Check out the Online Pitch and Hearing Test by Jake Mandell. It’s fun and very difficult. Over 15,000 have taken the test online, so you can see how your ears fair against other people.
No, I’m not going to post my score – because like most other people I’m embarrassed by my score. In order to retain my musical dignity I need to point out the obvious – that the tones used in this test are not timbres and patches normally encountered in music production or performance.
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ABOUT JAKE MANDELL AND THE TEST
While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!
In our research, we were looking for neuro-anatomical correlates of tonedeafness (called “congenital amusia” in the scientific literature. We gave several dozen subjects a high-resolution MRI scan and used a statistical package to analyze the images. This technique, called VBM (voxel-based morphometry), has been used to study the changes in the brain caused by Alzheimer disease and many other neurological conditions. The test you are about to take was used as a screening test to roughly characterize patient’s pitch discrimination and musical memory abilities. Even though musical memory is strongly tested here, we have found that people who are tonedeaf tend to have normal musical memories.
ABOUT JAKE MANDELL
I am currently a medical student at UMass. I have a musical background, having composed several electronic music albums under my own name. I formerly worked in Berlin, Germany, for Native Instruments, and was involved with the Reaktor and Absynth instruments. On the medical side of things, I am interested in using radiological technologies, such as anatomical and functional MRI, to investigate musical perception.