What is Your Musical IQ?

all right so today we're gonna be taking a musical IQ test and if you've ever applied to music school you know that there is some form of musical aptitude exam that you have to go through whether it's ear training or sight reading or whatever these sorts of things are normally administered by the music faculty but the test that we are taking today was developed at Harvard by a cognitive science research team this team has published some fairly controversial research on the universality of music I'm very excited but also maybe a little bit skeptical about this musical IQ test what exactly is it going to test let's find out your note-taking test one of three this test is about hearing tuning in music for each question on this test you will hear two examples of the same music sometimes the singer will be in tune with the music but in other clips the singer will be out of tune with the music your job is to choose the example where the singer is more out of tune alright so in tune in this case I'm assuming means more luck to the grid of twelve-tone equal temperament which is a very Eurocentric way of thinking about tuning if you're from a culture who hasn't adopted twelve-tone equal temperament in their music your ability to discern different pitches within twelve-tone equal temperament won't be as good as say mine would be that said your musical Accu might not be lower because your ability to discern pitches in another tuning system might be a lot higher than mine so perception and cognition result from some sort of complex interplay between our genes and our experience but in humans the vast majority of experiments that have been conducted are on members of Western societies because that's where most of the scientists are now I'll begin the main test like many second woman was definitely spicier I could fly through the sky handi hoping you can hear the auto-tune and some of that I'm not sure if this is the best way of testing any of this but yeah the first one was was the spicier one [Music] [Applause] [Music] at first one I guess you could make the argument that it's saying more out of tune with the music so being able to match tuning systems since the music is in twelve-tone equal temperament I guess [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah [Applause] [Music] that one's interesting because the vocal melody is just two notes a half step apart I guess it's just being able to tell like what the half step is supposed to be [Music] [Music] that one's tricky cuz the they're both a little off the music also isn't giving much pitch information but okay down sweating flying around it's easier when you're listening to something with the piano because it's more locked to any kind of grid the first one yes [Music] [Music] I was tricky because the vocals are just really buried in the mix I'm gonna guess the first [Music] that one's tricky it sounds like the background music isn't that super in tune maybe the second okay you completed the tuning perception test okay okay so these are all pop vocal melodies that have varying degrees of auto tune towards twelve-tone equal temperament and that's how we're defining tuning perception and therefore musical IQ this is fun but like what if there was an example of indian carnatic music would be be able to tell differences of tuning between two examples [Music] or even more far out like Javanese gamelan music pitch perception is a lot more interesting than you might expect there's a whole bunch of different facets to it and those can be teased apart if you respect the diversity of human experience this is very Eurocentric and its approach to music like you which is fine it's fun but just know that if you're having trouble with any of this stuff anyway this test is about hearing melodies in music for each questions on this test you will hear the same tune three times each time the tune will be in a different key this is like singing a song in a higher or lower voice okay I guess that's a way of explaining it to a lay audience but one of the tunes will be the odd one out its notes will have changed your job is to choose the odd one out interesting so this is about your ability to detect intervallic contour across multiple keys okay third one had that spicy higher note let's go with three [Music] ah third one the first interval was off so we're doing number three first one was off as is tricky melodic memory ain't ain't no joke [Music] okay the second one was the different one it's tricky because if the first two are different you have to remember what the first one is in relationship to the third one and it's going to be in a different key so tricky dear Lord and a third of the first one minutes that's hard [Music] third one that one was easier it's whenever anything gets more non diatonic became that comes easier [Music] so the second one is the oddball [Music] that's tricky number two I'm guessing [Music] all right three three you're the bad boy okay so that one was almost fun I like that one that was that was tricky but to feel like that did a pretty good job of testing musical memory and I found actually while I was listening to it I was imagining fingerings for those examples and how it would play them on a keyboard so the fingerings didn't match between the examples that would be another indicator for me that they were not the same melody as I've talked about in this channel there's a lot of her musical perception which is embodied in other words what you're doing physically with her body whether it's dancing or moving or playing an instrument or even whether or not you're balanced can affect your perception of things like meter and time and all sorts of things anyway let's keep going this test is about hearing the beat in music oh okay I'm gonna have some opinions about this and each question will play you two examples of music each example have a beat track playing along with the music in some examples the beeps will be on the beat and in other examples they will not be on the beat your job is to tell us which of the examples has the beeps which were most on the beat sometimes it will be very hard to tell okay so we could get philosophical here and immediately question like what is beat but I'm gonna try and do my best to give the correct answer for the confines of this test so here we go [Music] okay I think the second one technically but no all right I was interested I see what they're doing doing it the fact that the beep is pitched is interesting I'm wondering if pitch perception is that all going to influence beat perception I don't know because sometimes they're delayed a little bit but the music feels better if the beat is delayed a little bit so it's almost like you're countering your musical intuition by saying what it is objectively on the grid I think that's probably the reason why I got the first question wrong not to make any excuses but yeah so the first one was more on the beat I once tricky because both of them I feel like are slightly off the second one was more on top of it and the first one was slightly behind it let's say the first one yeah the beeps don't have a sharp transient so it's a little trickier and the cutoff of the beep actually affects the feeling of the groove articulation and when you cut the note off determines a lot about how the groove feels so ii yeah but [Music] [Music] first time second [Music] wow they put the beeps on one in three that one's evil that one was so jarring to me I wasn't actually able to really focus in on it whoa okay um I'm gonna guess the first one but honestly Oh God one in three guys come on [Music] all right that's in three four I guess that's an interesting change of pace but yeah sure yeah damn it oh well okay completed the beat perception test okay so it seems like most of these examples were quantized from their original recordings and just lined up to a grid artificially but even if that's the case all of the examples were European based music or Western music if there was any salsa involved for example or any afro-caribbean or afro-peruvian or Colombian or Brazilian or any of that probably the results of the beat perception test on musical IQ would be quite different now just think about how I reacted to listening to the beeps on beats one and three in that one example they put the beeps on one and three that one's evil that's not insignificant the way that beaten accent is conceptualized in that jazz music and therefore how we perceive it is different and that's in a style of music that a lot of Western listeners would be familiar with the test does not account for the fact that different styles of music have fundamentally different perceptual frameworks in other words it sounds really dumb to accent one and three when it should be two and four the examples of music that they're using to test perception and therefore musical IQ all come from a very specific cultural tradition this is of course somewhat unfortunate because there's a long history of this sort of thing outside of music using European cultural and artistic standards to define intelligence not to get in broiled in all of that but what I'm saying is that if you're musical like you when you take this test it's not very high it doesn't mean that you're not musical it just means that you have not conformed this incredibly narrow set of standards that they're defining as musical intelligence so anyway our estimate of your musical IQ is 118 all right cool we estimated the score in the same way that real light to Q test you based on although other people have taken the test we set hundreds the average great melodic discrimination is where I have failed the most miss tuning perception I think I'm the I'm the 93rd percentile bead alignment I feel like I should be better at beat alignment as a bass player so check this out even if your musical skills could use work all right so I really don't like this because this wasn't testing for musical skills or musical abilities it was testing for very specific kinds of music perception as they related to a European standard of music none of this tested your ability to perform music like the sorts of things you might get tested on at music school nor did any of it test your ability to listen to music or appreciate music or enjoy music so the utility of this even though it's couched in fancy scientific whatever nonsense it's basically a fancy BuzzFeed article no this is cool though you can like zoom in I guess BuzzFeed doesn't do that mmm I don't like this at all we think that a performance on a test like this might accurately predict people's ability to play musical instrument or sing I don't think that at all again this is a very narrow kind of approach to thinking about music no I don't want to knock on any of this too much because it is interesting it's well designed and I'm sure that people who worked on this put a lot of thought into it but it is very narrow in its scope so yeah Music Lab musical IQ hope you enjoyed if you enjoy this video please consider joining my patreon because it's my patrons over at my patreon that make this channel possible you can definitely go check out the Music Lab org slash quizzes slash em IQ if you'd like to take this IQ test for yourself and see how you score anyway guys thanks for watching these

