!
Moi
Your pitch discrimination and musical memory is greater than about 65% of the people who took the test.
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