11–20 of 62 posts
The tunes which are "wrong" aren't subtly off, they're grossly distorted - to the degree where on some of them it's hard to tell what the tune was meant to be, but you know that you're listening to some kind of godawful mess, and the answer must therefore be "No".
I got 'em all. Some of them sounded to me like sentences with grammatical errors. They were all musically very adherent to Euro tradition. That is, they were all in some key or other. When the key shifted, it shifted. Nothing subtle.
I don't think this test is really a test of tonal recognition. It's more of a test of culturally determined expectations.
Looking at the data it looks like it's designed to identify a relatively small number of atypical people. I hope they're careful about following up; if this were a test for actual hearing anomalies, it might have both false negatives and false positives that would swamp the real diagnoses if the test were applied to a broad population.
And, General MIDI still sucks after all these years.
24/26 -- I guess this test is tailored to Americans quite a bit... As a European I recognise a few of the melodies, but for some of them I just have no idea what the true melody is supposed to be.
When designing experiments it's good to point out what to do if the tests come across unexpected situations. E.g. I've witnessed QA where the verification suggestion "no RED text should appear in the generated report" would result in PASS if no report got generated in the first place.
24/26 -- I guess this test is tailored to Americans quite a bit... As a European I recognise a few of the melodies, but for some of them I just have no idea what the true melody is supposed to be.
If you had said that #3 was written by Bach, I would say it was wrong. If you had said it was by Tchaikovsky I would have said it was correct. I guessed that the test wanted me to say 'wrong' (which was the correct answer). Tchaikovsky was over a century ago and a piece of music by him would still be 'wrong'.
UNLESS I'm expected to have heard all these before.
Some of the tunes were familiar, some were not. There should be a control for 'don't know the tune' because without that the data's pretty meaningless.
This sounds more like a melodic/scale test, not a pitch test, I was excepting it would ask something more like whether the instrument is well-tuned or whether a fretless instrument plays correctly.
For the curious, I've analyzed the first 5 songs with a program I'm developing, using the default C Major scale, here's the result : http://imgur.com/a/yx2H9 (I guess you could do it with something like Melodyne too).
EDIT: nevermind, this is just a cultural/memory test. You are supposed to know the tunes in advance and see if there is any « diff » with what you hear, melody-wise.
EDIT2: 21/26, I only knew more or less half of the songs, and knew well like a third. I Guess I have either poor culture or poor hear (or a little bit of both, we'll never know).
24/26 -- I guess this test is tailored to Americans quite a bit... As a European I recognise a few of the melodies, but for some of them I just have no idea what the true melody is supposed to be.
Like here, the most common comment seems to be that this NIH test is too easy. Maybe the title should be 'Find out if you are REALLY tone deaf'?