Test Your Musical IQ

I had to quit. Either my internet connection or their server was the shits. I couldn’t tell when one sample ended and the next sample started from all the pausing and jittering.

My score is nul, since 2/3 of the way through I had to allow script from a different URL and it repeated the first part of the test instead of going into the third, so… I’ll try again, later, but that is a super-badly designed site.

Surprisingly I got 105. I understood/heard differences in the Melodic Discrimination(117) and Mistuning Perception(95). The odd part was that I couldn’t (never really could) follow a beat, so I just picked randomly on the Beat Alignment test for at least 12 of the 15 and got a score of 104! That was just dumb luck and I probably deserved a 30 on that one :slight_smile:

I scored 97, only slightly below average. I’m surprised it was that high. While I enjoy listening to music, I seem to have approximately zero aptitude at making music.

  1. Better on tone (the first test), worst on the beat (the second test), better than I thought I was doing on the third.

I saw that it would take 20 minutes, factored in my near-complete lack of musical knowledge and sense of rhythm of a Catholic woman with ten kids (does anybody still use the Rhythm Method for contraception?), and gave it up as a lost cause. :frowning:

I got a total 88, by 71 (beat) / 102 (melody) / 91 (tune). This confirms what I already knew: I´ll never be a percussionist. :frowning:

It’s a fun test though! But in the first part, i never actually heard a difference, so I mostly stuck to alternative 1 (and when I strayed to 2, it was wrong!)

Anyone got lower scores?

I scored 110 overall: Melodic Discrimination 113, Mistuning Perception 122, Beat Alignment 96. Like raspberry hunter, I have perfect pitch and I think it was actually a hindrance on differentiating melodies because I got bogged down by recalling the identities of the notes themselves and less so the overall shape. I’m terrible at relative pitch and transposition.

97

Moderator Action

Since this is about music, let’s move it over to Cafe Society (from MPSIMS).

Only 99. Which surprised me, since I can play three musical instruments (fife, trombone, and bagpipe). I guess I should practice more.

I scored a clean 100 - 103 beat perception, 98 mistuning perception, 99 melodic discrimination. For a guy who sometimes gets paid to play music and can play several instruments and sing, it lets me know that it’s yet another field that I love where I’m decidedly average. :slight_smile:

Yeah, that’s the part that was the most maddening for me. All of the singers were a bit out, and telling which one was more out was hard and I didn’t think a second listen would have helped me. But I think that I could have probably neared a perfect score on that part of the test if I could go back and hear the examples a second or third time to compare them.

I found that one easiest, with the beat test being nearly impossible for me. I scored 120 overall but only 75 on the beat part. This does not surprise me in the least. It was never a problem while dancing, but playing the piano while tapping a beat with my foot was something I could never do. And I always found a metronome unbearable.

Melody flows, for me, without reference to tempo. Which I suppose is why my favorite music is Irish Sean Nos, which has no tempo or volume dynamic.

105 Overall.

Mistuning Perception: 111
Beat Alignment: 116
Melodic Discrimination: 89

I found with the first 2, that if the intitial clip was “perfect” I could often tell that right away, and didn’t even need to listen to the second one. If they played the imperfect one at first, it was harder for me to tell. I found the last one quite a bit more difficult and my score reflected it.

I dabbled in violin as a child, piano as a teen, and guitar as an adult. I sang at church from very young, was in high school choir, and sing in my car whenever I’m alone. :smiley:

I got 119, with 125 (perfect, I think) on the melodic discrimination, 123 (two wrong) on the mistuning, and 109 (three or four wrong) on the beat alignment.

On the first test, I realized fairly quickly that the wrong one usually had a half-tone interval somewhere that the others didn’t. So even though the melodies got to be very long and hard to remember, if I heard a chromatic interval, that was probably the odd one.

In the second test, some of the pieces had the voice much higher in the mix and the instruments so far back that it was hard to pick out the underlying key. Also, some of the tunes were kind of spacey, so hard to know what was “right.”

The beat test highlighted my weakness. I’m not great on rhythm.

FYI, I’m not a musician. I like music, and have been around it from a young age. I had piano lessons as a child, but didn’t like them. From high school on I fooled around with piano, played bass guitar with some friends for a few years, even tried picking up the tuba. But I’ve never been more than a dilletante.

100 on the nose, which is higher than I expected

Mistuning Perception: 75
Beat Alignment: 109
Melodic Discrimination: 115

I had a lot of issues with knowing which voice was tuned to the music, most sounded the same.

I got 109. I forget what my individual scores were. I actually took it the day x-ray made this post and didn’t post my answer.

I’m not a professional musician, but I have played in bands on and off for 30 years (trombone and baritone). I might have done better on the test but I was surprisingly quite bored halfway through each section. I thought I had better concentration :frowning:

I scored highest on the mistuning perception which didn’t surprise me, because out of tune singers trigger an almost painful sensation for me. I was a slight bit below average (98) on both the beats and the melody tests.

I only had a couple of years (3, I think?) of accordion instruction 60 years ago which was the extent of my musical training.

I just watched the recent Stanley Milgram bio-pic, so the whole time I’m taking this quiz, I’ll be wondering what they’re REALLY testing for.

I got 112 which is about what I would expect, though I’d secretly wished it had surprised me by being higher, because I care sooooo much about music and I do sometimes get paid for playing it. What was interesting is that I thought I’d be stronger on melody perception (being a folk player I pick up lots of stuff by ear) and I wasn’t that great at 105, and I thought I was tone deaf, but got a respectable 124 in the mistuning test. Oh well. I do think this test doesn’t (and can’t) account for being expressive and transmitting an emotion at which I’m great btw. :slight_smile: