The audio was very crackly for me, anyone else? Also the dull sine wave was fairly difficult to differentiate at small intervals, I wonder if the researchers considered the effect of different timbres
That was fun. I'm more tone deaf than 96% of people, it seems. Not shocking because I'm effectively deaf and have a cochlear implant. The natural hearing in my other ear couldn't hear the tones at all.
I practiced with https://tonedear.com until I read that comparing intervals to melodies (like 'Hey Jude' for a minor third) is doing more harm than good.
I learned I was tone deaf when playing the game Myst in 1993 when I was eight years old. There was a puzzle[1] in which you had to listen to a tone, cross a room and move a slider until you heard the same tone. I knew exactly what had to be done, but I could not match the tones even after many attempts. Finally, I had to ask for my mom's help.
I carried the belief that I was tone-deaf with me for a decade or more until I happened to replay the game and found that as an adult, I had no difficulty completing the puzzle whatsoever. Apparently in my case, tone-deafness was a temporary condition of childhood. I wonder how many people have a childhood memory of not being able to sing in tune or complete a musical puzzle and believe they are tone-deaf for the rest of their lives.
It is possible to solve that puzzle even if you are deaf, by counting the number of notches the slider has moved, which corresponds to the position of the key on the keyboard.
Music is like anything else in that it requires practice. At 8 years old, there's really not much learned practice in music really occurring unless you're in family like the Von Trapps. Even listening to kids sing Happy Birthday or The Wheels On The Bus can be quite interesting in how far off the "notes" are. Kids are just mimicking the words. Even the tempo is not of concern. Unless you get some sort of musical training through choir or band or something, you might not ever learn about flat/sharp and how to correct to match the person next to you or more likely the radio.
This makes sense, but in my experience the other kids seemed to somehow gain this knowledge at a young age.
It's no surprise that I didn't make any real progress, since I wasn't learning an instrument and my school teachers made us sing but didn't bother trying to teach us to sing -- but by late primary school I was a notably bad singer relative to (almost literally) everyone else in my class. My home was by no means full of music, but we did have a record player and my sister liked to sing with my mother sometimes. And although it took me a while to get interested in pop music, by late primary school I had a CD player and some bands that I liked.
So I doubt the difference in ability was solely environmental rather than innate; surely the other kids hadn't all been taught how to sing, or grown up in very musical households. (I'm still very weak musically, and still can't sing, but I'm not literally tone deaf.)
Imo, person you are responding to just dont know what 8 years old are capable and is having those videos with cute 3-4 years old singing badly in mind.
I think it also depends on what kind of music you listen to. Music that is very "busy" with bass and percussion is more difficult for young kids to pick up, in my experience. Also the more difficult the vocal performance, the harder it will be to follow.
My wife and I listen to a lot of classical and hymns with simple 4-part harmonies. We have 7 kids, most of whom could match the songs pretty well at surprisingly young ages (2 or 3 years old).
I only meant that they were a family unit that made the choice to train their young children to be able to sing and perform. I chose the Von Trapps as I assumed that it was a reference pretty much anyone would have at least heard of and might recognize. Never in my wildest did I think someone would misconstrue that.
Completely tone-deaf person would not be able to recognize voices, e.g. tell male voice from female, father's voice from mother's. Obviously there are cases like this, but I believe very few.
On the other hand reproducing the tone requires practice, and mostly practice with your vocal instrument.
I would imagine that kids who grow up in families where e.g. mother sings while cooking, don't even notice how they practice at the age of 2 or so. But what is important, they train their voice, not only hearing.
It is like with colors. A person can see colors perfectly, but if you asked to mix acrylic paint to get chartreuse? Most of the population would struggle I would believe. We wouldn't call these people color-blind.
However with music I feel we somehow mix tone-deafness and ability to sing/reproduce tone.
> Completely tone-deaf person would not be able to recognize voices, e.g. tell male voice from female, father's voice from mother's.
I find this hard to believe. Human voice has a lot of timbral characteristics that show up on a spectrogram view. It would also imply that a person would be unable to tell the difference between a piano, a guitar and a trombone. This would also make understanding speech very difficult. Do people (with otherwise normal hearing) like this exist?
This is pretty different from not being able to distinguish musical pitch, say tell C# from Bb, or be able to tell which one of the pitches is higher.
Singing correct tune and being able to distinguish it are two much different things. In any case, 8 years old absolutely not just mimicking words. Even musically untrained 8 years old are diffentiating tunes and trying to hit it.
After I took up singing (briefly) I definitely got better at matching and distinguishing tones once I started paying attention to the actual melodies in music. Even then, it was and still is incredibly difficult for me. I sometimes wonder if pitch perception is analogous to learning a language; totally learn-able as an adult, but never will be as natural as if you learned it when you were a child.
This rings true to my experiences with High School Choir. Tone matching was a skill that everyone was able to improve in, with just two notable exceptions.
There was one girl who was truly tone-deaf, and as a result could not tell that she was only ever singing one monotone note.
