I knew a guitarist in college who had “perfect pitch.” You could slam 6 or 8 random notes on the piano all at once and he’d name them all. Never missed. But then his guitar would be grossly out of tune and he couldn’t tell. I found that fascinating.
I think it's because a guitarist can play whatever notes they need to even if the instrument is tuned differently right? So he can just find the right way to hold a string to get the right note. I have perfect color vision and I feel like I'm the opposite and when a monitor or screen is even the slightest bit off I can't help but try to fix it 😂
@@leestrz4153 if your playing even somewhat fast bending every note just perfect would be savant level shit. Maybe possible but not even remotely practical especially if done on the fly like someone would have to if theyre accidentally sharp/flat in 1 or more strings (edit) also you can only bend up on guitar so if you're flat you would have to readjust every fingering as well as bend which adds a whole other level of complexity
I can tell the notes on a violin and piano, but if you were to get someone to play an acoustic and/or classical guitar I have to really think to determine what was being played.
"We think this test might provide an indication of how well the participant could be expected to endure an evening of community musical theatre auditions."
@@johncenaplayingstarcraft9580 If they had known what they were looking for they would have seen it written on Adam Neely's window...I mean youtube channel
@@Mezurashii5 Ohhh boy, that's so wrong it hurts. Especially since the framework that they used is an systematical empirical one. Their method is stem-scientific so to speak (which is the completely wrong framework for doing something like this (I mean, there is not a great way to do something like this at all, because the idea is just stupid, but anyway)).
To be fair, this is a flaw shared by the actual IQ test as well. IQ tests, whether musical or otherwise, don't effectively test your intelligence, they test your skill at taking IQ tests.
They definitely used "out of tune" to mean "dissonant" and that really gets on my nerves. Dissonant and out of tune aren't the same and they get conflated so often.
@@keyboard_toucher Yes they did. I never saw the score sheet so I can assume the possibility of purposeful dissonance of written half-step chords and 1/4 tones. "In-tune" is a relative term. If I'm tuned to a Dm chord and you are tuned to Em11 who is "out of tune " ?
I'm pretty sure that this wording was used so that the average person would understand what to do even though it might technically be a sloppy way of putting it.
@@coryrad9575 I also disagree with you, sorry. Allowing for any and every possible chord, and even for sliding up to notes, etc., there was another test about whether the singer placed the note more "in tune" (as Adam said, in 12-note equal temperament". The actual music played and sung in each exampe was the same notationally, so chords didn't come into it. Nobody sang so far off that they clearly intended to mess with the harmonies for dissonant interest. Some clearly couldn't sing in tune; others I suspect were deliberately singing slightly off for the test.
Hello Adam, sorry a little bit correction there: 5:44 is actually Balinese gamelan, they are usually played more 'fiery' than their Javanese counterpart. But from all types of gamelans that I know (Javanese, Balinese and Sundanese) they each do have their own tuning system (and scales) that don't quite match western's 12 tones system. But there do exist gamelan sets that especially made and tuned to match western's 12 (ie. to play with orchestra/band etc). *Source: me native Indonesian 😁
*band playing a song . . .* *member 1:* hey bro you’re out of tune *adam:* [clears throat] um, i’m sorry but i believe you mean that he’s not locked to the grid of the very Euro-centric 12 tone equal temperament
Semi agree. It would have been more for an engineer If they would have asked to guess which frequency is being lowered or risen in a mix, which track has reverb, or which track is compressed.
Honestly appreciate, your appreciation for all music styles… When I got a chance to go to school for music… my friends from other cultures blew my mind. Still not the most top dollar musician, but I definitely think it’s in our diversity of music that we can find such great inspiration!
I blame that on his score was based on an average of a few skillful users has taken it, making the average being highly skilled, decreasing his value. Now a lot of average fans of him has taken the test, and decreased the skill value of the average, and therefore increased the score Adam has. ... or maybe not. The test isn't really that good.
Do you play an instrument? If not, maybe now's the time. 😎 I got the same score as Adam, too, but I play an instrument (20 years of piano), so I was hoping my score would be similar, though his music theory knowledge surpasses mine by far.
Plenty of perceived offbeats in prog music used nowadays that actually create a synchronized whole. I think there are plenty of beats and melodies in this test that could be used in prog music or avant garde stuff just fine.
When at 13 i took a MENSA test and came out in the top group, i realized that those tests in no way can measure intelligence as a whole (whichever definition we may have for intelligence) but only a person's attitude toward a very specific mental process. The same apply here: i scored slightly better than Adam and yet he is much more solid than me in most aspects of musical knowledge and, what matters most, in performing ability. Taken for fun, there's no harm in such tests, but if we want to draw conclusive assessments on someone's intelligence or ability, those tests suck big time and are actually strongly discriminatory. No surprise that most people in key positions in nations that heavily rely on those tests, are often just educated fools.
Mensa tests are a total farce. They measure how many times you've taken Mensa tests, as you get progressively better at remembering the same problems, shapes and sequences you've meant before. Mostly a 70s thing, highly discredited now, just like Myers Briggs "personality" tests - no scientific basis, easy to rig (I have, several times), and only HR fall for the marketing.
how can you determine intelligence with intelligence ? you can only understand who is less intelligent than you. that's why those tests suck but probably work for the majority
Actually, professionally conducted IQ tests do measure the IQ pretty well. The mistake those "fools" make is to assume that things they are looking for is caused/more strongly correlated with the results of the test.
I stumbled upon this video just out of curiosity and procrastination. I subscribed out of pleasure to find such a versed, intellectual and cited music conversation. And the moment you questioned eurocentrism in the test, I rushed to press the subscribe button.
@@whatever6223 For this meme, there might be two options that are similar. First option: It sometimes happens that after recording the synth has not the same tuning frequency as the vocals. (Adam has made a great video on tuning frequencies). So if you play them together, you will start noticing that something is weird about the music. That is, again, due to the fact that the synth is not in the same tuning as the vocals. For example, the synth can be tuned A=440 Hz and the guitar is tuned A=432 Hz. These 8Hz difference make a huge difference to the listener. It sounds off tuned. Second option: The synth player and the vocal singers are stupid and play in different keys (e.g. one plays in a minor and one plays in e minor). It can sometimes be wanted but that's due to art purposes. So the point of the joke is that people make those mistakes quite often and they are stupid. You're welcome :)
I feel like this was a good test, tho. As a retired dancer, I knew my strenght was going to be Beat Alignment. It was my highest score, beating Adam by far. And I'm starting to enter the world of music producing, melody is being the most difficult part for me, and my score on Melodic Discrimination was abysmal, only 86. It trully reflected what I perceived of my music skills.
@@ditorres9884 I think the big issue he was raising was scope. It’s a good test in the scope of the music they were choosing, it’s just not all music applies to popular western systems. And the researchers were extrapolating proficiency with western musical tradition with overall musical intelligence, which isn’t the case.
I'm very self-aware about my musical skills (since I started playing an instrument fairly late) and got super bummed out about my test results on this. Their "this might predict your ability to actually play an instrument!" sentence seems custom-tailored to kick me in the shins, too.
I wouldn't worry about it. The melody test is more of a memory test than a musical ability test and some of the tuning test entries sounded better in the mix with a bit of detuning. You'll be fine!
This test didn’t illustrate the ability to make or play music at all. You play music for enjoyment only. As you get better, you get more satisfaction. I don’t care if your playing “mary had a little lamb” or a Vivaldi piece. It about that inner joy. Don’t stop. I stopped for a year, after 48 years of playing, and my joy started to leave me. Don’t EVER let that happen. BTW: The only way I was able to pass this test is because of my long love affair with music. Started when I was about five. Love all kinds of music but rap music is an oxymoron.
Don’t let this test discourage you! In my Humble Violinist Opinion this was not a good test in the first place, but there’s a LOT more to bring a good musician than the three things they’re measuring here.
I think your right in your assessment that the tone of the beep affects the timing perception because it creates an obvious dissonance, albeit not relating to the beat. It became easier once I consciously ignored the tone.
me: the concept of an absolute intelligence quotient in reference to any subject will inherently be biased to the culture that created it also me: heehee i got 116
I can't believe this test comes from a university. The one who can tell whether random notes match a grid of pitch and beat perfectly and remember them like a machine has a high musical intelligence? What about feeling the music? What about knowing what to do in order to achieve a certain impact? What about being able to create and understand tension and release? What about creating elegant chord progressions? What about creating memorable and meaningful melodies? What about understanding relations between notes? etc etc
they repeatedly tell us that it is a mere hypotheses and they suspect it is inaccurate in actually evaluating musical skill so while all those etc.'s are entirely valid i dont think its fair to assume theyre enforcing the test as some ultimate standardized meter
@@mellot00th They literally say that they believe that this test could predict if someone is going to be good while playing an instrument or singing when they show you your scores. I'm not saying you're wrong, maybe in the more academic part where they describe this test in more depth they do say what you mentioned. But they's a clear contradiction in the stuff they tell and sometimes they do think this is solid.
Sounds like another instance where scientists have attempted to quantify some skill without actually consulting people who have specific experience with the skill they're measuring... disappointing. Thank you for highlighting the Eurocentric nature of their approach and doing the work to find papers discussing the implications of this bias.
Plus, none of it translates to actually playing or mixing. It's so abstracted away from the point of music, that it no longer has to do with it at all. It's a logic test. Music is not about logic. It's about context. That's why some of the ugliest chords turn so beautiful in Jazz. They're given context and they're part of a bigger story.
@@manictiger yes! Almost all of the “wrong” ones sounded better to me, so I quickly switched from trying to listen to what works well and just started listening for what sounded boring.
I ordered some curried chicken the other day while in India and the server asked me how I would like it prepared and I told her "extra out of tune please".
I get the feeling the key change one was testing "how well can you remember a really long sequence of arbitrary notes that don't make any melodic sense after hearing it just once".
I agree with this. I just woke up and am very drowsy and my key change score is significantly lower than my other 2 scores just because I couldn't remember 3 melodies. I had about a 17 point difference average from my other 2 sections compared to the key change section.
they did shit like that in my normal iq test. i think that's one of the better parts of this test actually. it doesn't have the problem the beat and pitch tests have where being a more experienced musician matters more than having a high aptitude for understanding music. if you have played an instrument, you will do way better on the beat and pitch tests because you practice those things to play an instrument. remembering lines you just heard and hearing if the next is different isn't a thing you practice normally, so it's better for testing the functionality of the brain when it comes to music rather than just skill. that's just my opinion.
@@piesmuggler7268 I don't think it's that different from transcribing a piece of music. Granted you can rewind as many times as you like, slow down, you've probably heard the piece of music before, etc. etc., but fundamentally transcribing does sharpen up your musical memory. If you can picture in your head playing the notes on a keyboard I think that is evidence that there is skill involved in this one too imo. The 'not making musical sense' part is what makes it hard I think.
They use 3d audio for the virtual piano on that, so lower notes are further left. Oddly, when I stopped trying to remember the melody and just tried to remember the location the notes were coming from relative to each other it was much, much easier. I have ADHD, so I could just about remember two of them to compare, trying to compare three was impossible. But I instantly felt it when I heard a note come from a relative location different from the others.
