James Tauber

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Pitch Perception Test

As part of his research at Harvard Medical School, Jake Mandell has a nice online pitch perception test that you can do in about 5 minutes.

Jake says that "the test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct."

I got 80.6% on my first try, but I think Jake is being kind in his quote above because that only places me in the 66th percentile.

UPDATE: Next day I did the test again and got 88.9% (92nd percentile). That's quite a big jump :-)

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Comments (7)

xtian on Nov. 21, 2006:

That was fun! I got 91.7% correct (first try), but it wouldn't tell me what percentile I was in.

steff on Nov. 21, 2006:

I also got 80.6% on my first try; interesting.

Sylvain on Nov. 22, 2006:

His test is not really hard. I got 86.1

I think it's an interesting test but I doubt it shows a lot on its own. Plus the quality of the result will depend on the quality of your sound system and your condition. If you feel tired the test will become harder...what does that really mean?

The test might become more interesting if you decide to do it several times at different moment in time.

James Tauber on Nov. 22, 2006:

Where I think it becomes interesting is when particular tests are consistently harder than others for a wide range of people. Or if one test is a good predictor for another. This might suggest there are different types of tone deafness.

raul on Dec. 2, 2006:

I got an 88.9 on my first try. It's not hard, imo. But maybe I just have that good a pitch

Jason Clark on Dec. 8, 2006:

80.6 on my first test as well, which is now 69th %ile, so the average score has trended down slightly in the two weeks since James took the test.

It seemed fairly easy, but I've had years of music training. The ones that seemed hard were the longer ones, I had trouble keeping the whole melody in my head with only one listen. I'm going to try again in a few days, to see if I improve.

Geoffy Dahmer on March 19, 2007:

I got 97% first try pwnd! lol

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Created: Nov. 21, 2006
Last Modified: Nov. 22, 2006
Author: jtauber