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Test Your Sense of Pitch

nidcd.nih.gov

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#51
post #40

I got 24/26, but there were two that I would have liked to listen to again, so those were probably the ones I got wrong. I'm not sure why you could only listen to each clip once.

Probably depends on your browser. I could listen multiple times (chrome)

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#53
post #33

Despite not knowing almost half of the tunes, I got everything right. Though, I have to say, as someone who appreciates alternative music a lot, some of the 'wrong' samples sounded quite intriguing!

Heavens, yes. Me, too. Some of the "wrong" samples were very fun -- especially if you like diminished or augmented scales.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#54
This test seems to be mostly about a) familiarity with the song and a little bit about b) knowing the notes that are part of a scale. Several of the "incorrect" melodies could be correct in that the notes played are pretty much all within scale, they're just not the right ones for the song.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#55
post #32
post #18

As an American with (apparently) okay pitch this was easy to ace, but without a "Never heard this" button I don't see how the results can be meaningful. Assuming an international audience, surely the number of missed due to not knowing the song must be non-negligible - if not indeed higher than the number of misses due to poor pitch!

25/26 and I didn't recognise 1/4 of the tunes. It's harder when you don't know the tune, but it's possible to tell where the tune should be going.

Sure. Nonetheless when you don't know the tune, the test measures a different quantity than it was intended to.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#56

I'm confused as to how you could get anything but 26/26... 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".

The webpage states the following:

"Research shows that 2 to 5 percent of the U.S. population has problems with pitch perception."

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#57
post #16

I'm confused, are we supposed to tell whether it matches any Major/Minor diatonic scale? 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 That's neat. I know little about music. Would it be close to correct to say that this program finds the notes (hz, fourier) and checks if they the progression fit some predetermined pattern. eg. B4 must be followed by one of X1,X2,..., osv. ? > EDIT: nevermind, ... Does this mean there's songs which the program fails to classify? It would be interesting to see the output of the program for…

It does indeed fourier analysis to find the notes. But I'm sorry to disappoint you, it does no progression analysis, so it's useless for this particular exercise (it's only handy to see the notes when you don't have an absolute pitch earing).

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#58
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one, you could not know the tunes and think it's all random chromatic scale piano playing and thus all played « correctly ».

If you have some musical knowledge or experience it's pretty easy to tell which tunes are wrong even if you've never heard them. Assuming you have knowledge of the western musical tradition, e.g. modes, major/minor keys, etc, it's usually pretty clear where a melody should be going even if you haven't heard it (i.e. it will probably remain in the tonal centre of the piece).

That's interesting, do you have any links you could point me to in order to learn more about this? For instance, let's say we're in C Major.

Tune1 = C D F A G C

Tune2 = C F D A G C

How can you tell which (if any) is wrong or not and how?

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#60
26/26

I agree. It is much more difficult to tell which note played, in each clip, is out of pitch if you have no frame of reference. Having heard a version of the sound clip goes a long way in this test.

This is a pitch test. IE: If I play middle C for you, then play a flat or sharp version, you should be able to identify the difference.

Asking people who have never heard middle C to identify middle C doesn't make the test relevant.

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