This is interesting. It's seem to be largely a test of memory and positions of tones and rhythms relative to each other. It's been years that I've been studying music. In the western tradition, we've been raised on octaves but that's simply a convention.
I totally agree with your commentary on a narrow set of standards being used to apply benchmarks for measuring aptitude, particularly coming from a Jazz music perspective (the 1+3 thing threw me off a lot too). As a pop musician who lives on a click, however, I find myself having to set aside a lot of preconceived notions about how I hear music, and instead, have to try to stick myself into the situation where everything is riding on the click. So in this test I tried to get as outside of my preconceived musical ideology as possible (I missed the first question though) and simply tried to listen for a whether the click was ahead or behind the pulse of the drums/bass/strings, etc. I'm not sure what I'm doing that makes me able to do that-- maybe the producer in me is just thinking "ignore your personal feelings, just stick to the click/tuning" and that's how I'm able to get through the test. All that aside, even though I scored 125 on the beat section, I didn't like this click because it's a) not percussive enough (sine tones without an attack and fast decay are bad for defining time) b) because it's not a fast decay, you sometimes can't tell whether it's hitting the beat before or right on with the rest of the instrumentation.
That was funny: my wife and I are both musicians and we did the test alongside with you. At the first "beat" test, we both went "yeah, the second one", like you did. It turned out all three of us were wrong. Then we commented about which beat makes the music feel better... and then you said the exact same thing.
In contrast, I'm nowhere near the level of musician Adam is, but I got more answers correct, and sometimes faster, than Adam, despite definitely not having a higher musical IQ. I think it purely signifies my listening and musicianship is closer to typical Western pop than his; I don't have as much JAZZ flowing through my veins.
The beep test is wild. I closed my eyes and tapped along to it, and got the right answer each time because I realized there was a sinking in my gut on the wrong one. Really strange that my body had a visceral reaction to the beat.
synesthete here, i feel it like this too but even more so i feel it being off somehow "spatially" (literally as spatial awareness like how you can judge distances between objects with your eyes closed)
@@kindramusic Same. I just went by which felt "wrong". I sucked totally and gave up on the beat one. Hey, I'm a clarinet player, not a drummer! (My daughter is a drummer, I should have her take the test.)
Nice to see you taking the test, thanks for sharing. I took it a few times (at some time got a little obsessed) and at times results varied wildly/widely (take your pick), including both less and more than what we got when we played now, not sure how reliable it is (with respect to variance). Anyway, I think the singing in or off tune test makes a little more sense because of (mostly) having a 12 TET accompaniment in harmonic tonality. Wouldn't be so much if only the leading sung melody were used - some things wouldn't sound out of tune to me for example even if a drone were played for pitch reference (I'd think, it's dissonant, but so what, doesn't make it wrong), so maybe to that extent it's Eurocentric, or rather, Western - centric. Not to mention, like you said, that some some sound samples are so hazy that you can barely hear the voice, it's almost like a whisper. Anyway I like hearing the sample music, a lot was not even familiar to me, so I've played sometimes just for that :D I think the tune comparison test is quite different from the in/out of tune and on beat/tempo/phase lag tests because while the first involves pattern recognition, the other two are more absolute with respect to a reference, so minute differences are easier to overlook (or to the contrary, some may say that it's just off and that much more jarring, so you know that it's not on). I tend to perform best with the tune comparison test (not bad with the others either) so maybe I'm better at pattern recognition. Maybe because I think of music as being made of beautiful, aesthetic, moving sound patterns. I'm happy with that. Although I sometimes felt strongly that I was right and when it showed me 'incorrect' it was faulty, but also felt ambivalent about it being mechanical and possibly not lying. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, I think. This is nice as a game, maybe even a somewhat useful challenge, but shouldn't be used to measure your ability. We shouldn't rely on it or anything, and certainly not put down by it, heck no. But if we happen to do well, let's feel good, because why not? ;)
To me, it sounded like the beats weren't only just delayed, but actually at different rates. Like, the interval between each beat would be different in the first example compared to the second example. So it's not just about delay or offset… it's actually about tempo.
I made 10 incorrect answers and was about to say "ok I'm totally worthless" when I understood that you have to choose a more out of tune melody, not more in tune 😂
Your point about culture being highly relevant and this test just focusing on western style music is very crucial: I remember vividly being asked to a party with some sudanese exchange students - they were really impressed with me - since I, as a former drummer, had no problem clapping sextuplets while dancing to 2/4 music - which was their "thing". I remember going home from that party thinking that culture is so much more diverse than it's normally represented. You would have had to be a drummer or experienced that culture all your life to do that. I have tried getting musician friends to do a 4/4 8th note thing with one hand and sextuplets with the other - nobody can do that; but this whole party had no problem doing that with their whole body - for hours. :D
You're quite right about the Western-centric thing, especially with tests 1 and 3. I've played piano in a salsa band (Afro-Cuban), and the variance of the beat "lag"/"push" between instruments was extremely subtle and took a lot of practice to grow accustomed to.
Ngl, my mom’s probably completely tone deaf but she’s also a middle eastern immigrant. When I mentioned the first study to her and insinuated that she’s not as tone deaf as she thinks, she lit up and started talking to me about the music she listened to before emigrating.
On the other hand, my dad could not carry a tune in a bucket, and he was raised in a Western European society. My mother, on the other hand, was probably responsible for my musical aptitude.
@@Suire1000 musical aptitude isn't genetic it's Environmental and also what you personally like. On top of the fact making such an assertion would mean that you have an objective Universal standard to compare someone's capabilities to and that simply does not exist
@Carl Panzram Yes and No. Well yes because our genetics are literally the building blocks of our being that doesn't mean that our genetics have encoded within it beat perception or you can interpret genetics this way that also functions from the idea that g-factor is genetic when it's never even been proven to exist so either way the still fundamentally flawed bc it assumes a lot of things and even if let's just say that you're right that there's a genetic component to everything that doesn't mean we can use genetics like an answer key or that that this is the way to express whatever we think our genetics have in them. Like our genetics don't explain everything they just don't and I see why people would think that's the case but a lot of times we underestimate how much environment plays into things and also forget that what we consider better is based on a lot of subjective Construction
In the second test: you don't need to remember the first one at all after comparing it to the second. If the first and second are the same, the third is the odd one out (just listen to confirm). If the first two are different, then one of them must be the odd one. Compare second to third. If they're the same, the first is the odd one out. If they're different, the second one must be the odd one out
That's another proof of how this and similar tests actually fail (!) at testing what they claim to test, testing in reality something completely different.
That was the method I was instinctually using until he talked about having to remember the first one, and then my brain froze and I started getting the answers wrong.
Ethnomusicologist here. What a great video - I'll definitely use it in my classes. Also in case Adam sees this comment: that's a Balinese gamelan you have in the clip, not a Javanese gamelan. Both have interesting tuning systems, though!
I think you'd confirm that they have interesting tuning systems in which each gamelan has its own internally consistent tuning of instruments of fixed pitch that is different from that of every other gamelan (unless someone started standardizing that when I wasn't looking). My DMA is in flute performance, but my mother was a well-known anthropologist specializing in Malaysia and I did enough study and listening over the years to be able to teach an upper-divisional course on Southeast Asian music.
I notice that in the tuning test, they used a lot of 90s genres and even had some radio-head-ish pieces in there. That amuses me because a lot of that stuff is very intentionally out of tune, or uses harmonization that doesn't quite match up, in addition to leaning on mixing conventions where everything kinda runs together to make, for a lack of a better term, a "soup" of sound. It's clear the test is trying to throw the listener off.
Yeah. I have a choral background, so I had a hard time discriminating the tuning for the rough voices they used since I'm used to more clear/sonorous vocals.
that doesn't matter at all. Your quest was to pick a piece that has a vocal more out of tune than the other, having two to chose from. Simple, doesnt require considering any of things you mentioned.
"And even if your musical skills could use some work, rest assured: as far as we know, many people who have difficulty making music still enjoy listening to music very much." Wow. That's the second most condescending thing I've read or heard all week.
Its such a dumb statement too. You don't have to be physically good at playing music to have good musical ideas nor do you even have to be good at music theory to make good music.
You can only instantly memorize a long sequence (over 7-8) if it's composed of already learned sub-patterns like a diatonic scale, often heard licks, or similar. So, designing an unbiased test is practically impossible.
I first did the test on my own and distinctively thought it was funny they put the beeps on 2 and 4. I'd love to hear Adam's explanation of this in a q&a!
Very informative! Thank you for your knowledge and sensibility. Always intriguing and well stated. The Ipanema…. Episode was very extensive and well done
Adam being mad at the beats on one and three Me: *nervously sweats in German* (there is this stereotype in Germany that Germans will always clap on one and three, no matter the kind of music...)
I am just speculating here, but I believe that's because of the heavy influence of Polka Music, where the bass horn plays or accents 1 & 3. A lot of central American music has that same time feel in their songs which is derived from that same influence.
~me while taking test~ this test is unfair and not at all an accurate representation of musical talent ~me after scoring higher than Adam~ this test is THE unquestioned scientific authority on musical IQ
Can we just take a moment to admire the incredible midi sound in the melody test.. Why did they not take the time to make it sound maybe just a bit better?
Wow! I scored exactly the same as you did on the first test. I got a little lost in the second test for the reasons you described I suppose. I had a lot of trouble deciding on the 3rd test but I did better than I thought I would. This was a lot of fun!
This made me think of the music teacher that supposedly flunked Brian Wilson. A bandmate once commented on how I tended to bend the strings while playing lead lines. Later I read more about music theory, specifically natural intervals, and then realized *why* I did, and why such playing tended to sound "eastern," without having been aware of the theory behind at the time. And later came to realize why I have an affinity for chords with missing thirds.
Yes, the question was; which one is MOST out of tune, indicating the possibility of both being out of tune. I also noticed that and made some mistakes there because of that
i got above average on the other 2 parts but i got a fuckin 66 on the 1st part because I ended up having to guess a bit. I've never listened to the songs before and alot of the pitch changed ones i felt still "went" with the music as well as the ones that were apparently in tune. or literally just sounded the same. idk if its because i listen to alot of indie music (...and weezer) and weird vocal tunings are kinda normal, or if im just a big dumb dumb. im gonna try retaking it later edit: bruh i just retook the first part and i got 12/15?? on my first try it was like 6/15? edit 2: ok i finished the retake and i got 110 on the first part but then i got basically average on the 3rd part. this test ain't really that consistent (maybe im not consistent which is more likely)
What is average on this test? That's another thing I didn't get. It says 85% score between 85 and 115, and 95% score between 75 and 130. I can't comprehend that.
