
Test Your Sense of Pitch - herendin
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/tunetest/Pages/Default.aspx
======
OliverJones
It's interesting. I didn't recognize all the tunes (most of them I did, of
course, having gone to summer camp and Christmas services in the US).

I got 'em all. Some of them sounded to me like sentences with grammatical
errors. They were all musically very adherent to Euro tradition. That is, they
were all in some key or other. When the key shifted, it shifted. Nothing
subtle.

I don't think this test is really a test of tonal recognition. It's more of a
test of culturally determined expectations.

Looking at the data it looks like it's designed to identify a relatively small
number of atypical people. I hope they're careful about following up; if this
were a test for actual hearing anomalies, it might have both false negatives
and false positives that would swamp the real diagnoses if the test were
applied to a broad population.

And, General MIDI still sucks after all these years.

------
madaxe_again
I'm confused as to how you could get anything but 26/26...

The tunes which are "wrong" aren't subtly off, they're grossly distorted - to
the degree where on some of them it's hard to tell what the tune was meant to
be, but you know that you're listening to some kind of godawful mess, and the
answer must therefore be "No".

~~~
robhack
Well, for one, you could not know the tunes and think it's all random
chromatic scale piano playing and thus all played « correctly ».

~~~
bananaboy
If you have some musical knowledge or experience it's pretty easy to tell
which tunes are wrong even if you've never heard them. Assuming you have
knowledge of the western musical tradition, e.g. modes, major/minor keys, etc,
it's usually pretty clear where a melody should be going even if you haven't
heard it (i.e. it will probably remain in the tonal centre of the piece).

~~~
robhack
That's interesting, do you have any links you could point me to in order to
learn more about this? For instance, let's say we're in C Major.

Tune1 = C D F A G C

Tune2 = C F D A G C

How can you tell which (if any) is wrong or not and how?

------
DangerousPie
24/26 -- I guess this test is tailored to Americans quite a bit... As a
European I recognise a few of the melodies, but for some of them I just have
no idea what the true melody is supposed to be.

~~~
nwatson
I also got 24 of 26 ... two samples were cut short omitting one or more notes
that naturally would come at the end. Not being sure whether "completeness"
was part of the test (probably not since the focus was "pitch") I wrongly
replied "no" for those.

When designing experiments it's good to point out what to do if the tests come
across unexpected situations. E.g. I've witnessed QA where the verification
suggestion "no RED text should appear in the generated report" would result in
PASS if no report got generated in the first place.

~~~
cannam
Same here. Even though I suspected the odds were against me, I couldn't bring
myself to identify phrases with their final notes missing as "correct".
There's probably a moral about pedantry here.

------
robhack
I'm confused, are we supposed to tell whether it matches any Major/Minor
diatonic scale?

This sounds more like a melodic/scale test, not a pitch test, I was excepting
it would ask something more like whether the instrument is well-tuned or
whether a fretless instrument plays correctly.

For the curious, I've analyzed the first 5 songs with a program I'm
developing, using the default C Major scale, here's the result :
[http://imgur.com/a/yx2H9](http://imgur.com/a/yx2H9) (I guess you could do it
with something like Melodyne too).

EDIT: nevermind, this is just a cultural/memory test. You are supposed to know
the tunes in advance and see if there is any « diff » with what you hear,
melody-wise.

EDIT2: 21/26, I only knew more or less half of the songs, and knew well like a
third. I Guess I have either poor culture or poor hear (or a little bit of
both, we'll never know).

~~~
olejorgenb
> [http://imgur.com/a/yx2H9](http://imgur.com/a/yx2H9)

That's neat. I know little about music. Would it be close to correct to say
that this program finds the notes (hz, fourier) and checks if they the
progression fit some predetermined pattern. eg. B4 must be followed by one of
X1,X2,..., osv. ?

> EDIT: nevermind, ...

Does this mean there's songs which the program fails to classify?

It would be interesting to see the output of the program for all the songs.

~~~
robhack
It does indeed fourier analysis to find the notes. But I'm sorry to disappoint
you, it does no progression analysis, so it's useless for this particular
exercise (it's only handy to see the notes when you don't have an absolute
pitch earing).

------
afandian
Well, I got 26 out of 26, but only by second-guessing the tonality that they
expected, "what would classical music want me to do?".

If you had said that #3 was written by Bach, I would say it was wrong. If you
had said it was by Tchaikovsky I would have said it was correct. I guessed
that the test wanted me to say 'wrong' (which was the correct answer).
Tchaikovsky was over a century ago and a piece of music by him would still be
'wrong'.

UNLESS I'm expected to have heard all these before.

Some of the tunes were familiar, some were not. There should be a control for
'don't know the tune' because without that the data's pretty meaningless.

~~~
logicallee
Are you an American? As an American I found all of these _very_ familiar, and
they're explicitly patriotic, like yankee doodle, the national anthem, my
country 'tis of thee, and so forth. Others like La Cucaracha would be very
familiar to Americans.

~~~
afandian
No. Do I need to be? The landing page doesn't mention it. This may be an NIH
study, but NIH studies aren't limited to American participants.

Of course I know some of them, but a handful are unknown to me.

------
fenomas
As an American with (apparently) okay pitch this was easy to ace, but without
a "Never heard this" button I don't see how the results can be meaningful.
Assuming an international audience, surely the number of missed due to not
knowing the song must be non-negligible - if not indeed higher than the number
of misses due to poor pitch!

~~~
dsfsdfd
25/26 and I didn't recognise 1/4 of the tunes. It's harder when you don't know
the tune, but it's possible to tell where the tune should be going.

~~~
fenomas
Sure. Nonetheless when you don't know the tune, the test measures a different
quantity than it was intended to.

------
jerrell
There's a wide variety of tests and information about "tone deafness" out
there. This NIH one is actually one of the better tests, though it does suffer
from the problems mentioned in comments already - that it assumes familiarity
with a particular set of melodies.

Tone deafness is a real condition (it's a subset of the more general condition
"amusia") but is often confused with learned musical abilities, particularly
being able to sing in tune. True tone deafness is something (which most
studies agree) only 1-3% of the general population suffer from.

If you are truly tone deaf you will be unable to really enjoy or appreciate
music. For that reason many people take these tests and declare them "too
easy" but if the test is well designed it _should_ be easy for 99% of people.
This is an example of people misusing the phrase "tone deaf" to mean "not
skilled in music".

If anybody would like to try some other tests for tone deafness (some good,
some terrible, and disclaimer: one made by me) I wrote up a summary of the
most popular ones online here: [http://www.easyeartraining.com/learn/tone-
deaf-tests-online/](http://www.easyeartraining.com/learn/tone-deaf-tests-
online/)

------
throwaway02938
Most common score is 26/26

Histogram:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673726/figure/F...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673726/figure/F1/)

------
herendin
Submitter here. The discussion at the site where I found this may also be
interesting - [http://www.metafilter.com/153003/Test-Your-Sense-of-
Pitch](http://www.metafilter.com/153003/Test-Your-Sense-of-Pitch)

Like here, the most common comment seems to be that this NIH test is too easy.
Maybe the title should be 'Find out if you are REALLY tone deaf'?

------
philh
I seem to have the lowest score yet, at 17/26\. I recognized most but not all
of the tunes. There were many I wasn't sure about, and if I took it again I'd
probably give different answers.

One time I tried to tune a ukulele, using a sound played from a laptop as a
reference note, but I couldn't even tell whether the string pitch was higher
or lower than the reference.

And yet - I rarely play, but I own an ocarina, and when I get a note wrong,
it's usually quite obvious to me.

I wish they'd give me a more precise breakdown of my score. Did I get more
false positives or false negatives?

~~~
philh
Here are my answers - Y correct, N incorrect. 9/26 Y, 17/26 N, makes me guess
I had too many N, which is already what I was expecting. Does anyone feel like
marking me?

    
    
        (Example) - Y
         1	Y *
         2	Y
         3	Y *
         4	N
         5	Y
         6	N *
         7	N
         8	Y
         9	N
        10	Y *
        11	N
        12	N *
        13	N
        14	N
        15	Y
        16	N
        17	N
        18	Y
        19	N
        20	N
        21	N
        22	N *
        23	Y *
        24	N
        25	N *
        26	Y *
    

edit - starred the ones I got wrong. My prediction was wrong too. 5 false Ys,
4 false Ns.

~~~
olejorgenb
Answers:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10220145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10220145)

------
gadders
24/26, which is amazing as when singing I can't carry a tune in a bucket. For
fun, my 9 year old daughter will sing a note and get me to try and match it,
and then laugh at my efforts.

------
rskar
Scored 26/26\. Clearly the music samples are meant to be familiar to nearly
all Americans. As mentioned before, the errors aren't subtle ones. One should
be considerate that 2 to 5 percent of the U.S. population has problems with
pitch perception (and evidence indicates this has genetic causes), and
although it seems incredible that these samples would be challenging for those
with the condition, let's be reflective on the things that are easy for some
and hard for others.

------
adyrhan
Hmm, well I stopped at the second song from the example one. I think tests
like this should not assume that the listener knows those songs. Also, if the
listener knows those songs the test shouldn't assume a perfect memory of them.
It tests the sense of pitch, not how well the listener remembers those songs.
I mean without even knowing those songs, one only can guess by giving a no
answer to those songs that contain a section with an unexpected or unfitting
dissonant note. If the notes are fit to the song, dissonant or not, there is
no way of noting that the song was played correctly if you haven't heard the
original song multiple times in the past or just right before listening to the
test ones.

