Examining musical sophistication: A replication and theoretical commentary on the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index

Abstract

The difficulties associated with measuring the complex construct of musicianship have received considerable attention in the music psychology literature. Multiple measures exist for various constructs, yet the need for the careful replication and documentation of the use of these measures remains an area of critical importance. Here, we describe the replication of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) in a sample of 346 university students, drawn from both a school of music and a department of psychology. The original approach to modeling the Gold-MSI was followed as closely as possible, and the results replicated well overall. Issues were noted, however, with the characteristics of the sample, the skew of some of the individual items, and the overall use of the bifactor structure. These findings are discussed in relation to the state of measuring musicianship in the current literature, as well as in relation to the larger theoretical concerns surrounding the modeling of complex psychological and musical constructs.

The Chinese version of the Gold-MSI: Adaptation and validation of an inventory for the measurement of musical sophistication in a Taiwanese sample

“…All subscales of the Gold-MSI inventory possessed good to very good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = .791-.926) and test-retest reliability (rtt = .857-.974). These findings were later replicated very closely with data from a sample of American college students (Baker, Ventura, Calamia, Shanahan, & Elliott, 2018), German speaking adults (Schaal et al, 2014) as well as adolescent participants (Fiedler & Müllensiefen, 2015). The correlations between the Gold-MSI inventory and the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA) (Gordon, 1989) were in the range of r = .30 to .51, whereby the factors Perceptual Abilities, Musical Training, Singing Abilities, and General Musical Sophistication were correlated more strongly with AMMA than were the factors Active Engagement and Emotions.…”

Learning melodic musical intervals: To block or to interleave?

“…We administered the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI; version 1.0) to assess participants' musical sophistication as a potential predictor of their inductive learning performance. A 38-item self-report inventory, the Gold-MSI measures musical sophistication on several dimensions of musical skills and behaviors in the general population (Müllensiefen, Gingras, Musil, & Stewart, 2014), and has been validated across several studies (Baker, Ventura, Calamia, Shanahan, & Elliott, 2018;Degrave & Dedonder, 2019;Lima, Correia, Müllensiefen, & Castro, 2020;Lin, Kopiez, Müllensiefen, & Wolf, 2019). The Gold-MSI includes five subscales: active musical engagement (9 items; α = .80), perceptual abilities (9 items; α = .80), musical training (7 items; α = .77), emotional responses to music (6 items; α = .62), and singing abilities (7 items; α = .83).…”

Rapid encoding of temporal sequences discovered in brain dynamics

“…Furthermore, participants' general and auditory WM abilities and musical expertise were assessed. Specifically, their musical expertise was collected using the Gold-MSI questionnaire 48,49 . With regards to general WM we adopted one of the most used psychological tests for assessing cognitive abilities, namely .…”

“…The data was high-pass filtered (0.1 Hz threshold) to remove too low frequencies for being originated by the brain. We also used a notch filter (48)(49)(50)(51)(52) to control for interference of the electric current. The data was then down-sampled again to 150 Hz and few segments of the data, altered by large artifacts, were discarded after visual inspection.…”