Thank you for the video. I just took the test and it really bummed me out when I didn't score as high as I thought I would on the second and third parts.
super cool video, fun to play along. I clearly need to work on my rhythm. Glad to hear you call out the "western only" perspective. Would love to hear you address the scales used in Ethiopian jazz music like Admas and Hailu Mergia-- they have a couple that are fantastic, but just untouched in the western world
Loved that you picked this apart. I’m a classical bass trombonist, playing a lot of new and quirky works, movie, and video game music. But I grew up in jazz bands, because they were so much fun and taught me where classical cannot. So I agree with you about the jazz example (even a couple more examples, I believe): why the hell 1 & 3? Omega YIKES Thanks for your video, man.
I personally appreciate that you studied both jazz and classical! There seems to sometimes be a disconnect between the two, so it's nice to hear of people that grab from both
There are lots of styles of music where we emphasize the offbeat. But that's why we call it the _offbeat._ Because it is literally not on the beat. That's why that music works the way it does in the first place. You can clap on 2 and 4 all you want, but that doesn't put the *beat* there. Indeed if the beat were there, you'd immediately switch to clapping on 1 and 3 instead. Because that is the whole point. That you don't want to be clapping on the beat. You specifically want to be clapping against it. In brief, they put the beat on 1 and 3 because that's where the beat actually *is.*
In a lot of western music - especially rock, jazz, and pop - the emphasis of 2 and 4 is actually an emphasis on the down beat; 2 and 4 just happens to be the down beats of common 4/4 time In these genres, it's culturally agreed upon (or hammered into jazz scholars) to focus on the down beats and only move to accenting the up beats (1 and 3 in this case) if you want to throw in some extra spice - say in the last measure of a bridge or something. That's why the accent on 1 and 3 was so jarring to Adam and op: they're so accustomed to 2 and 4 being the down beat that 1 and 3 felt essentially like it was being rushed a 1/4th beat Hope this helps! Just got off work so sorry if it's rough in some places
After taking the test, on top of the obvious eurocentrism, I feel like some of the clips are just so goddamn long that they're not even really testing the musical parameters they say they are, just like, raw, cognitive memory. I also think for the beat test, they should play a measure with no beeps each clip so you can get the tempo. Just throwing you into it is really jarring. The fact that this test is incredibly flawed as a metric for an individual's "musicality" is clear when you consider I got a higher score than...Adam...and he's obviously leagues ahead of me and the general public in terms of musical knowledge & ability. So people who take this test: it's a fun distraction but I wouldn't put too much credence into what result you get.
Another criticism is that as a classically trained musician, I scored quite poor (average, but poor as a musician) on beats. I did average on mistuning, but I absolutely nailed the melody with a score of 130, and I imagine a percussionist in a jazz band would have the opposite of mine sort of. So, this test is in no way reliable.
Yes I agree the melody section in particular was hard on memory having 3 clips. If 1 and 2 are different you have to keep both in memory to compare against 3, as well as trying to think how the key change would affect it. I got 111 in the test, the melody questions were the worst scoring for me but I do wish beat perception was better with drums being my main instrument.
colorsofsound as a classically trained pianist, who had since picked up jazz percussion and singing, I did very well on mistuning, pretty well on beats, and poor (like genuinely worse than most people) on the melody
I was thinking the exact same thing. my STM is pretty shit, especially under pressure, and while I was doing this i was like wait, I don't *remember* what the last tune sounded like.
Just came back and watched this a second time (like 3 years later) and absolutely smashed the first 2 tests. Can't wait to receive my master's degree in the mail 👊🤙 HOWEVER, no matter HOW MANY TIMES I replay 9/15 in test 3 (12:28), the second example sounds considerably more bang-on to me! Anyone else get this?
Yes, but don't take any notice of me as I took the test and scored 64, ("You did as well as or better than 0.82% of people"), so I'm a certified Musical Moron!
I agree 100% on the presenters assessment of this test, having said that, I am quite tickled that I was able to keep pace with him and even got a couple that he missed (as well as missed one or two that he answered correctly) 😉.
I absolutely loved how you maintained the whole time that this is an incredibly Euro-centric and narrow test. I still so much enjoyed trying to guess along with you the whole time.
But maybe this design flaw of the test is not such a big deal. Think about it that way: "real" IQ supposedly measures g-score, and the idea behind g-score is that "everything in intelligence correlates with everything" - your math abilities correlate with spatial abilities, or even vocabulary (even though this correlation is rather weak, because there are factors like your age or socio-economic status). So supposedly you can measure IQ even with an English vocabulary test - but, obviously, you won't give that that test to a Japanese person, or a 6-year old kid. But it will predict your g-score better than chance. Maybe it's the same with this test - you SHOULDN'T give it to someone who didn't have exposure to Western musical tradition, and there are better ways to discern your musical ability; but it's still better than chance.
To be fair to them, throat singing, didgeridoo and drum circles (without even mentioning arabian tunings) tend to be more of a feel/hear musical experience. So they don't really have a need for anything to be written down. Most of the people who started this craze of "ethnic musicology" where british people who wanted to try to document the local songs they where hearing while overseas. So making it about "euro-centric" (usually tied to "western imperialist") argumentation seems rather dishonest from my perspective. It's kind of like being a western flute player and learning music for the shamisen, you need to learn a completely alien system of annotation (at least from a western perspective). But it would be easy for me to turn around and say "I cant play japanese folk music because it is so japan-centric." This is how I feel when I see people saying "western music theory" is coming from a "euro-centric" perspective (where else would it have came out of? these where the people who created it). Unlike a lot of these guarded musial cultures (e.g. Japan and India), anyone can pick up a book and learn can partake in "western music theory." That is what makes it a good thing, Not a "force for evil" as is usually implied. TL;DR: Until these complainers come up with their own system of musical notation, Dreams of some sort of unified "universalist global music theory" are worthless. Although I have a feeling if one was ever invented, it would be a lot like pop music. Take the "good" bits water down the rest. 1-size-fits all is really just a bad shoe.
@@ifiwasyouiwouldntbe I think mostly people criticize the idea that western music theory, tuning and music or whatever is presumably thought to be universal. Criticizing this doesn't mean we should try to create "global music tuning or theory" and what would even be point of this?
@@dismayd3955 Yes that was my point. It is "universal." Anyone can learn "western music theory" (granted access to information). Where as to even attempt to transcribe certain music you have to go to that place, and learn it from a teacher the same way they do. Then transcribe it into a paradigm so other people could even understand. To criticize this is pretty pathetic, clearly they are interested in learned about other cultures musical traditions, not shoving them into a box. (The box is the best way they have to explain it to other people.) I guess my question to you would be, if we dismantle western music, tuning and theory. (Because that is usually what it takes to change an industrial standard.) Then what do you have in place as an alternative? or is this a cringe "woke" thing about "acknowledging" that people who never "did" something "could have" done it better than the people who actually did it? Because then there isn't really a conversation here.
Yes, it's hopelessly conflated with long-sequence memory testing. It would be better if they gave you three buttons to play the pieces as many times as you wanted to. It would still test the abilty to distinguish between the transpositions.
This is really fun, and an entirely untrained person who has a feeling they have "good ear" my answers almost entirely matched yours lol I love this and I love that I'll learn about non European musical ideals on your channel
It's fun in the same way that "wHiCh fRieNdS chAraCter ArEyOU?" tests are, but it's pretty audacious of them to try to claim that it's indicative of "Musical Skill" lol
Sometimes, I preferred the "wrong" solution over the correct one, especially when the vocals were more on the flat side. Overall, it's a fun little test without any deeper meaning.
@@braveheart1320 I don't think that entirely follows. Being able to accurately perceive when something is and isn't on-pitch could help you determine while making music when it is exactly that you want to go off pitch, when you want to go back on pitch, and especially when doing improv determine when you need to adjust yourself to match the rest of the band.
@@braveheart1320 Actually it absolutely is correlative to one's ability to make music, as a matter of fact, it's pretty important. There's a difference between a conscious decision to go off pitch for the sake of a song, and not being able to match pitch.
I very much enjoy your being so reflective and educated and at the same time culturally conscious of music in general and musical traditions in particular with regard to this kind of musical "aptitude" test here. I guess the take away for me here is how far reaching a thing like "cultural imperialism" can go as this test could very well turn out to be a greatly traumatizing experience to, say, a super gifted young person who is simply too advanced already to still get to conform to these highly normatizing, if not oppressive pseudo-standards. It was fun, though, to witness the examples they present here, particularly the "mean" metronome beep on the one and three beat as they played it above an apparently heavily swung Jazz beat, which typically follows a 2 and 4 downbeat. I very much enjoyed your thoughts and analysis segments, which I largely concur with. Fun and very educating, as always! (I wish I could express my gratitude more substantially than just cheerleading.... Should there come a time that I can I'll live up to that)
I learned both western (Suzuki style) and Carnatic violin, but never got into the theory part of the music. I would love to see a video where you describe the differences from a theory perspective. Thanks for the awesome content!!!
Originally, the IQ test was to let teachers know how skilled the 6-year-olds were. In France. The theory of measuring G is pretty suspect. And most IQ tests today corrolate with your wealth, or how much you've read, or how many IQ tests you've taken.
A lot of IQ test skills are trainable - and as already mentioned, Binet's original goal was to identify kids who needed extra help to raise their scores - not to uncover some innate unchangeable quality of the individual.
After taking the test and reading the short text about the research objective of the study, I feel like the test actually fits the research question quite well: Determining whether having practiced musical instruments over a period of time improves some specific musical abilities. The only problem is the way they try to advertise the test as a "musical IQ" (probably in order to get a bigger sample of people who feel intrigued to try it?). An IQ is usually thought to be universally applicable to many different cultures (which unfortunately also "normal" IQ tests often fail to do), so setting European music characteristic as a standard is definitely problematic. Also, pitch and rhythm are things that can be learned and then practiced quite well (which actually is the premise of the entire study, right?). That makes the term "IQ" even less appropriate, because IQ measurements are supposed to be more stable and basically measure cognitive abilities instead of trained skills (although obviously many typical IQ tasks can be practiced as well). All in all - cool study, and I got some feedback on the effect my music lessons in Western instruments had on my perception and skills surrounding Western music. Definitely not an IQ, but nice to know!
I would agree that it achieves its goal. I've spent the vast majority of my musical practice on non-melodic percussion, but also a decent amount various melodic instruments along the way. I was way above average in beat alignment and mistuning perception, but I absolutely tanked melodic discrimination. Which makes sense, because I have spent roughly 0% of my time playing music transposing to different keys, and all of it either attempting to play on beat or tune my drums (or attempt to tune a whole drumline). I have been attempting to sing some recently and my ear for my own voice is absolutely awful compared to my ear for consonance/dissonance in music, so perhaps that also affected my scores in some way.
I think you summed it up very nicely! I too think the promotion as a "Musical IQ Test" is misleading. Currently there is a longitudinal study carried out, that is - among other things - examining the relationship between these tests and practicing a musical instrument (longgold.org). The test are constantly developed by D. Müllensiefen, P. M. C. Harrison and others and maybe we will see a more cultural diverse version in the future. For those who are interested: link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-019-01225-1@ nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30318-8 nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03586-z
@@drumpillo Interesting, and they seem to be using the same test material as the IQ test! longgold.org/procedure/ Unfortunately the links (or twitter names?) below your comment don't show up, could you post them again?
@@atomicbomm Correct! themusiclab.org is just hosting these tests and labeled them as "Musical IQ-Tests". The researchers of the LongGold-Team actually developed them. Here are the resources: link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-019-01225-1#Sec13 nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30318-8 nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03586-z
This anthropologist/ethnomusicologist thanks you for fighting reductionist-ethnocentric mumbo-jumbo disguised as “cognitive science”. Your reaction to the “1 and 3” example made me LOL. Glad you caught it on tape.
Hi, I appreciate your comment, but I just want to take a moment to add here that from my background in psychology this appears to be a useful and worthy project. I acknowledge that the term "musical IQ" is a bit clickbait-y and the "are you a prodigy?" tagine is flat-out ridiculous, but in fact they are not trying to measure people's "intelligence" or musical merits (I assume that part of it is what you are principally objecting to - if I misunderstood, I apologize). They are gathering data. IQ tests (even if this were one, which it really isn't, as it's far too short) are more about looking at how people's minds work (which is what they are gathering data to do here) than measuring intelligence per se; the inventor of IQ tests knew that intelligence was a multifaceted concept that can't be fully measured by any test, and that wasn't why he designed them. (Very interesting history to read about, if you're interested!) It says on the test site that they are trying to "understand how people make sense of music they hear" - that is the kind of thing that tests like these are actually for. Fwiw, if you go to the "learn more" page, there are links to a lot of excellent work this team is doing with regard to the cultural factors that influence how people experience music. :)
@@AlexB-vb2tw It’s been a while… My sense of Neely’s video is that it wasn’t about dismissing the project as much as to put it in a broader context. Sure, the background for IQ research over the years is pretty much common knowledge at this point (and there have been multiple approaches to testing within that history, some more problematic than others). The framing for this particular project is quite important, including the clickbait aspect, coverage by media outlets, etc. What’s even more relevant, though, is something which has since become something of a trend in Neely’s approach: debunking claims of universality or cross-cultural relevance. Particularly important as Anglophone musickers suddenly realize that there might be a whole lot more to music than they thought throughout long and illustrious careers. Adam’s recent video about Schenkerian analysis has probably attracted much more mainstream attention than this one. The two share a thrust.
The test 1 really got me cause of the mistuned version sound more better, and sometimes the mistuned notes actually works in a different way. Like a different harmonic relationships...
Yup. I'm a beat detection moron (a score below 70 for that test) and none of the bands I've played in noticed. It seems so easy to do a better test - just have a piece of music playing and ask people to hit any key in time. Or just on the 1.
@@simongunkel7457 they might be being polite. also the test tests when 2 of them are both out but one is more out than another. you can't really do that with your game idea
@@asdfazxczcv I don't think anybody has an audition for bass players and picks the one with no sense of time out of politeness. or hires somebody for another studio job if they didn't perform. The test I gave gives you a good indicator of whether somebody can detect the beat, which ostensibly is what their test does, but you get more accurate data on whether they miss the tempo or lag by a constant. Their test generates a lot less data than my suggestion and tapping along to a beat is an actual performance skill...
@@simongunkel7457 you can't ask to hit a key in time because that adds an entire other variable of input device accuracy. Let alone those with physical disabilities.
This test is really fun. I said the answer out loud first and then you clicked my answer everytime :-) . I found something while I was doing the test... It's like you not only h e a r when something is wrong but also f e e l which was the correct answer. . There are really sneaky musical-questions there cos they picked examples where the instruments were way off in vibrato and glissando's. So you have to determine vocal pitch in a sort of 'unpitched-instruments scene'. . Kinda cool idea, musical IQ. . Thanx for this. :-) Thumbs up + subscribed.
I have a huge amount of respect for Adam and I love his videos about music. I thought he seemed to be missing the point (and I'm willing to be shown it was actually me that was missing the point) of the beat test. Wasn't it just about which pieces were "metronomic"? i.e. weren't they asking us to detect which ones had the beeps "in time" with the music? I felt like Adam's superior grasp of jazz has left his internal beat machine a bit "spicy". I have had so many arguments with musicians who think that playing in a non-metronomic way is "more human" and therefore "better". One musician with whom I've had this argument also seems to think that singing with notes that are in the diatonic scale fro a given key is also less human and therefore not as good. It's like arguing about grammar and spelling and pronunciation with people who say there are no right or wrong ways to do things and that nobody has the right to say what the rules are or should be. I don't think the test was about whether you think music should be metronomic or which beat you preferred. I think it was just about whether you have a feel for "beat" (is that different from rhythm?) that aligned with the model advocated by those who instigated the test.
I knew a guitarist in college who had “perfect pitch.” You could slam 6 or 8 random notes on the piano all at once and he’d name them all. Never missed. But then his guitar would be grossly out of tune and he couldn’t tell. I found that fascinating.
Learning how to play an untuned guitar is legendary tbh
I think it's because a guitarist can play whatever notes they need to even if the instrument is tuned differently right? So he can just find the right way to hold a string to get the right note. I have perfect color vision and I feel like I'm the opposite and when a monitor or screen is even the slightest bit off I can't help but try to fix it 😂
What if somebody hit 5-7-9 notes?
@@leestrz4153 if your playing even somewhat fast bending every note just perfect would be savant level shit. Maybe possible but not even remotely practical especially if done on the fly like someone would have to if theyre accidentally sharp/flat in 1 or more strings (edit) also you can only bend up on guitar so if you're flat you would have to readjust every fingering as well as bend which adds a whole other level of complexity
I can tell the notes on a violin and piano, but if you were to get someone to play an acoustic and/or classical guitar I have to really think to determine what was being played.
"You're singing out of tune"
Me: "You just can't handle my spiciness"
For real real though. Check out this Annette Peacock track: ruclips.net/video/khdOMSmuFSo/видео.html
I usually just say I'm singing microtones 💁
Do you like jazz?
HAHAHAHAH :P
p r e t e n d i t s j a z z or r e p e t i t i o n l e g i t i m i z e s
Alternatively, you can just turn into a banana, if neither of them works.
"It's basically a fancy Buzzfeed article"
SAVAGE ^^
"We think this test might provide an indication of how well the participant could be expected to endure an evening of community musical theatre auditions."
😂
hahahha
the fact that u shared the link of the iq test broke their homepage .
@Turnips Harvard ain't know proper internet
@@johncenaplayingstarcraft9580 If they had known what they were looking for they would have seen it written on Adam Neely's window...I mean youtube channel
Yip
I got most of the way through before it said 'too many users' and kicked me off...
i was halfway through the test when it went down and kicked me out :/
"Fancy buzzfeed article"
I think that about sums it up.
Welcome to 90% all humanistic sciences
@@Mezurashii5 Ohhh boy, that's so wrong it hurts.
Especially since the framework that they used is an systematical empirical one. Their method is stem-scientific so to speak (which is the completely wrong framework for doing something like this (I mean, there is not a great way to do something like this at all, because the idea is just stupid, but anyway)).
I got a 9 incher
To be fair, this is a flaw shared by the actual IQ test as well. IQ tests, whether musical or otherwise, don't effectively test your intelligence, they test your skill at taking IQ tests.
haha. he also hit the nail on the head like this when describing Whiplash as a "sports movie" :)
They definitely used "out of tune" to mean "dissonant" and that really gets on my nerves. Dissonant and out of tune aren't the same and they get conflated so often.
no they didn't
@@keyboard_toucher Yes they did. I never saw the score sheet so I can assume the possibility of purposeful dissonance of written half-step chords and 1/4 tones. "In-tune" is a relative term. If I'm tuned to a Dm chord and you are tuned to Em11 who is "out of tune " ?
I'm pretty sure that this wording was used so that the average person would understand what to do even though it might technically be a sloppy way of putting it.
@@coryrad9575 i dont think so, some of them sounded microtonal.
@@coryrad9575 I also disagree with you, sorry. Allowing for any and every possible chord, and even for sliding up to notes, etc., there was another test about whether the singer placed the note more "in tune" (as Adam said, in 12-note equal temperament". The actual music played and sung in each exampe was the same notationally, so chords didn't come into it. Nobody sang so far off that they clearly intended to mess with the harmonies for dissonant interest. Some clearly couldn't sing in tune; others I suspect were deliberately singing slightly off for the test.
Hello Adam, sorry a little bit correction there:
5:44 is actually Balinese gamelan, they are usually played more 'fiery' than their Javanese counterpart.
But from all types of gamelans that I know (Javanese, Balinese and Sundanese) they each do have their own tuning system (and scales) that don't quite match western's 12 tones system.
But there do exist gamelan sets that especially made and tuned to match western's 12 (ie. to play with orchestra/band etc).
*Source: me native Indonesian 😁
i agree with u
*band playing a song . . .*
*member 1:* hey bro you’re out of tune
*adam:* [clears throat] um, i’m sorry but i believe you mean that he’s not locked to the grid of the very Euro-centric 12 tone equal temperament
Band playing a song ...
Member 1:Hey bro you're off the beat.
Adam: I don't want to get too philosophical,but what's a beat?
there's an old saying: Bjork doesn't sing out of tune. Bjork explores microtonality.
Orchestra playing out of tune
Me: looks over at the viola section with look of disappointment
Violist: what even is a key?
I’m saving these for next band practice
So basically complaining about being out of tune is racist
I think this test is more relevant to sound/audio engineers rather than an average musician.
And even then only the unambitious ones.
Totally, listening to the band drift from the click track, auto tuning the vocal etc.
Not really! most skilled orchestra players can get a 100 on this
It's sounds to me like most you guys are just embarrassed
Semi agree. It would have been more for an engineer If they would have asked to guess which frequency is being lowered or risen in a mix, which track has reverb, or which track is compressed.
Each time I come back to see you, my respect increases.
You actually have a lot to give. That's exceptional.
Honestly appreciate, your appreciation for all music styles…
When I got a chance to go to school for music… my friends from other cultures blew my mind.
Still not the most top dollar musician, but I definitely think it’s in our diversity of music that we can find such great inspiration!
Bruh the fact that I got a similar score to the Adam Neely tells me this doesn’t measure musical intelligence LOL
I blame that on his score was based on an average of a few skillful users has taken it, making the average being highly skilled, decreasing his value. Now a lot of average fans of him has taken the test, and decreased the skill value of the average, and therefore increased the score Adam has. ... or maybe not. The test isn't really that good.
same here
Do you play an instrument? If not, maybe now's the time. 😎 I got the same score as Adam, too, but I play an instrument (20 years of piano), so I was hoping my score would be similar, though his music theory knowledge surpasses mine by far.
JorgeOlmosMusic I do! I play violin and study music theory in high school
yeah i got 114, I'm 12
Broke: Beats on 1 and 3
Woke: Those notes aren't "off", they're "spicy"
Very true, offbeats are very common and cool.
@@david2618 they were on 2 and 4.
@@davidcottrell1308 I wasn't the one who mentioned which were offbeat, it was BARRR
@@davidcottrell1308 I think so too. But I admit it feels strange with this short snippet
Plenty of perceived offbeats in prog music used nowadays that actually create a synchronized whole.
I think there are plenty of beats and melodies in this test that could be used in prog music or avant garde stuff just fine.
When at 13 i took a MENSA test and came out in the top group, i realized that those tests in no way can measure intelligence as a whole (whichever definition we may have for intelligence) but only a person's attitude toward a very specific mental process. The same apply here: i scored slightly better than Adam and yet he is much more solid than me in most aspects of musical knowledge and, what matters most, in performing ability.
Taken for fun, there's no harm in such tests, but if we want to draw conclusive assessments on someone's intelligence or ability, those tests suck big time and are actually strongly discriminatory.
No surprise that most people in key positions in nations that heavily rely on those tests, are often just educated fools.
Reminds me of a Mark Twain quote, "I never let schooling interfere with my education".
Mensa tests are a total farce. They measure how many times you've taken Mensa tests, as you get progressively better at remembering the same problems, shapes and sequences you've meant before. Mostly a 70s thing, highly discredited now, just like Myers Briggs "personality" tests - no scientific basis, easy to rig (I have, several times), and only HR fall for the marketing.
how can you determine intelligence with intelligence ? you can only understand who is less intelligent than you. that's why those tests suck but probably work for the majority
Actually, professionally conducted IQ tests do measure the IQ pretty well. The mistake those "fools" make is to assume that things they are looking for is caused/more strongly correlated with the results of the test.
@veevyo Because the made up number ist defined by the test :)
I stumbled upon this video just out of curiosity and procrastination. I subscribed out of pleasure to find such a versed, intellectual and cited music conversation. And the moment you questioned eurocentrism in the test, I rushed to press the subscribe button.
Test:
PROTIP: Make sure the synth and the vocals are in the same key!!
I dumb. Can anyone explain this meme to me?
Whatever some guy left an angry comment on one of adam’s videos from like, a year ago, and adam responded in a later video, and the dude got memed
@@whatever6223 ruclips.net/video/JXfQsHT5c30/видео.html around 11:30
@@whatever6223 For this meme, there might be two options that are similar.
First option: It sometimes happens that after recording the synth has not the same tuning frequency as the vocals. (Adam has made a great video on tuning frequencies). So if you play them together, you will start noticing that something is weird about the music. That is, again, due to the fact that the synth is not in the same tuning as the vocals. For example, the synth can be tuned A=440 Hz and the guitar is tuned A=432 Hz. These 8Hz difference make a huge difference to the listener. It sounds off tuned.
Second option: The synth player and the vocal singers are stupid and play in different keys (e.g. one plays in a minor and one plays in e minor). It can sometimes be wanted but that's due to art purposes. So the point of the joke is that people make those mistakes quite often and they are stupid. You're welcome :)
@@crystalmik8410 no dude, check out the video I linked. It's from a real youtube comment
Adam Neely: It's basically a fancy BuzzFeed article.
Researchers: *sad husky noises*
*buzzfeed closing door sound effecT*
Why does this comment have 1.5 k likes and only 2 replies
I feel like this was a good test, tho. As a retired dancer, I knew my strenght was going to be Beat Alignment. It was my highest score, beating Adam by far. And I'm starting to enter the world of music producing, melody is being the most difficult part for me, and my score on Melodic Discrimination was abysmal, only 86. It trully reflected what I perceived of my music skills.
@@ditorres9884 I think the big issue he was raising was scope. It’s a good test in the scope of the music they were choosing, it’s just not all music applies to popular western systems. And the researchers were extrapolating proficiency with western musical tradition with overall musical intelligence, which isn’t the case.
@@haikal9329 man i hope theyre busy practicing!
I'm very self-aware about my musical skills (since I started playing an instrument fairly late) and got super bummed out about my test results on this. Their "this might predict your ability to actually play an instrument!" sentence seems custom-tailored to kick me in the shins, too.
I wouldn't worry about it. The melody test is more of a memory test than a musical ability test and some of the tuning test entries sounded better in the mix with a bit of detuning. You'll be fine!
This test didn’t illustrate the ability to make or play music at all. You play music for enjoyment only. As you get better, you get more satisfaction. I don’t care if your playing “mary had a little lamb” or a Vivaldi piece. It about that inner joy. Don’t stop. I stopped for a year, after 48 years of playing, and my joy started to leave me. Don’t EVER let that happen.
BTW: The only way I was able to pass this test is because of my long love affair with music. Started when I was about five. Love all kinds of music but rap music is an oxymoron.
@@Unborn-Lives-Matter Thanks for the kind words of encouragement, man. Sometimes it's all it's needed to keep someone going. Cheers!
Don’t let this test discourage you! In my Humble Violinist Opinion this was not a good test in the first place, but there’s a LOT more to bring a good musician than the three things they’re measuring here.
@@Unborn-Lives-Matter everything was going great and then you had to say that rap music is an oxymoron 😔
I think your right in your assessment that the tone of the beep affects the timing perception because it creates an obvious dissonance, albeit not relating to the beat. It became easier once I consciously ignored the tone.
Test: *beep* *beep* *beep* *beep*
Fletcher: not quite my tempo
i said that going through the test lmao
*Throws the score to the screen*
"I just threw a chair at your monitor, computer."
LOL
*throws music stand at comments section*
me: the concept of an absolute intelligence quotient in reference to any subject will inherently be biased to the culture that created it
also me: heehee i got 116
-get rekt i got 119-
i mean... uhhhhh what he said
@Anthony Lopez you should join musical mensa dude. do what all the normal mensa people do with their inflated sense of self. nothing.
can there not be ppl advocating for race realism in my notifications please? thank you
Hey I remember your channel lol. you kinda made mistakes too lol
@@Patricia_Taxxon big fan of your videos
I can't believe this test comes from a university. The one who can tell whether random notes match a grid of pitch and beat perfectly and remember them like a machine has a high musical intelligence? What about feeling the music? What about knowing what to do in order to achieve a certain impact? What about being able to create and understand tension and release? What about creating elegant chord progressions? What about creating memorable and meaningful melodies? What about understanding relations between notes? etc etc
They think music is "sound" :). Typical "scientists" !
Adam Neely is a very charitable person and I appreciate his diplomacy. I thought the pitch test was B.S. and Adam was far too kind.
they repeatedly tell us that it is a mere hypotheses and they suspect it is inaccurate in actually evaluating musical skill so while all those etc.'s are entirely valid i dont think its fair to assume theyre enforcing the test as some ultimate standardized meter
It’s just an ear test. Try not to over complicate it.
@@mellot00th They literally say that they believe that this test could predict if someone is going to be good while playing an instrument or singing when they show you your scores. I'm not saying you're wrong, maybe in the more academic part where they describe this test in more depth they do say what you mentioned. But they's a clear contradiction in the stuff they tell and sometimes they do think this is solid.
Sounds like another instance where scientists have attempted to quantify some skill without actually consulting people who have specific experience with the skill they're measuring... disappointing. Thank you for highlighting the Eurocentric nature of their approach and doing the work to find papers discussing the implications of this bias.
Plus, none of it translates to actually playing or mixing. It's so abstracted away from the point of music, that it no longer has to do with it at all. It's a logic test. Music is not about logic. It's about context. That's why some of the ugliest chords turn so beautiful in Jazz. They're given context and they're part of a bigger story.
Well said, spot on.
@@manictiger yes! Almost all of the “wrong” ones sounded better to me, so I quickly switched from trying to listen to what works well and just started listening for what sounded boring.
"I don't want to knock on it too much."
"BuzzFeed article."
That's not too much! It's just the truth!
"Fancy BuzzFeed article" shouldn't be knocking too much.
> Adam Neely: or even more far out like Javanese gamelan music?
> *proceeds to show balinese gamelan.*
Yup!
I think he said Japanese! :P
...or best case scenario, pronounced Java like javelin.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one that heard Japanese!
@@Edd030427 :P
Balinese* lol
I love your final thoughts Adam, thank you for sharing this!
I ordered some curried chicken the other day while in India and the server asked me how I would like it prepared and I told her "extra out of tune please".
Beat alignment:
Me: Were you rushing or dragging??
Not my tempo.
One two thr👋
One two thr👋
*throws chair at head*
I get the feeling the key change one was testing "how well can you remember a really long sequence of arbitrary notes that don't make any melodic sense after hearing it just once".
I agree with this. I just woke up and am very drowsy and my key change score is significantly lower than my other 2 scores just because I couldn't remember 3 melodies. I had about a 17 point difference average from my other 2 sections compared to the key change section.
I couldn't memorize those long sequences either but the odd one sounded off somehow
they did shit like that in my normal iq test. i think that's one of the better parts of this test actually. it doesn't have the problem the beat and pitch tests have where being a more experienced musician matters more than having a high aptitude for understanding music. if you have played an instrument, you will do way better on the beat and pitch tests because you practice those things to play an instrument. remembering lines you just heard and hearing if the next is different isn't a thing you practice normally, so it's better for testing the functionality of the brain when it comes to music rather than just skill. that's just my opinion.
@@piesmuggler7268 I don't think it's that different from transcribing a piece of music. Granted you can rewind as many times as you like, slow down, you've probably heard the piece of music before, etc. etc., but fundamentally transcribing does sharpen up your musical memory. If you can picture in your head playing the notes on a keyboard I think that is evidence that there is skill involved in this one too imo. The 'not making musical sense' part is what makes it hard I think.
They use 3d audio for the virtual piano on that, so lower notes are further left. Oddly, when I stopped trying to remember the melody and just tried to remember the location the notes were coming from relative to each other it was much, much easier. I have ADHD, so I could just about remember two of them to compare, trying to compare three was impossible. But I instantly felt it when I heard a note come from a relative location different from the others.
This is interesting. It's seem to be largely a test of memory and positions of tones and rhythms relative to each other. It's been years that I've been studying music. In the western tradition, we've been raised on octaves but that's simply a convention.
I totally agree with your commentary on a narrow set of standards being used to apply benchmarks for measuring aptitude, particularly coming from a Jazz music perspective (the 1+3 thing threw me off a lot too). As a pop musician who lives on a click, however, I find myself having to set aside a lot of preconceived notions about how I hear music, and instead, have to try to stick myself into the situation where everything is riding on the click. So in this test I tried to get as outside of my preconceived musical ideology as possible (I missed the first question though) and simply tried to listen for a whether the click was ahead or behind the pulse of the drums/bass/strings, etc. I'm not sure what I'm doing that makes me able to do that-- maybe the producer in me is just thinking "ignore your personal feelings, just stick to the click/tuning" and that's how I'm able to get through the test.
All that aside, even though I scored 125 on the beat section, I didn't like this click because it's a) not percussive enough (sine tones without an attack and fast decay are bad for defining time) b) because it's not a fast decay, you sometimes can't tell whether it's hitting the beat before or right on with the rest of the instrumentation.
That was funny: my wife and I are both musicians and we did the test alongside with you. At the first "beat" test, we both went "yeah, the second one", like you did. It turned out all three of us were wrong. Then we commented about which beat makes the music feel better... and then you said the exact same thing.
Maybe because we love Lo-fi music
In contrast, I'm nowhere near the level of musician Adam is, but I got more answers correct, and sometimes faster, than Adam, despite definitely not having a higher musical IQ. I think it purely signifies my listening and musicianship is closer to typical Western pop than his; I don't have as much JAZZ flowing through my veins.
It was just cuz of what he said, you weren't expecting it, so you forgot. I thought that one was pretty easy
Musician here too. I went for the second one too!
The beep test is wild. I closed my eyes and tapped along to it, and got the right answer each time because I realized there was a sinking in my gut on the wrong one. Really strange that my body had a visceral reaction to the beat.
synesthete here, i feel it like this too but even more so i feel it being off somehow "spatially" (literally as spatial awareness like how you can judge distances between objects with your eyes closed)
i felt something strange in my ear and the sound sounded so distorted
Does pain count as synesthesia? Not physical pain. But intense discontent when the beat or tune does not match. It's worse than Cilantro.
I got that with the out of tune stuff too, the gut reaction.
@@kindramusic Same. I just went by which felt "wrong". I sucked totally and gave up on the beat one. Hey, I'm a clarinet player, not a drummer! (My daughter is a drummer, I should have her take the test.)
Nice to see you taking the test, thanks for sharing. I took it a few times (at some time got a little obsessed) and at times results varied wildly/widely (take your pick), including both less and more than what we got when we played now, not sure how reliable it is (with respect to variance). Anyway, I think the singing in or off tune test makes a little more sense because of (mostly) having a 12 TET accompaniment in harmonic tonality. Wouldn't be so much if only the leading sung melody were used - some things wouldn't sound out of tune to me for example even if a drone were played for pitch reference (I'd think, it's dissonant, but so what, doesn't make it wrong), so maybe to that extent it's Eurocentric, or rather, Western - centric. Not to mention, like you said, that some some sound samples are so hazy that you can barely hear the voice, it's almost like a whisper. Anyway I like hearing the sample music, a lot was not even familiar to me, so I've played sometimes just for that :D
I think the tune comparison test is quite different from the in/out of tune and on beat/tempo/phase lag tests because while the first involves pattern recognition, the other two are more absolute with respect to a reference, so minute differences are easier to overlook (or to the contrary, some may say that it's just off and that much more jarring, so you know that it's not on). I tend to perform best with the tune comparison test (not bad with the others either) so maybe I'm better at pattern recognition. Maybe because I think of music as being made of beautiful, aesthetic, moving sound patterns. I'm happy with that. Although I sometimes felt strongly that I was right and when it showed me 'incorrect' it was faulty, but also felt ambivalent about it being mechanical and possibly not lying.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter, I think. This is nice as a game, maybe even a somewhat useful challenge, but shouldn't be used to measure your ability. We shouldn't rely on it or anything, and certainly not put down by it, heck no. But if we happen to do well, let's feel good, because why not? ;)
To me, it sounded like the beats weren't only just delayed, but actually at different rates. Like, the interval between each beat would be different in the first example compared to the second example. So it's not just about delay or offset… it's actually about tempo.
Title of video should be "Man on Internet Rages at Facebook Quiz."
I made 10 incorrect answers and was about to say "ok I'm totally worthless" when I understood that you have to choose a more out of tune melody, not more in tune 😂
in this case will we correlate lower normal iq with lower musical iq?
Andrei Ven I think reading and comprehension would be lower, iq usually doesn’t cover reading.
@@isaacfullerton well, it implies it, doesn't it? but does music iq implies being able to read sheet music? idk, you may be right
LOL same happened to me, I actually noticed it but somehow I still mistakenly picked the "better" one
saaaaaame
Your point about culture being highly relevant and this test just focusing on western style music is very crucial: I remember vividly being asked to a party with some sudanese exchange students - they were really impressed with me - since I, as a former drummer, had no problem clapping sextuplets while dancing to 2/4 music - which was their "thing". I remember going home from that party thinking that culture is so much more diverse than it's normally represented. You would have had to be a drummer or experienced that culture all your life to do that. I have tried getting musician friends to do a 4/4 8th note thing with one hand and sextuplets with the other - nobody can do that; but this whole party had no problem doing that with their whole body - for hours. :D
You're quite right about the Western-centric thing, especially with tests 1 and 3. I've played piano in a salsa band (Afro-Cuban), and the variance of the beat "lag"/"push" between instruments was extremely subtle and took a lot of practice to grow accustomed to.
Ngl, my mom’s probably completely tone deaf but she’s also a middle eastern immigrant. When I mentioned the first study to her and insinuated that she’s not as tone deaf as she thinks, she lit up and started talking to me about the music she listened to before emigrating.
RIP
That's because this day really proves nothing other than like what Adam said it's a buzzfeed ear training quiz
On the other hand, my dad could not carry a tune in a bucket, and he was raised in a Western European society. My mother, on the other hand, was probably responsible for my musical aptitude.
@@Suire1000 musical aptitude isn't genetic it's Environmental and also what you personally like. On top of the fact making such an assertion would mean that you have an objective Universal standard to compare someone's capabilities to and that simply does not exist
@Carl Panzram Yes and No. Well yes because our genetics are literally the building blocks of our being that doesn't mean that our genetics have encoded within it beat perception or you can interpret genetics this way that also functions from the idea that g-factor is genetic when it's never even been proven to exist so either way the still fundamentally flawed bc it assumes a lot of things and even if let's just say that you're right that there's a genetic component to everything that doesn't mean we can use genetics like an answer key or that that this is the way to express whatever we think our genetics have in them. Like our genetics don't explain everything they just don't and I see why people would think that's the case but a lot of times we underestimate how much environment plays into things and also forget that what we consider better is based on a lot of subjective Construction
In the second test: you don't need to remember the first one at all after comparing it to the second. If the first and second are the same, the third is the odd one out (just listen to confirm). If the first two are different, then one of them must be the odd one. Compare second to third. If they're the same, the first is the odd one out. If they're different, the second one must be the odd one out
Haha, yes I used the same logic some people may call it cheating but I call it common sense.
That's another proof of how this and similar tests actually fail (!) at testing what they claim to test, testing in reality something completely different.
This is a problem that Adam Neely didn't mention, but a lot of tests really measure test-taking tactics, and makes the results content-independent.
That was the method I was instinctually using until he talked about having to remember the first one, and then my brain froze and I started getting the answers wrong.
@@guitarbrother1234 100% with you. IQ tests test how good you are at repeatedly taking IQ tests. Nothing more.
I like your thought process and impartiality!
Amazing, I had a higher musical IQ than Adam Neeley!!
*grabs bass sits down failing on Seven Nation Army
hahaha same
Ethnomusicologist here. What a great video - I'll definitely use it in my classes. Also in case Adam sees this comment: that's a Balinese gamelan you have in the clip, not a Javanese gamelan. Both have interesting tuning systems, though!
I think you'd confirm that they have interesting tuning systems in which each gamelan has its own internally consistent tuning of instruments of fixed pitch that is different from that of every other gamelan (unless someone started standardizing that when I wasn't looking). My DMA is in flute performance, but my mother was a well-known anthropologist specializing in Malaysia and I did enough study and listening over the years to be able to teach an upper-divisional course on Southeast Asian music.
@@michaelladerman2564 Surely not THE Carol Laderman? How cool!
@@fabe61 The same.
I notice that in the tuning test, they used a lot of 90s genres and even had some radio-head-ish pieces in there. That amuses me because a lot of that stuff is very intentionally out of tune, or uses harmonization that doesn't quite match up, in addition to leaning on mixing conventions where everything kinda runs together to make, for a lack of a better term, a "soup" of sound. It's clear the test is trying to throw the listener off.
Spot on. Thom Yorke used vocal dissonance so superbly
Yeah. I have a choral background, so I had a hard time discriminating the tuning for the rough voices they used since I'm used to more clear/sonorous vocals.
I thought so too
that doesn't matter at all. Your quest was to pick a piece that has a vocal more out of tune than the other, having two to chose from. Simple, doesnt require considering any of things you mentioned.
@@jpaslawski93 No, but it does. I like that kinda sound so I can't tell if it's supposedly "out of tune"
I got everything right and I can't even read notes. I just produce music by ear. Love the content! Keep it going ♪
I took the test while you were taking it and got a substantial amount right, the best test was the most challenging
"And even if your musical skills could use some work, rest assured: as far as we know, many people who have difficulty making music still enjoy listening to music very much."
Wow. That's the second most condescending thing I've read or heard all week.
Its such a dumb statement too. You don't have to be physically good at playing music to have good musical ideas nor do you even have to be good at music theory to make good music.
that's just what unskilled musicians tell themselves
First most condescending thing?
@@hemIocked A coworker's code review comment.
@@pvanukoff Lmao if we were friends irl we would get along very well
Melody Test in a nutshell:
Practice 1: 4 notes in the same scale
Practice 2: 84 notes in no discernible key
Me: wtf
🤣
You can only instantly memorize a long sequence (over 7-8) if it's composed of already learned sub-patterns like a diatonic scale, often heard licks, or similar. So, designing an unbiased test is practically impossible.
@@orbik_fin hence the whole point of why this test and ones like it are bullshit....
@@orbik_fin also what's your sourcing on that?
5:44 is actually Balinese Gamelan, my Dear Friend.
Kind of new to watching your videos. WOW... really insightful and thought provoking. thanks!
Yea I’m pretty sure as a drummer my musical iq is a negative number
:D
:(
Same here lol. I only know rhythm related stuff. Do we drummers count as real musicians or not?
I feel you, brother. RLRR to you too.
Lol. Obligatory drummer jokes have now been preempted.
Interestingly, in the example where you complained about beats 1 & 3,
I actually heard it as 2 & 4 and completely shifted the whole song 1 beat back.
LOL me too! 😂 I just assumed...
Same. I tried relistening to hear the drum pattern, but I couldn't really hear it though the beep track.
ME TOO!!!
Same. I've listened to it about 30 times now and my brain won't let those beeps be on 1 and 3.
I first did the test on my own and distinctively thought it was funny they put the beeps on 2 and 4.
I'd love to hear Adam's explanation of this in a q&a!
Very informative! Thank you for your knowledge and sensibility. Always intriguing and well stated. The Ipanema…. Episode was very extensive and well done
Thanks for your honesty, Adam.
Also their site must have gotten a Neely Hug of Death because the game just won't load haha
Adam being mad at the beats on one and three
Me: *nervously sweats in German*
(there is this stereotype in Germany that Germans will always clap on one and three, no matter the kind of music...)
Having attended a Blues Brothers performance in Germany, I can confirm this
Same here. Immediatly thought of Musikantenstadl
Why is that, compared to other European cultures?
I have some German blood in me, so that helps explain why I only clap on 1 and 3.
I am just speculating here, but I believe that's because of the heavy influence of Polka Music, where the bass horn plays or accents 1 & 3. A lot of central American music has that same time feel in their songs which is derived from that same influence.
Great video! I really appreciated the cultural considerations you highlighted.
I love your perception and information about other cultures perspective on music intelligence. You are good with your analysis!✊🏿💯‼️
~me while taking test~
this test is unfair and not at all an accurate representation of musical talent
~me after scoring higher than Adam~
this test is THE unquestioned scientific authority on musical IQ
i mean im a potato at music and scored only 8 point below adam
@@Rodoadrenalina Same here - I got 95, I should be WAY lower than that.
~me after scoring exactly the same total score as Adam~
this test is inconclusive
I play guitar since the last six months and I score just below Ada, so....
He takes me driving and then leaves me in the caaaaar
Can we just take a moment to admire the incredible midi sound in the melody test.. Why did they not take the time to make it sound maybe just a bit better?
I like how you recoiled during the second part's dissonant notes the same way I always do too. X)
*scored 85 on beat perception
*Remembers that I'm a guitar player
"Yeah story checks out".
139 Beat Perception. 98 melodic. Yep. Still a bass player.
@@32pritch I feel you on that one lmfao
@@32pritch Same but 118 and 83
"what if there was indian karnatic music, would we be able to tell?"
Me who grew up listing to indian music his whole life: No
me (who has had 7+ years singing karnatic): yeee.... NOPE xD
Lol
I grew up with Japanese folk music from Okinawa.
Both probably have the same stuff.
@@SlyHikari03 not really... both are very different
Wow! I scored exactly the same as you did on the first test. I got a little lost in the second test for the reasons you described I suppose. I had a lot of trouble deciding on the 3rd test but I did better than I thought I would. This was a lot of fun!
This made me think of the music teacher that supposedly flunked Brian Wilson.
A bandmate once commented on how I tended to bend the strings while playing lead lines. Later I read more about music theory, specifically natural intervals, and then realized *why* I did, and why such playing tended to sound "eastern," without having been aware of the theory behind at the time. And later came to realize why I have an affinity for chords with missing thirds.
Wow, that was the most long-winded expression of "\m/" I've ever heard.
kidding.
@@jessejordache1869 Ha ha, good one!
clearly my IQ isn't high enough to work out how to start the quiz
@@robjobse8860 (due to this video I think) the servers are too overloaded. it just kicked me out
Hahaha
spill the lava Nah we’re just too small brain
Did anyone else feel like some of the more in tune vocals, even if in tune, still just... sounded worse for the part?
I think the one that sounded like Nirvana (sort of) sounded better with the vocals "more" out of tune ... And #7, first choice sounds better to me.
Yes, the question was; which one is MOST out of tune, indicating the possibility of both being out of tune. I also noticed that and made some mistakes there because of that
Y'up, particularly the more Indie sounding "Spacey" type music. I got a 112 and I went to college for music, so now I feel like shit. : (
i got above average on the other 2 parts but i got a fuckin 66 on the 1st part because I ended up having to guess a bit. I've never listened to the songs before and alot of the pitch changed ones i felt still "went" with the music as well as the ones that were apparently in tune. or literally just sounded the same. idk if its because i listen to alot of indie music (...and weezer) and weird vocal tunings are kinda normal, or if im just a big dumb dumb. im gonna try retaking it later
edit: bruh i just retook the first part and i got 12/15?? on my first try it was like 6/15?
edit 2: ok i finished the retake and i got 110 on the first part but then i got basically average on the 3rd part. this test ain't really that consistent (maybe im not consistent which is more likely)
What is average on this test? That's another thing I didn't get. It says 85% score between 85 and 115, and 95% score between 75 and 130. I can't comprehend that.
Thank you for the video. I just took the test and it really bummed me out when I didn't score as high as I thought I would on the second and third parts.
super cool video, fun to play along. I clearly need to work on my rhythm. Glad to hear you call out the "western only" perspective. Would love to hear you address the scales used in Ethiopian jazz music like Admas and Hailu Mergia-- they have a couple that are fantastic, but just untouched in the western world
Loved that you picked this apart.
I’m a classical bass trombonist, playing a lot of new and quirky works, movie, and video game music. But I grew up in jazz bands, because they were so much fun and taught me where classical cannot.
So I agree with you about the jazz example (even a couple more examples, I believe): why the hell 1 & 3? Omega YIKES
Thanks for your video, man.
I personally appreciate that you studied both jazz and classical! There seems to sometimes be a disconnect between the two, so it's nice to hear of people that grab from both
There are lots of styles of music where we emphasize the offbeat. But that's why we call it the _offbeat._ Because it is literally not on the beat. That's why that music works the way it does in the first place.
You can clap on 2 and 4 all you want, but that doesn't put the *beat* there. Indeed if the beat were there, you'd immediately switch to clapping on 1 and 3 instead. Because that is the whole point. That you don't want to be clapping on the beat. You specifically want to be clapping against it.
In brief, they put the beat on 1 and 3 because that's where the beat actually *is.*
In a lot of western music - especially rock, jazz, and pop - the emphasis of 2 and 4 is actually an emphasis on the down beat; 2 and 4 just happens to be the down beats of common 4/4 time
In these genres, it's culturally agreed upon (or hammered into jazz scholars) to focus on the down beats and only move to accenting the up beats (1 and 3 in this case) if you want to throw in some extra spice - say in the last measure of a bridge or something.
That's why the accent on 1 and 3 was so jarring to Adam and op: they're so accustomed to 2 and 4 being the down beat that 1 and 3 felt essentially like it was being rushed a 1/4th beat
Hope this helps! Just got off work so sorry if it's rough in some places
After taking the test, on top of the obvious eurocentrism, I feel like some of the clips are just so goddamn long that they're not even really testing the musical parameters they say they are, just like, raw, cognitive memory. I also think for the beat test, they should play a measure with no beeps each clip so you can get the tempo. Just throwing you into it is really jarring. The fact that this test is incredibly flawed as a metric for an individual's "musicality" is clear when you consider I got a higher score than...Adam...and he's obviously leagues ahead of me and the general public in terms of musical knowledge & ability. So people who take this test: it's a fun distraction but I wouldn't put too much credence into what result you get.
Agreed. It seems like its mostly just aural short term memory
Another criticism is that as a classically trained musician, I scored quite poor (average, but poor as a musician) on beats. I did average on mistuning, but I absolutely nailed the melody with a score of 130, and I imagine a percussionist in a jazz band would have the opposite of mine sort of. So, this test is in no way reliable.
Yes I agree the melody section in particular was hard on memory having 3 clips. If 1 and 2 are different you have to keep both in memory to compare against 3, as well as trying to think how the key change would affect it. I got 111 in the test, the melody questions were the worst scoring for me but I do wish beat perception was better with drums being my main instrument.
colorsofsound as a classically trained pianist, who had since picked up jazz percussion and singing, I did very well on mistuning, pretty well on beats, and poor (like genuinely worse than most people) on the melody
I was thinking the exact same thing. my STM is pretty shit, especially under pressure, and while I was doing this i was like wait, I don't *remember* what the last tune sounded like.
Just came back and watched this a second time (like 3 years later) and absolutely smashed the first 2 tests. Can't wait to receive my master's degree in the mail 👊🤙 HOWEVER, no matter HOW MANY TIMES I replay 9/15 in test 3 (12:28), the second example sounds considerably more bang-on to me! Anyone else get this?
Yes, but don't take any notice of me as I took the test and scored 64, ("You did as well as or better than 0.82% of people"), so I'm a certified Musical Moron!
They both sounded close, but the middle section of the first one was a little off.
lol I loved how you used the test music in the transitions.
"Answer these simple questions about beeping and we'll predict how good you are at playing the violin with 100% accuracy! (Yes, it really works!)"
DREAMCRASH music teachers hate him!
Sacrilegious. Ling Ling would not approve
I play the violin and the drums. I kinda failed the beeping test with like 3 or 4 mistakes, guess I'm never going to make it as a musician lol
@@chase4557 No worries, that will not impact the enjoyment you can get out of listening to music!
@@jesselandreth4497 Ling Ling would practice 40 hours every day by waking up 16 hours before the day starts.
My musical IQ is 69
*This feels like a win to me*
nice
nice
nice
LMAO
Anything above 0 I would consider a success for myself
"Which one is more out of tune?"
They both suck but I'd rather hear the one that's sharp
I agree 100% on the presenters assessment of this test, having said that, I am quite tickled that I was able to keep pace with him and even got a couple that he missed (as well as missed one or two that he answered correctly) 😉.
I absolutely loved how you maintained the whole time that this is an incredibly Euro-centric and narrow test. I still so much enjoyed trying to guess along with you the whole time.
But maybe this design flaw of the test is not such a big deal. Think about it that way: "real" IQ supposedly measures g-score, and the idea behind g-score is that "everything in intelligence correlates with everything" - your math abilities correlate with spatial abilities, or even vocabulary (even though this correlation is rather weak, because there are factors like your age or socio-economic status). So supposedly you can measure IQ even with an English vocabulary test - but, obviously, you won't give that that test to a Japanese person, or a 6-year old kid. But it will predict your g-score better than chance.
Maybe it's the same with this test - you SHOULDN'T give it to someone who didn't have exposure to Western musical tradition, and there are better ways to discern your musical ability; but it's still better than chance.
To be fair to them, throat singing, didgeridoo and drum circles (without even mentioning arabian tunings) tend to be more of a feel/hear musical experience. So they don't really have a need for anything to be written down. Most of the people who started this craze of "ethnic musicology" where british people who wanted to try to document the local songs they where hearing while overseas. So making it about "euro-centric" (usually tied to "western imperialist") argumentation seems rather dishonest from my perspective.
It's kind of like being a western flute player and learning music for the shamisen, you need to learn a completely alien system of annotation (at least from a western perspective). But it would be easy for me to turn around and say "I cant play japanese folk music because it is so japan-centric." This is how I feel when I see people saying "western music theory" is coming from a "euro-centric" perspective (where else would it have came out of? these where the people who created it).
Unlike a lot of these guarded musial cultures (e.g. Japan and India), anyone can pick up a book and learn can partake in "western music theory." That is what makes it a good thing, Not a "force for evil" as is usually implied.
TL;DR: Until these complainers come up with their own system of musical notation, Dreams of some sort of unified "universalist global music theory" are worthless. Although I have a feeling if one was ever invented, it would be a lot like pop music. Take the "good" bits water down the rest. 1-size-fits all is really just a bad shoe.
@@ifiwasyouiwouldntbe I think mostly people criticize the idea that western music theory, tuning and music or whatever is presumably thought to be universal.
Criticizing this doesn't mean we should try to create "global music tuning or theory" and what would even be point of this?
dismay'd the thought of making a “global music theory” sounds headache inducing to even try to outline
@@dismayd3955 Yes that was my point. It is "universal." Anyone can learn "western music theory" (granted access to information).
Where as to even attempt to transcribe certain music you have to go to that place, and learn it from a teacher the same way they do. Then transcribe it into a paradigm so other people could even understand.
To criticize this is pretty pathetic, clearly they are interested in learned about other cultures musical traditions, not shoving them into a box. (The box is the best way they have to explain it to other people.)
I guess my question to you would be, if we dismantle western music, tuning and theory. (Because that is usually what it takes to change an industrial standard.) Then what do you have in place as an alternative?
or is this a cringe "woke" thing about "acknowledging" that people who never "did" something "could have" done it better than the people who actually did it? Because then there isn't really a conversation here.
That second test is really hard if you struggle with working memory. Especially if you have ADHD.
as a person with adhd, yes.
Yeah, i was lost when they got longer haha
Well, a regular IQ test is prolly also harder with adhd i imagine
@@bruceboom7378 surprisingly not the case. I actually score highly on generalized IQ tests, as do many who have ADHD.
Yes, it's hopelessly conflated with long-sequence memory testing. It would be better if they gave you three buttons to play the pieces as many times as you wanted to. It would still test the abilty to distinguish between the transpositions.
Thanks for being open minded and going against the grain, Adam.
This is really fun, and an entirely untrained person who has a feeling they have "good ear" my answers almost entirely matched yours lol I love this and I love that I'll learn about non European musical ideals on your channel
It's fun in the same way that "wHiCh fRieNdS chAraCter ArEyOU?" tests are, but it's pretty audacious of them to try to claim that it's indicative of "Musical Skill" lol
I am pleased that people use the word audacious
@@bonniejunk I'm glad you had the audacity to say that
haaaa someone got a 72
Sometimes, I preferred the "wrong" solution over the correct one, especially when the vocals were more on the flat side. Overall, it's a fun little test without any deeper meaning.
Yes and that is a very interesting topic. Most musicians agree that sharper = clearer and flatter = warmer
That's not what the question was asking though, it's not "which do you prefer", it's being able to perceive one as off pitch, and one as on pitch.
@@The16thninja But that's just the point. The ability to discern which is more "on pitch" isn't correlative to someone's ability to make music.
@@braveheart1320 I don't think that entirely follows. Being able to accurately perceive when something is and isn't on-pitch could help you determine while making music when it is exactly that you want to go off pitch, when you want to go back on pitch, and especially when doing improv determine when you need to adjust yourself to match the rest of the band.
@@braveheart1320 Actually it absolutely is correlative to one's ability to make music, as a matter of fact, it's pretty important. There's a difference between a conscious decision to go off pitch for the sake of a song, and not being able to match pitch.
I very much enjoy your being so reflective and educated and at the same time culturally conscious of music in general and musical traditions in particular with regard to this kind of musical "aptitude" test here. I guess the take away for me here is how far reaching a thing like "cultural imperialism" can go as this test could very well turn out to be a greatly traumatizing experience to, say, a super gifted young person who is simply too advanced already to still get to conform to these highly normatizing, if not oppressive pseudo-standards.
It was fun, though, to witness the examples they present here, particularly the "mean" metronome beep on the one and three beat as they played it above an apparently heavily swung Jazz beat, which typically follows a 2 and 4 downbeat. I very much enjoyed your thoughts and analysis segments, which I largely concur with. Fun and very educating, as always! (I wish I could express my gratitude more substantially than just cheerleading.... Should there come a time that I can I'll live up to that)
I learned both western (Suzuki style) and Carnatic violin, but never got into the theory part of the music. I would love to see a video where you describe the differences from a theory perspective.
Thanks for the awesome content!!!
In theory IQ is supposed to be stable over time, however all the "skills" tested here stike me as highly trainable ... mmh
Iq is not supposed to be stable. Dosen´t make the test any better though
In Asian countries it isn't uncommon to train for IQ tests. So there's that.
Originally, the IQ test was to let teachers know how skilled the 6-year-olds were. In France. The theory of measuring G is pretty suspect. And most IQ tests today corrolate with your wealth, or how much you've read, or how many IQ tests you've taken.
Well in theory IQ is a load of rubbish anyway.
A lot of IQ test skills are trainable - and as already mentioned, Binet's original goal was to identify kids who needed extra help to raise their scores - not to uncover some innate unchangeable quality of the individual.
“Not gonna say this test is dumb but... this test is dumb”.
Agreed!
Thanks, for analyzing this. Confirms to me, why I'm subscribed to you.
123 baby! Woot! Very cool test. I'm glad I checked out this video. New sub here.
After taking the test and reading the short text about the research objective of the study, I feel like the test actually fits the research question quite well: Determining whether having practiced musical instruments over a period of time improves some specific musical abilities.
The only problem is the way they try to advertise the test as a "musical IQ" (probably in order to get a bigger sample of people who feel intrigued to try it?). An IQ is usually thought to be universally applicable to many different cultures (which unfortunately also "normal" IQ tests often fail to do), so setting European music characteristic as a standard is definitely problematic.
Also, pitch and rhythm are things that can be learned and then practiced quite well (which actually is the premise of the entire study, right?). That makes the term "IQ" even less appropriate, because IQ measurements are supposed to be more stable and basically measure cognitive abilities instead of trained skills (although obviously many typical IQ tasks can be practiced as well).
All in all - cool study, and I got some feedback on the effect my music lessons in Western instruments had on my perception and skills surrounding Western music. Definitely not an IQ, but nice to know!
I would agree that it achieves its goal. I've spent the vast majority of my musical practice on non-melodic percussion, but also a decent amount various melodic instruments along the way. I was way above average in beat alignment and mistuning perception, but I absolutely tanked melodic discrimination. Which makes sense, because I have spent roughly 0% of my time playing music transposing to different keys, and all of it either attempting to play on beat or tune my drums (or attempt to tune a whole drumline). I have been attempting to sing some recently and my ear for my own voice is absolutely awful compared to my ear for consonance/dissonance in music, so perhaps that also affected my scores in some way.
I think you summed it up very nicely! I too think the promotion as a "Musical IQ Test" is misleading. Currently there is a longitudinal study carried out, that is - among other things - examining the relationship between these tests and practicing a musical instrument (longgold.org).
The test are constantly developed by D. Müllensiefen, P. M. C. Harrison and others and maybe we will see a more cultural diverse version in the future. For those who are interested:
link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-019-01225-1@
nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30318-8
nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03586-z
I think when they used the term 'IQ', they knew to add a cultural bias, since that's what all the other IQ tests do.
@@drumpillo Interesting, and they seem to be using the same test material as the IQ test! longgold.org/procedure/
Unfortunately the links (or twitter names?) below your comment don't show up, could you post them again?
@@atomicbomm Correct! themusiclab.org is just hosting these tests and labeled them as "Musical IQ-Tests". The researchers of the LongGold-Team actually developed them. Here are the resources:
link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-019-01225-1#Sec13
nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30318-8
nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03586-z
This anthropologist/ethnomusicologist thanks you for fighting reductionist-ethnocentric mumbo-jumbo disguised as “cognitive science”.
Your reaction to the “1 and 3” example made me LOL. Glad you caught it on tape.
Hi, I appreciate your comment, but I just want to take a moment to add here that from my background in psychology this appears to be a useful and worthy project. I acknowledge that the term "musical IQ" is a bit clickbait-y and the "are you a prodigy?" tagine is flat-out ridiculous, but in fact they are not trying to measure people's "intelligence" or musical merits (I assume that part of it is what you are principally objecting to - if I misunderstood, I apologize). They are gathering data. IQ tests (even if this were one, which it really isn't, as it's far too short) are more about looking at how people's minds work (which is what they are gathering data to do here) than measuring intelligence per se; the inventor of IQ tests knew that intelligence was a multifaceted concept that can't be fully measured by any test, and that wasn't why he designed them. (Very interesting history to read about, if you're interested!) It says on the test site that they are trying to "understand how people make sense of music they hear" - that is the kind of thing that tests like these are actually for. Fwiw, if you go to the "learn more" page, there are links to a lot of excellent work this team is doing with regard to the cultural factors that influence how people experience music. :)
@@AlexB-vb2tw It’s been a while… My sense of Neely’s video is that it wasn’t about dismissing the project as much as to put it in a broader context. Sure, the background for IQ research over the years is pretty much common knowledge at this point (and there have been multiple approaches to testing within that history, some more problematic than others). The framing for this particular project is quite important, including the clickbait aspect, coverage by media outlets, etc.
What’s even more relevant, though, is something which has since become something of a trend in Neely’s approach: debunking claims of universality or cross-cultural relevance. Particularly important as Anglophone musickers suddenly realize that there might be a whole lot more to music than they thought throughout long and illustrious careers. Adam’s recent video about Schenkerian analysis has probably attracted much more mainstream attention than this one. The two share a thrust.
The test 1 really got me cause of the mistuned version sound more better, and sometimes the mistuned notes actually works in a different way. Like a different harmonic relationships...
This was very cool Adam.
“It’s basically a buzzfeed quiz” DAMN!
That "beat" test seemed super suspect to me. The incorrect one almost always felt more locked in with the groove.
Yup. I'm a beat detection moron (a score below 70 for that test) and none of the bands I've played in noticed. It seems so easy to do a better test - just have a piece of music playing and ask people to hit any key in time. Or just on the 1.
@@simongunkel7457 they might be being polite. also the test tests when 2 of them are both out but one is more out than another. you can't really do that with your game idea
@@asdfazxczcv I don't think anybody has an audition for bass players and picks the one with no sense of time out of politeness. or hires somebody for another studio job if they didn't perform. The test I gave gives you a good indicator of whether somebody can detect the beat, which ostensibly is what their test does, but you get more accurate data on whether they miss the tempo or lag by a constant. Their test generates a lot less data than my suggestion and tapping along to a beat is an actual performance skill...
Probably because playing just slightly ahead of the beat it feels very wrong compared to dragging behind the beat.
@@simongunkel7457 you can't ask to hit a key in time because that adds an entire other variable of input device accuracy. Let alone those with physical disabilities.
This test is really fun.
I said the answer out loud first
and then you clicked my answer everytime :-)
.
I found something while I was doing the test...
It's like you not only h e a r when something is wrong
but also f e e l which was the correct answer.
.
There are really sneaky musical-questions there
cos they picked examples where the instruments were way off
in vibrato and glissando's. So you have to determine vocal pitch
in a sort of 'unpitched-instruments scene'.
.
Kinda cool idea, musical IQ.
.
Thanx for this. :-)
Thumbs up + subscribed.
I have a huge amount of respect for Adam and I love his videos about music. I thought he seemed to be missing the point (and I'm willing to be shown it was actually me that was missing the point) of the beat test. Wasn't it just about which pieces were "metronomic"? i.e. weren't they asking us to detect which ones had the beeps "in time" with the music? I felt like Adam's superior grasp of jazz has left his internal beat machine a bit "spicy". I have had so many arguments with musicians who think that playing in a non-metronomic way is "more human" and therefore "better". One musician with whom I've had this argument also seems to think that singing with notes that are in the diatonic scale fro a given key is also less human and therefore not as good. It's like arguing about grammar and spelling and pronunciation with people who say there are no right or wrong ways to do things and that nobody has the right to say what the rules are or should be. I don't think the test was about whether you think music should be metronomic or which beat you preferred. I think it was just about whether you have a feel for "beat" (is that different from rhythm?) that aligned with the model advocated by those who instigated the test.
That's the point. If the expectation of a test isn't crystal clear, it's not a test. If you're asking questions of the test, it's not clear.