# Test Your Musical IQ **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 21, 2020, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279 "2020-02-21T03:30:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![x-ray\_vision](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/x-ray_vision/32/351_2.png) [@x-ray\_vision](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/x-ray_vision)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/1 "2020-02-21T03:30:45Z")
Mine is 89. :eek: > **[The Music Lab](https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/miq)** > > We do citizen science to learn how the human mind creates and perceives music. ---
**Author:** ![Labdad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/439d5e/32.png) [@Labdad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labdad)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/2 "2020-02-21T05:01:19Z")
That was pretty cool; I scored 101 ---
**Author:** ![Beckdawrek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beckdawrek/32/3647_2.png) [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/3 "2020-02-21T06:25:40Z")
Cool. I’m 122. The beat thing got to me. I’m from a very musical family. Myself being the least talented of my sibs. All of them work in the music field in someway. I danced ballet and I think that’s why the beat test was hardest for me. ---
**Author:** ![psychobunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/54ee81/32.png) [@psychobunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychobunny)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/4 "2020-02-21T06:26:20Z")
I got 93 which was a lot higher than I expected. Apparently I can tell when things are out of tune but have no sense of beat or melody. ---
**Author:** ![psychobunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/54ee81/32.png) [@psychobunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychobunny)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/5 "2020-02-21T06:34:17Z")
I went ahead and did their tone deafness test. The good news is that I am not completely tone deaf. I apparently can discriminate down to an eighth of a tone. ---
**Author:** ![LLCoolL](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/llcooll/32/3596_2.png) [@LLCoolL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LLCoolL)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 10:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/6 "2020-02-21T10:24:14Z")
What is the scale of the score range? Is 100 roughly average? ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/7 "2020-02-21T11:47:02Z")
I got 134. What threw me was the style of singing in the examples. In many of them, they both sounded out of tune, and I couldn’t really hear the background music. ---
**Author:** ![whitetho](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whitetho/32/1059_2.png) [@whitetho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whitetho)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/8 "2020-02-21T13:36:27Z")
I only rated a 94. Which exp!ains why, at the American Idol tryouts, instead of saying “don’t quit your day job”, they said “please kill yourself”. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/9 "2020-02-21T15:13:57Z")
Sorry, they want too much control info - couple that with things such as being able to view things like IP address and browser etc - that’s not info they will be getting from me ---
**Author:** ![Eonwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eonwe/32/240_2.png) [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/10 "2020-02-21T15:27:07Z")
I scored 119. I’m a semi/sometimes professional musician. For me, the biggest challenge was the second test; “melodic discrimination”. Tracking a melody over three different keys, and picking out the one with a single note change was tough. Particularly not knowing which was the baseline. “Was this third melody, in a different key,” the same as the first or second?" is a doozie of a challenge, at least for me, as it means keeping both those previous melodies clearly in mind when listening to the third. For those who are curious about the score values: “We estimated your score in the same way as real IQ tests do: based on all the other people who have taken the test, we set 100 as the average score, following a Normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15. That means that most people (68% of them) score between 85 and 115 and nearly everybody (95% of people) scores between 70 and 130.” ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/11 "2020-02-21T16:23:05Z")
> [@psychobunny](#): > > I got 93 which was a lot higher than I expected. Apparently I can tell when things are out of tune but have no sense of beat or melody. I got 94, but unlike you I did really bad on the tune test, but a bit better than average on the melody and beat tests. That really surprised me, as I can’t clap in time, even when there is an entire audience to help me keep the beat. I think I did better than average on the melody test, because I used a simple strategy. No need to keep every melody in your head: Is 1 the same as 2? Then the answer is 3. Is 1 different than 2? Then is 2 different from 3? If so then 2 is the odd melody. If not, then 1 is the odd melody. It’s only necessary to remember the last melody. ---
**Author:** ![EmilyG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/emilyg/32/364_2.png) [@EmilyG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EmilyG)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/12 "2020-02-21T16:39:29Z")
I’m a musician. I got 107. I found some of the melodies in the melody test difficult. There is interesting grammar in this sentence: “people who are very skilled musicians might be more skilled at being able to tell how the tunes different from one another.” ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/13 "2020-02-21T16:51:36Z")
1. ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/14 "2020-02-21T16:55:09Z")
I want to try, but I’ll have to wait till the middle of the night sometime. Ain’t no way I’m getting 20 minutes of quiet uninterrupted time around here in the morning! ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/15 "2020-02-21T17:26:22Z")
> [@LLCoolL](#): > > What is the scale of the score range? Is 100 roughly average? Yes, 100 is the center of the bell curve for this test. I got 119, as well. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/16 "2020-02-21T17:38:11Z")
I was very surprised at my 109, and very surprised at only scoring 100 on beat alignment. I thought I had a pretty good handle on that. ---
**Author:** ![raspberry\_hunter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b19c9b/32.png) [@raspberry\_hunter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raspberry_hunter)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/17 "2020-02-21T18:16:55Z")
1. I consider myself to be pretty musically skilled, so I wish I’d gotten higher, lol 🙂 On the other hand, I’m trained as a string player, so the fact I did the worst on the beat section is only to be expected, heh. The melodic discrimination was interesting. I realized while doing that test that it’s very different from the kinds of things I feel like I’m trained to do. Like, my brain really wanted to try to play/sing back the melodies rather than pay attention to whether they were different. I also have perfect pitch, which was actually a drawback for this test because while I could tell you the pitches that were being used, it was harder to keep in my head how it was acting as a melody. Mistuning perception: this was the easiest one for me. As a string player and someone who used to be in a choir for which tuning was The Most Important Thing, for most of these I was able to pick the answer based on which one set my teeth on edge 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![aktep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f0a364/32.png) [@aktep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aktep)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2020, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/18 "2020-02-21T21:25:47Z")
I scored a 95, which tracks for me. Although I learned a bit of piano as a youth and have been learning the guitar lately, I’ve generally considered myself barely functional at music. I was useless on the “is the singer in tune” portion of the test - one time I thought the singer was dead on on one sample, and that was the out of tune one. Others, I couldn’t tell a qualitative difference between the two at all. I did better on the beat thing that I thought I would - if it weren’t for a section in the middle where i started second guessing myself, I might have gotten them all right. > [@Eonwe](#): > > For me, the biggest challenge was the second test; “melodic discrimination”. Tracking a melody over three different keys, and picking out the one with a single note change was tough. Particularly not knowing which was the baseline. “Was this third melody, in a different key,” the same as the first or second?" is a doozie of a challenge, at least for me, as it means keeping both those previous melodies clearly in mind when listening to the third. I read the instructions wrong on this one or something - I thought I’d ear three melodies the exact same but two in one key and one in a different. Once I figured out what was being asked (around question 7) I went from missing them all to finding it to not be particularly difficult at all. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2020, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/19 "2020-02-22T03:25:52Z")
1. I play guitar, and have decent pitch. I struggled at first with the melody section, until about halfway through I started mentally picking out the notes on a guitar and then I was able to finish out without a miss. ---
**Author:** ![araminty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b5e925/32.png) [@araminty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/araminty)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2020, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279/20 "2020-02-22T05:48:18Z")
119 too. I scored best on the third test, which seems about right for a decent choral singer 🙂 Interesting! Thanks for the link OP. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/test-your-musical-iq/848279.md?page=2)