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Results of "tone deafness" test published

By dmunger on January 8, 2007.

Jake Mandell, creator of the Tone Deafness Test we discussed on Cognitive Daily, has now posted the results of that study and two others on musical perception:

Effects of musical training:

Subjects who report more years of musical training do better on the musical tests than those who have less musical training. It is impossible to say whether this is a chicken or egg phenomenon: Are people able to improve their performance by studying for more years, or do people who last through several years of musical lessons have greater inherent ability to start with?

Effect of race:

Subjects who described themselves as "Black or African American" and "Hawaiian-Pacific Islander" performed significantly better than subjects who identified themselves as "Caucasian" and "Hispanic-Latino." An ANOVA returned a P-value of less than 0.0001 (meaning that the differences are likely statistically significant and not likely due to chance). Black-African-Americans and Hawaiian-Pacific-Islanders have on average 3.7 and 2.7 years of training, compared with 3.9 and 2.4 years of training for Caucasians and Hispanic/Latinos, respectively. Since Caucasians report more musical training than any other ethnic group, their relatively lower performance on the music test cannot be explained by a deficiency in training. A two-sample t-test directly comparing Black/African Americans to Caucasians returned a p-value of 0.007.

Fascinating! However, I did notice that Mandell lumped together participants with musical training of greater than 6 years. I'd be interested to see higher training levels broken down in a similar way, as several of the respondents to the Cognitive Daily poll on the subject (including a musicologist friend of mine with "perfect pitch") indicated that they felt a very high level of musical training might actually make the test more difficult.

In other news:

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