And then there was the teacher's son, who would run sound during our productions and claimed to have perfect pitch. He certainly could pick up on things much quicker than anyone else running the boards.
I've always had a sharp sense for relative tones - whether two notes are the same, or I can even tell specifically what interval they are, usually - but despite having played organized music for eight years of my life I'm hopeless at telling you what note a tone or chord actually is (or what key something is in). Zero indication whatsoever.
I do have a friend who can do that, though. You press the Bb key on a piano and he'll tell you it's a Bb and that it's slightly out of tune on the sharp end. It's amazing.
Absolute pitch like your friend has is hard to learn and relatively uncorrelated to musical ability. Musical training largely works your relative pitch muscle.
Likewise, closing my eyes was unintentional at first and then I realized it actually helped quite a bit so I kept doing it. Senses, focus, and the dynamics between them are fascinating.
The first one it gave me was the 1/64th above. I had to mentally adapt my expectation of the amount of focus I had to give to the tones. After that I got them all w/o difficulty. I wonder if the ordering was the same for others, if so this would be a good way to test if there are people who can discern such a difference immediately, without any priming.
Mine definitely started with a much larger interval. 1/64th only did not come before 1/32th, also. I thought they were trying to trick me as if it was ordered, but in the end, it kinda was for me.
I wonder if they changed it, as it makes a comment about being able to use the up/down arrow keys based on user feedback. It now does one stage, and then tells you it's about to get harder.
TwoSet violin did it in a Youtube video and Eddy (the one with perfect pitch) got it quite easily. I suspect anyone with perfect pitch is not going to have any difficulty.
The explanation when you finish the test says that it's random. IIRC I got three 1/64ths, of which I got 2/3, so tough to tell whether that's an unlucky mistake, or just getting them by random luck!
It looks like I'm only average at guessing the direction of shift but where do I rank in speed guessing? If they wanted 100% accuracy why highlight the decision time?
I think they want to know how certain people are about the pitch change, but this isn't a great way to determine that - there are too many reasons response times could vary. I thought this was a distracting part of the test and couldn't see what value it would provide in the end.
I scored 23, I didn't wear headphones. I've always known not to have prefect/absolute pitch. I used to play guitar a lot (I can tune the thing by ear!) but certainly can't sing.
I thought the "game" aspect was distracting. I'd preferred if they didn't show the correct/wrong and the timing. During the listening test I decided to look away from the screen and focus elsewhere. I'd like to take this test again but I can't bothered filling out all those questions again. To bad you can't just jump right to the test...
I know that dyslexia causes people to get letters rearranged, but I'm now curious if it causes words to get rearranged as well. Off to look that up now...
Well, that explains why I can't tune a guitar by ear - all the examples where the difference was 1/64 or 1/32 sounded as completely identical four beeps, I had zero idea about the direction and had to guess randomly. I.e. it's not that I could not interpret the difference, it's that I could not identify any difference in the first place.
That's why you tune a guitar by listening to the beat in the notes, provided you can get close enough to the right chord you can figure out the rest just by tuning it until the chord stop varying in volume.
Musicality and being good the quiz might not be related that strongly. Music kind of relies on people being unable to notice difference <1/4 tone, or at least that's the closest you can get to true rational intervals with an equally-tempered piano (other instruments can cheat by changing their notes slightly to sound better).
Usually when you tune an instrument you have a simultaneous reference, you don't have to remember the reference. Especially with a guitar, you tune a string against another string at the same time. It is easy (for me) to tune away small differences because the beat frequency is audible.
On this test I could not determine the 1/64th differences, I guessed those but I got all the 1/32nd and bigger intervals easily. I have a feeling that off-by-1/64th would be easy to hear if the tones played at the same time.
Did anyone else find the first half of the test harder than the second? I got all of the questions right but the ones where the tone was 1/3 or more of a tone off I really struggled to tell if they were up or down. Weirdly I didn't have that problem on the 1/4 or less questions.
Music perception varies so it might be easier for you to hear a narrower interval. I can imagine it being closer so it doesn't mess up with your perspective, whereas with a larger difference you might lose your comparison baseline from the first.
Yes! I think this is a good explanation. I find it hard to relate two different notes to each other when they are sufficiently different. If they are very different then it obvious but if they are 1-2 tones apart I only really hear them as two different notes rather than one note clearly being higher than the other.
It can get even weirder when you jump a gap more than half an octave. For instance say you jump down 6 notes, absolutely speaking it's lower... but relative to the original "note" (not pitch) it's closer to being above than bellow, which can make it feel higher at the same time.
I can perceive this higher+lower aspect simultaneously in a lot of music and i suspect this is common even.
True, but this is another dimension of tonal perception I think i.e comparative memory. Kind of like the musical equivalent of short term memory... until you get into scales and more recognizable sequences then that part of the brain seems to have way better memory abilities somehow.
Did anyone else have more trouble with a particular direction? I had significantly more difficulty with small descending changes, and I think I have worse hearing on my right side, so I'm wondering if different hemispheres may have be responsible for detecting ascending or descending changes.
