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Test Your Sense of Pitch

nidcd.nih.gov

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#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.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#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!

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#34
What strikes me is distorted in _which_ sense? Without a training example (i.e. one distorted and one non-distorted tune). In particular each waveform is a non-distorted version of itself.

I am not in musics (or not an American), so I am missing all cultural "obvious truths". But perceptually, there are _differences_ than can be spotted, and tastes, but not "ground truths".

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#35
I got 19/26 but couldn't recognise the majority of the tunes... Are you supposed to be able to tell whether it's played correctly even if you've never heard the song?

Some of them sounded "weird" but hard to say whether that's just how it sounds.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#36
post #23
post #19

Hmm, well I stopped at the second song from the example one. I think tests like this should not assume that the listener knows those songs. Also, if the listener knows those songs the test shouldn't assume a perfect memory of them. It tests the sense of pitch, not how well the listener remembers those songs. I mean without even knowing those songs, one only can guess by giving a no answer to those songs that contain…

I only recognized 3 of the tunes, but still got 26 perfect score. Nothing to do with familiarity with the material, just whether you can hear notes being in the correct key or not.

That's my point. You can't really know if they are correct. You just guess, if the notes are fit or not to the song. We could argue that what really tests is the listeners ability to recognize dissonant notes if all songs in the test don't have dissonant notes in them. But then its not a pitch sense test. There was one other test that I took that I see more accurate than this one: http://tonometric.com/adaptivepitch/ This one measures how little a difference of pitch can you note. It starts with a difference of 12hz, and ask you to tell if the second tone is lower or higher in frequency than the first. When you have answered a few of them correctly, it reduces the difference of pitch. I remember I was able to recognize differences of 0.75Hz before I started to fail to answer correctly.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#37

Well, I got 26 out of 26, but only by second-guessing the tonality that they expected, "what would classical music want me to do?". 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 w…

Are you an American? As an American I found all of these very familiar, and they're explicitly patriotic, like yankee doodle, the national anthem, my country 'tis of thee, and so forth. Others like La Cucaracha would be very familiar to Americans.

No. Do I need to be? The landing page doesn't mention it. This may be an NIH study, but NIH studies aren't limited to American participants.

Of course I know some of them, but a handful are unknown to me.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#38
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!

It's a "standardized survey in use for over 50 years" by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, so I imagine it assumes an American audience familiar with western music and its tropes.

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#39
post #29
post #28

I seem to have the lowest score yet, at 17/26. I recognized most but not all of the tunes. There were many I wasn't sure about, and if I took it again I'd probably give different answers. One time I tried to tune a ukulele, using a sound played from a laptop as a reference note, but I couldn't even tell whether the string pitch was higher or lower than the reference. And yet - I rarely play, but I own an ocarina, and…

Here are my answers - Y correct, N incorrect. 9/26 Y, 17/26 N, makes me guess I had too many N, which is already what I was expecting. Does anyone feel like marking me? (Example) - Y 1 Y * 2 Y 3 Y * 4 N 5 Y 6 N * 7 N 8 Y 9 N 10 Y * 11 N 12 N * 13 N 14 N 15 Y 16 N 17 N 18 Y 19 N 20 N 21 N 22 N * 23 Y * 24 N 25 N * 26 Y * edit - starred the ones I got wrong. My prediction was wrong too. 5 false Ys, 4 false Ns.

Answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10220145

Re: Test Your Sense of Pitch

#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.
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