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 826,134

Rating: 4.9261966 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: b15BrgrctPs

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Clarityy]

*Happy Licc*

[u/BlueWolf934]

Adam is Breadtube now, its official

​

DEFGECD

[u/UncarvedWood]

Fun fact: Indonesian gamelan music is rythmically so complex that it can't be written in western musical notation.

To me it sounds like vaguely interesting harmonic bangs, but saying that it lacks melody or something is like saying Bach lacks bass drops.

[u/[deleted]]

is this video meant as a stab at Adam or more the actual test itself?

He mentions that at the end of this video. "The test does not account for the fact that different styles of music have fundamentally different perceptual frameworks... The examples of music that they're using to test percept, and therefore musical IQ all come from a very specific cultural tradition."

[u/[deleted]]

Love Adam Neely

[u/JITTERdUdE]

Can someone please infodump me some stuff I can use to convince my brother that IQ is bullshit? He is steadfast in his belief of using it to measure the value of other people, and I feel like it really helps inform his more right-wing/faschie beliefs. I have hope for him since I managed to kind of turn him onto anarcho-syndicalism recently, but then we'll talk about things like autism (he is most likely a closeted aspie and has said before that if he is he won't admit it out of shame of being associated with "low-functioning" ASD) and when talking about "high" vs "low" functioning he'll say stuff like "Oh right I forgot your side doesn't believe in IQ".

Also, I tried to make him listen to Shaun's video on the Bell Curve but he wouldn't listen to it because it was "too long".

[u/[deleted]]

It takes me 3 hours to tune an instrument and this test didn't score me poorly. What use is an IQ test that doesn't account for skill you can actually apply?