Are you TONE DEAF or MUSICALLY GIFTED? (A FUN test for non-musicians)

[Old Joad]

 

[craigb]

1 hour ago, Old Joad said:

Are you TONE DEAF or MUSICALLY GIFTED?

No. 

 

?

[Shane_B.]

I was in a band with one of the best guitar players I've ever heard back in the 90s. He was completely and totally tone deaf but he was dead on with his lead covers. He argued with me about whether Smoke On The Water was in a major or minor for 20 minutes one night and he could not hear the difference that one of us was playing a major and the other a minor. Tried to get the bass player to back me up on the spot but that didn't help. ?

The next week at practice he leaned over to me before we started the song and he whispered to me, "I checked my sheet music. You were right.".

And his singing ... it was tragic. He was a talented guitar player. A walking encyclopedia of music. But the guy could not hear the difference between notes. It was purely technical playing.

The guys in that band had been together a long time. I had just joined. It made me wonder how many years they were playing the most basic song in the universe wrong and why nobody ever called them out on it.

[Bapu]

Well I'm not tone deaf (according to this test) but I'm one brick shy of genius. 

[mettelus]

 

 

[craigb]

Love Bill's stuff!

[Grem]

@mettelus that was a good one!!

[Jacques Boileau]

I am glad I didn't reach genius status on this test. It would have discredited the test completely! ?

[bitflipper]

I took that test, and while doing so considered whether to post it here. By the end I'd decided it wasn't quite good enough to advertise on this forum. No offence to Old Joad! To be fair, I only copped a negative view of it about 2/3 of the way through.

13 of the 15 tests are legitimate, even if most were ridiculously easy - assuming you're not genuinely tone deaf, which would be approximately 0% of readers of this forum.

However, there were two tests that I took issue with because both asked for a subjective opinion, namely whether something sounded "sad" or "happy".

Now, if you're a Blues fan, do you find the blues scale "sad"? The correct answer, according to the video, is "yes". Sorry, but the blues makes me happy. Minor 9th chords make me happy. I'm sure that for some, the B Major scale is demonic and should have no place in civilized art. Subjective.

What he meant to ask is whether the listener can distinguish between major and minor scales, but he was trying to avoid musical terminology in order to make it more accessible to non-musicians. 

Do I need to admit that my score was 14 out of 15? It would have been 13 out of 15, but after getting burned by the first sad/happy test I assumed he was trying to trick me.

[craigb]

Kind of like asking (while F# is being repeatedly pounded in the background), "Do you feel tense?" ?

[Grem]

13 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Do I need to admit that my score was 14 out of 15? It would have been 13 out of 15, but after getting burned by the first sad/happy test I assumed he was trying to trick me.

Same thing happened to me!! Now I wonder how many others this happened too.

[bitflipper]

13 hours ago, craigb said:

Kind of like asking (while F# is being repeatedly pounded in the background), "Do you feel tense?" ?

There was an interview with Steven Spielberg and John Williams where they talked about their long collaboration, friendship and mutual regard for one another. At one point they talked about Spielberg's reaction to Williams playing the Jaws theme for him for the first time. 

Basically, Steven said "you're kidding, right?". Two notes? Two notes that became a musical meme embedded in our collective consciousness and will forever be associated with tension and primordial fear.  But I don't feel that way about the same interval in Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. The bold opening to Beethoven's grandiose 5th Symphony is the same interval that opens the theme from Sesame Street.

Then again, I still remember the impact of hearing Solveig's Song and Aase's Death from the Peer Gynt Suite as a child. Both filled me with sadness, even though at age 6 I had no prior associations, had never seen a movie. That and the 1812 Overture were my faves, and I recall that the latter used to make me march around the room with patriotic pride for Mother Russia, a country I wouldn't even have been able to find on a map. So there's some evidence that emotional content is at least somewhat universal.

[Grem]

5 hours ago, bitflipper said:

some evidence that emotional content is at least somewhat universa

I believe that we are spiritual beings.  And we communicate feelings and ideas through a complex web of ways that we yet don't understand. 

Sound is one of these known ways. How that information is communicated isn't yet known or understood.  But there is overwhelming facts that prove that information is delivered and received. 

