Can musical ability be tested online?

Abstract

We sought to determine whether an objective test of musical ability could be successfully administered online. A sample of 754 participants was tested with an online version of the Musical Ear Test (MET), which had Melody and Rhythm subtests. Both subtests had 52 trials, each of which required participants to determine whether standard and comparison auditory sequences were identical. The testing session also included the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), a test of general cognitive ability, and self-report questionnaires that measured basic demographics (age, education, gender), mind-wandering, and personality. Approximately 20% of the participants were excluded for incomplete responding or failing to finish the testing session. For the final sample ( N = 608), findings were similar to those from in-person testing in many respects: (1) the internal reliability of the MET was maintained, (2) construct validity was confirmed by strong associations with Gold-MSI scores, (3) correlations with other measures (e.g., openness to experience, cognitive ability, mind-wandering) were as predicted, (4) mean levels of performance were similar for individuals with no music training, and (5) musical sophistication was a better predictor of performance on the Melody than on the Rhythm subtest. In sum, online administration of the MET proved to be a reliable and valid way to measure musical ability. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-021-01641-2.

Associations between music training and cognitive abilities: The special case of professional musicians.

“…Otherwise, ad hoc translations were created by native speakers who were also fluent in English. Correia, et al (2021) documented that the online versions and translations of all tests used in the present study had good reliability and validity, matching that of in-person testing conducted in English (Swaminathan et al, 2021), and that performance did not vary as a function of testing language.…”

“…General cognitive ability (hereafter cognitive ability) was tested with the Matrix Reasoning Item Bank (MaRs-IB; Chierchia et al, 2019). The MaRs-IB, which has been used successfully by a variety of independent research groups (e.g., Correia et al, 2021; Nussenbaum et al, 2020), is a freely available online measure of abstract (nonverbal) reasoning modeled after Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (Raven, 1965). The test has 80 trials.…”

A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory

“…This study did not also measure musical ability in any way and relied on self-reported measures of musical sophistication. Although scores on this questionnaire correlate well with tests of musical ability, such as melody or rhythm detection, further research is needed using similar online measures of musical ability such as the Musical Ear Test 23 , 36 . The nature of the method used to study our participants did not allow us to get detailed information about the computer setup they were using, which may have been very important in certain tasks such as that for perceptual precision.…”

The day-of-invitation effect on participation in web-based studies

“…Although we do not expect large effects of the day of invitation on participation, taking advantage of small but systematic variations in people's willingness to participate in studies, would be a cost-free and low threshold measure to increase data quantity. Along with other papers published in this journal (e.g.,Anwyl-Irvine et al, 2021;Correia et al, 2021;Grootswagers, 2020;Söderström et al, 2021), the present study thus adds to our knowledge on advancing the quality of online studies.Several studies have examined whether the day of the week affects participation in online surveys. In ad hoc studies, there is some limited evidence that participation is higher in the beginning of the week Zheng (2011).…”