We are interested in studying musical perception ability in the general population. The following 2 tests, developed by Isabelle Peretz (University of Montreal), take less than 8 minutes each. They involve listening to pairs of tunes and deciding whether they are the same or different. Once you have completed both tests you will receive your scores.
http://www.delosis.com/listening/home.html
Amusia:
For most of us the appreciation of music is acquired effortlessly, much like language, in the early years of our lives. This appreciation forms an important social, cultural and emotional role, indeed one that is so central to everyday life that it is difficult for us to imagine being without.
However, people with a disorder recently termed 'congenital amusia' fail to recognize common tunes from their culture, do not hear when notes are 'out of tune' and sometimes report that music sounds like a 'din' or 'banging'. At a perceptual level, congenital amusia is most commonly associated with finding it difficult to notice changes in pitch.
People who experience these phenomena when listening to music are otherwise socially, emotionally and intellectually normal. Famous figures in history, Milton Friedman and Che Guevara, are thought to have been afflicted with the disorder, though such cases must remain anecdotal.
Although difficulties in other areas of sound perception are not immediately obvious, current studies are investigating whether the processing of contours in speech, and other higher-order patterns of sound, might be affected.
To see the results of the study so far please visit:
http://www.delosis.com/listening/summary.html
For follow-up studies, we are interested in examining whether speaking a tone language has implicati##被过滤## for musical abilities. Previous research has indicated that individuals with congenital amusia have normal intellectual functioning and do not appear to have any difficulty in understanding speech, including the melody of speech. The intact ability to hear the music of speech may be related to the fact that, in languages such as English, pitch changes are often several semitones and commonly co-occur with changes in stress and timing, therefore problems in hearing subtle pitch changes will not be a limiting factor. To test this hypothesis, it will be important to investigate whether amusics who speak a tone language, such as Chinese, are sensitive to pitch changes in a linguistic context, where subtle changes can profoundly alter semantic meaning. Therefore, we are currently in the process of recruiting native speakers of Standard Chinese (Mandarin), who live in the London area, to participate in a set of listening/reading tests in our lab. We would really appreciate your help if you could invite and encourage your family and friends who live in the London area to take the test so we can select a group of Chinese participants, across the whole range of scores, to participate in the next stage of our research.