Are YouWilling To Take This Test To See If You’re Tone Deaf?

Hopefully if you’re in the music business you’re not tone deaf. That said, I’ve worked with clients in the past that made me wonder. Harvard University wants to test you though, has opened a new lab designed to study the science of music. They’ve created a series of online tests that measure how the general public perceives music.

One of the tests is pretty interesting in that it measures if you’re tone deaf. If you want to take the test in the interest of science, go here. It takes about 5 minutes, and while some of it is dead easy for a musician, there’s also a section that involves minute changes in tone in cents, not semitones like we’re used to, and that’s a bit challenging. Be sure to wear your headphones!

After you’ve gotten through that one, there’s also this interesting World Music Quiz that plays you music from around the world, and you have to decide its purpose – dance, lullaby, romance, sickness. Unless you’re already familiar with indigenous music, it’s a lot more difficult than it seems.

The Music Lab does basic science, focusing in particular on infancy and on people who live in isolated small-scale societies around the world. As the site says, “We also work on large corpus studies of ethnographies and field recordings from the Natural History of Song project, which we host, and use those data in large-scale online experiments.” A noble cause for sure!

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