These tests are also interesting. They correspond with my result from the OP, that is I can't reliably determine a 1/64th step in the OP, and I also can't reliably hear a 2-cent difference in this one, although I can distinguish a 5c diff.
https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_index.php
You laugh, but I once threw a "tasting party" for my friends that went along those lines. You can buy a kit with a bunch of test strips with certain chemicals on them on amazon (search "super taster kit") and see who reacts to them and who doesn't.
Add in some miracle berries and weird food, and you've got a good time.
Yeah tried it without headphones with my phone pressed against my ear. I barely managed to catch the last two reference tones most of the time after clicking next. The 1/64ths were tough that way. I missed a couple of the first ones but started getting them after I got a good click, get the phone to the head to listen to the tones fast rhythm going on.
I can hear pitch, but barely. 23/32, and some of those were random guesses. I'm in the 16th percentile! I know that I can't hear pitch very well, and my musically oriented partner says that I always sing "weird" harmonies like 7ths that are not particularly pleasing to the Western ear.
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[ 70.2 ms ] story [ 493 ms ] threadI carried the belief that I was tone-deaf with me for a decade or more until I happened to replay the game and found that as an adult, I had no difficulty completing the puzzle whatsoever. Apparently in my case, tone-deafness was a temporary condition of childhood. I wonder how many people have a childhood memory of not being able to sing in tune or complete a musical puzzle and believe they are tone-deaf for the rest of their lives.
1. https://youtu.be/qP6GU710jV4?t=141
It's no surprise that I didn't make any real progress, since I wasn't learning an instrument and my school teachers made us sing but didn't bother trying to teach us to sing -- but by late primary school I was a notably bad singer relative to (almost literally) everyone else in my class. My home was by no means full of music, but we did have a record player and my sister liked to sing with my mother sometimes. And although it took me a while to get interested in pop music, by late primary school I had a CD player and some bands that I liked.
So I doubt the difference in ability was solely environmental rather than innate; surely the other kids hadn't all been taught how to sing, or grown up in very musical households. (I'm still very weak musically, and still can't sing, but I'm not literally tone deaf.)
My wife and I listen to a lot of classical and hymns with simple 4-part harmonies. We have 7 kids, most of whom could match the songs pretty well at surprisingly young ages (2 or 3 years old).
What makes you think that’s not nurturing?
On the other hand reproducing the tone requires practice, and mostly practice with your vocal instrument.
I would imagine that kids who grow up in families where e.g. mother sings while cooking, don't even notice how they practice at the age of 2 or so. But what is important, they train their voice, not only hearing.
It is like with colors. A person can see colors perfectly, but if you asked to mix acrylic paint to get chartreuse? Most of the population would struggle I would believe. We wouldn't call these people color-blind.
However with music I feel we somehow mix tone-deafness and ability to sing/reproduce tone.
Mind-bogglingly one can apparently be tone-deaf and still be able to sing in tune.
On the other hand a person lacking ability to tell green from red can still paint quite good landscapes?
I find this hard to believe. Human voice has a lot of timbral characteristics that show up on a spectrogram view. It would also imply that a person would be unable to tell the difference between a piano, a guitar and a trombone. This would also make understanding speech very difficult. Do people (with otherwise normal hearing) like this exist?
This is pretty different from not being able to distinguish musical pitch, say tell C# from Bb, or be able to tell which one of the pitches is higher.
After I took up singing (briefly) I definitely got better at matching and distinguishing tones once I started paying attention to the actual melodies in music. Even then, it was and still is incredibly difficult for me. I sometimes wonder if pitch perception is analogous to learning a language; totally learn-able as an adult, but never will be as natural as if you learned it when you were a child.
There was one girl who was truly tone-deaf, and as a result could not tell that she was only ever singing one monotone note.
And then there was the teacher's son, who would run sound during our productions and claimed to have perfect pitch. He certainly could pick up on things much quicker than anyone else running the boards.
I do have a friend who can do that, though. You press the Bb key on a piano and he'll tell you it's a Bb and that it's slightly out of tune on the sharp end. It's amazing.
I thought the "game" aspect was distracting. I'd preferred if they didn't show the correct/wrong and the timing. During the listening test I decided to look away from the screen and focus elsewhere. I'd like to take this test again but I can't bothered filling out all those questions again. To bad you can't just jump right to the test...
"Seeing words backwards sometimes - a person sometimes might see the words backwards."[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristics_of_dyslexia
On this test I could not determine the 1/64th differences, I guessed those but I got all the 1/32nd and bigger intervals easily. I have a feeling that off-by-1/64th would be easy to hear if the tones played at the same time.
I have no musical talent at all by the way.
I can perceive this higher+lower aspect simultaneously in a lot of music and i suspect this is common even.
Add in some miracle berries and weird food, and you've got a good time.
Too bad the iSmell never took off and became ubiquitous, or it could be used to screen for COVID-19 symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell
https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
I recommend headphones at the very least.