How Musical Are You Really?
Five kinds of musicality, and you do not need lessons for most of them
Most musicality questionnaires ask how many years of lessons you had, which gives most people a score of zero and no information. In 2014 a team at Goldsmiths, University of London, built one for everyone else: people who never trained but listen closely, sing in the car, get goosebumps at certain songs or notice when a band drifts out of time. Their data, from more than a hundred thousand people, showed that musicality in the general population is made of several separate skills - and most people have more of it than they think.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about what you do and can do now, not about what you would like to be able to do. There are no trick questions and no right taste in music.
What it measures
The five self-report subscales of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index: active engagement with music, perceptual abilities, musical training, singing abilities and emotional responses to music. It treats musicality as a set of skills and habits that everyone has in some measure, not a talent reserved for trained musicians. It is not a hearing test, and it says nothing about your taste.
Based on: Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, Gold-MSI (Müllensiefen, Gingras, Musil & Stewart, 2014)
Possible results
Active engagement
How much time, attention and curiosity you give to music.
Perceptual abilities
How well you pick up pitch, timing and detail when you listen.
Musical training
How much practice and formal learning you have behind you.
Singing abilities
How well you can carry and reproduce a melody with your voice.
Emotions
How strongly music moves you, and how you use it for your moods.
Common questions
Can you be musical without playing an instrument?
Yes, and that was the central idea behind the index. Its authors found that musical skills and behaviours vary widely among people who never trained, in how they listen, engage, sing and respond emotionally. Training is one route to musicality, not the definition of it.
Is musicality something you are born with?
Partly. Studies of twins suggest musical abilities are moderately heritable, but practice, exposure and interest matter a great deal. Only a small minority of people have a genuine difficulty perceiving pitch; for most, these abilities grow with use at any age.
Does musical training raise all five scores?
It tends to go with higher scores elsewhere, but not evenly. Emotional responses to music in particular seem to depend much less on lessons - many people with no training at all score high there. That is why the five bars are shown separately rather than added into one number.
Sources
- Müllensiefen, D., Gingras, B., Musil, J., & Stewart, L. (2014). The musicality of non-musicians: An index for assessing musical sophistication in the general population. PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0089642
- Degrave, P., & Dedonder, J. (2019). A French translation of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, an instrument to assess self-reported musical skills, abilities and behaviours. Journal of New Music Research. doi:10.1080/09298215.2018.1499779
An honest note The statements are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, so scores are not comparable to its published norms, which come from a very large online sample of mostly Western listeners. All five bars are self-reports: in the original research they went together with performance on real listening tasks, but people can overrate or underrate their own ear and voice. This is not a hearing test, and it says nothing fixed about talent or potential.
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