~~~
alosarv
I only recognized 3 of the tunes, but still got 26 perfect score. Nothing to
do with familiarity with the material, just whether you can hear notes being
in the correct key or not.

~~~
adyrhan
That's my point. You can't really know if they are correct. You just guess, if
the notes are fit or not to the song. We could argue that what really tests is
the listeners ability to recognize dissonant notes if all songs in the test
don't have dissonant notes in them. But then its not a pitch sense test. There
was one other test that I took that I see more accurate than this one:
[http://tonometric.com/adaptivepitch/](http://tonometric.com/adaptivepitch/)
This one measures how little a difference of pitch can you note. It starts
with a difference of 12hz, and ask you to tell if the second tone is lower or
higher in frequency than the first. When you have answered a few of them
correctly, it reduces the difference of pitch. I remember I was able to
recognize differences of 0.75Hz before I started to fail to answer correctly.

~~~
filoeleven
The test you linked is much more interesting to take, thanks!

------
Kenji
Despite not knowing almost half of the tunes, I got everything right. Though,
I have to say, as someone who appreciates alternative music a lot, some of the
'wrong' samples sounded quite intriguing!

~~~
chipuni
Heavens, yes. Me, too. Some of the "wrong" samples were very fun -- especially
if you like diminished or augmented scales.

------
jimworm
It's important to remember that this test only focuses on the pitch of the
notes. Some of the tunes cut off before the phrase finishes, which feel weird
and wrong but isn't part of the test.

------
olejorgenb
Answers: [http://pastebin.com/yWjhWtsm](http://pastebin.com/yWjhWtsm) (they
are embedded in the javascript function 'countChecked')

~~~
philh
To clarify, 0 here means the answer is no (the tune was played incorrectly)
and 1 means the answer is yes.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
26/26, although to be fair I have played various musical instruments since a
very young age. I was actually expecting the distortions to be a lot more
subtle. Fun test!

~~~
rahimnathwani
I'd love to see something which started off with these blatant distortions,
and then progressed so I could train myself to hear better (assuming that's
possible).

Even better if it could, based on that, what percentile I am compared with
other 40yo males.

------
rahimnathwani
26/26\. I had to guess one of the answers, as I wasn't sure whether it was a
tune I hadn't heard, or whether it was just really badly played.

------
boggie1688
26/26

I agree. It is much more difficult to tell which note played, in each clip, is
out of pitch if you have no frame of reference. Having heard a version of the
sound clip goes a long way in this test.

This is a pitch test. IE: If I play middle C for you, then play a flat or
sharp version, you should be able to identify the difference.

Asking people who have never heard middle C to identify middle C doesn't make
the test relevant.

------
stared
What strikes me is distorted in _which_ sense? Without a training example
(i.e. one distorted and one non-distorted tune). In particular each waveform
is a non-distorted version of itself.

I am not in musics (or not an American), so I am missing all cultural "obvious
truths". But perceptually, there are _differences_ than can be spotted, and
tastes, but not "ground truths".

------
i336_
23/26 here.

Score yourself: paste the following into your browser's JS console.

    
    
      a=[0,1,0,0,1,1,0,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0];for(i=1;i<a.length;i++){
      with(document.querySelector("label[for='correct"+i+(a[i]?'yes':'no')+"']")){
      style.color='green';innerText+=" (correct)";}}

------
fallinghawks
This test seems to be mostly about a) familiarity with the song and a little
bit about b) knowing the notes that are part of a scale. Several of the
"incorrect" melodies _could_ be correct in that the notes played are pretty
much all within scale, they're just not the right ones for the song.

------
jstanley
I got 19/26 but couldn't recognise the majority of the tunes... Are you
supposed to be able to tell whether it's played correctly even if you've never
heard the song?

Some of them sounded "weird" but hard to say whether that's just how it
sounds.

------
plg
got 26/26

yes you are supposed to be able to tell even if you don't know the tunes

my daughter who is 9 took the test, she said she only recognized about 50% of
the tunes, yet she scored 100%

although the test is likely skewed towards people with experience with western
musical styles and scales

------
lordnacho
Got full marks despite knowing nothing about music at all. The wrong ones are
just so wrong it's impossible to make a mistake. I heard PP has something to
do with tonal languages, is that relevant?

------
kylec
I got 24/26, but there were two that I would have liked to listen to again, so
those were probably the ones I got wrong. I'm not sure why you could only
listen to each clip once.

~~~
olejorgenb
Probably depends on your browser. I could listen multiple times (chrome)

------
rectang
* 10 were played right.

* 16 were played wrong but so, so right.

Signed, music nerd who used to end major-key choral pieces with an "anti-
picardy" third during rehearsal.

------
Labyrinth
25/26 for me. From the selection I've played at least most of these tunes in
middle and high school or have just heard them.

------
amelius
Is this meant to test for disability, or also to test for "giftedness"?

Seeing many people here with a 26/26 score, I suspect the former.

------
Rossimac
26/26\. Didn't recognise a few tunes, but easy enough to spot when something's
wrong.

Oh and from Northern Ireland, so UK.

------
s_kilk
23 out of 26, not too bad.

------
boggie1688
26/26