[craigb]

54 minutes ago, Grem said:

I believe that we are spiritual beings.  And we communicate feelings and ideas through a complex web of ways that we yet don't understand. 

Sound is one of these known ways. How that information is communicated isn't yet known or understood.  But there is overwhelming facts that prove that information is delivered and received. 

I hear that! ?

[Bapu]

21 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Do I need to admit that my score was 14 out of 15? 

You're in great company. I was 14 out of 15 too.

[User 905133]

4 hours ago, Grem said:

I believe that we are spiritual beings.  And we communicate feelings and ideas through a complex web of ways that we yet don't understand. 

Sound is one of these known ways. How that information is communicated isn't yet known or understood.  [emphasis added]

There are vast bodies of literature among researchers / scholars on this subject from a wide variety of perspectives / academic disciplines / fields of study.  Unfortunately, for example, there is a populist notion that music is a "universal language."  Most lay people mindlessly repeat that gross oversimplification and in fact many experts from various fields of study pander to that populist notion to give their research populist credibility.

If those are the people you have in mind as the basis for the comment I highlighted, I would agree: Those people have very little knowledge about the role sound (speech, music, natural sound, etc.) plays in communication of all sorts.

But among various educated communities (which are sometimes denigrated by populist communities), much has been written and much is  known.  Though in the words of some scholarly dscisplines, "More research is needed." 

That being said, I have a painful memory of a respected member of my graduate studies department who (in a doctoral presentation to the faculty early on in the dissertation process) thought I was saying that the only difference in the meaning of "close the door" and "open the door" was the sound of the words.

In other words, ignorance of the role of sound in communication is not limited to lay people who deafly accept such things as the "Music is a universal language" and can't hear anything beyond that populist belief.

Still, the role of sound is very far from being unknown and not understood.  In part, given the bias of other modes of communication, it is not surprising that many people can't hear what they don't see.  Also, the nature of visual modes of communication is very different from aural modes of communication.

Edited March 21, 2023 by User 905133
fixed erroneous quotation marks

[SteveStrummerUK]

Q16. If in doubt, which key should one tw@t it up into?

 

Q17. What is the optimum number of basses to own to have a greater than 50% chance of correctly playing the A minor note (rounded down to the nearest 25)?

 

Q18. Which is the correct answer to the question "How many plug-ins is enough"?

        a) Pfft .... we don't need no steenkin' plug-ins

        b) 38,295

 

 

 

Edited March 21, 2023 by SteveStrummerUK

[craigb]

Posting Extra Nonsense Is Strummy! ?

[craigb]

3 hours ago, User 905133 said:

There are vast bodies of literature among researchers / scholars on this subject from a wide variety of perspectives / academic disciplines / fields of study.  Unfortunately, for example, there is a populist notion that music is a "universal language."  Most lay people mindlessly repeat that gross oversimplification and in fact many experts from various fields of study pander to that populist notion to give their research populist credibility.

If those are the people you have in mind as the basis for the comment I highlighted, I would agree: Those people have very little knowledge about the role sound (speech, music, natural sound, etc.) plays in communication of all sorts.

But among various educated communities (which are sometimes denigrated by populist communities), much has been written and much is  known.  Though in the words of some scholarly dscisplines, "More research is needed." 

That being said, I have a painful memory of a respected member of my graduate studies department who (in a doctoral presentation to the faculty early on in the dissertation process) thought I was saying that the only difference in the meaning of "close the door" and "open the door" was the sound of the words.

In other words, ignorance of the role of sound in communication is not limited to lay people who deafly accept such things as the "Music is a universal language" and can't hear anything beyond that populist belief.

Still, the role of sound is very far from being unknown and not understood.  In part, given the bias of other modes of communication, it is not surprising that many people can't hear what they don't see.  Also, the nature of visual modes of communication is very different from aural modes of communication.

I've been involved with some of the sound-therapy / brain-mind music types for decades.  Since, as Tesla as pointed out, everything is energy, vibration and frequency, it's seems obvious to me that anything within (and even outside) the frequencies we, as humans, can perceive as sound will have an impact.

Lately, I've been studying how a dominating frequency can cause lesser frequencies to resonate at its frequency.  Here's an example using metronomes: