Musical ear test: how good is your ear?

What a musical ear is, and what a musical ear test measures

Having a musical ear means hearing music in detail, and it is several skills, not one: hearing which way a note moves and by how little, hearing how far it jumped, holding a new tune long enough to notice a change, and keeping a rhythm. Research tests split it the same way: the Musical Ear Test used in studies (Wallentin and colleagues, 2010) scores melody and rhythm separately. This test gives each skill its own row and adds fine pitch and interval size, so the result shows where your ear is sharp and where it has room, not one number that hides both.

The four parts, and what each one hears

Pitch. Three tones; did the last step go up or down? It starts at a semitone (100 cents) and shrinks to 50, 30, 20 and 12 cents, about an eighth of a semitone. Telling the direction is harder than telling that something changed, much harder for some people (Semal and Demany, 2006), so "Can't tell" is an honest answer near the end. It counts as missed.

Intervals. Two jumps, each from a low note up, starting on different notes; which jump was bigger? The pairs close in: a whole tone against a fifth, a minor third against a tritone, a fourth against a fifth, then a minor against a major third and a major third against a fourth, one semitone apart.

Melody memory. A new tune in a major key plays twice; the second time one note moves by one to three semitones, and the note buttons light along so you can point at it. The tunes grow from four notes to eight. This is the part closest to the melody half of the research tests.

Rhythm. Four clicks count you in at 100 beats per minute, then a rhythm of four to six clicks; tap it back on the pad. A little faster or slower than you heard is fine (from about 0.6 to 1.6 times the speed); the pattern is what counts: each tap has to land near its place. The last rounds are syncopated, with clicks between the beats.

Your score, and your ear

What is a good score on the musical ear test?

This test has no published norm, so read the score by what the rounds say. About 30 is what guessing gets (half the pitch and interval rounds, about one tune, no rhythms). 35 to 50: some parts came through, others not yet; check the sound and take it again with headphones. Around 55 to 70: the clear rounds came through and the fine ones not yet. 75 to 85: most of the fine pitch steps and the longer tunes too. 90 or more: two rounds or fewer missed in twenty, so most of the finest steps, the one-semitone jumps and the longest tunes came through. The rows say more than the total: a 70 with full marks for rhythm and little for pitch is a different ear from a 70 the other way round. Headphones, a quiet room and a rested evening can move the score, so take it twice before believing it.

How do you know if you have a good musical ear?

Outside a test it shows in ordinary moments: you notice when a singer drifts flat or a familiar song has a wrong note, you can hum a tune back after hearing it once or twice, you find the beat of a song and clap on it without drifting, and you can tell whether a melody goes up or down. In this test those are the four rows. A low row is not a verdict on music for you; nearly everyone who can follow a tune can train each of them. If the worry is the opposite one, whether you hear pitch at all, the tone-deaf test asks just that.

What is the Musical Ear Test (MET) researchers use?

The Musical Ear Test, or MET, is a research test from Aarhus (Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust and Vuust, 2010). It has 104 trials in about 18 minutes: 52 pairs of short piano melodies and 52 pairs of wood-block rhythms at 100 beats per minute, each answered only "same" or "different", so guessing gets half. In its third validation study the best non-musician scored 76.9 % and the weakest professional 77.9 %. In 2021, 523 Canadian undergraduates averaged 72.5 of 104 (melody 36.1, rhythm 36.5 of 52), and those with ten or more years of lessons 78.7, those with none 69.7 (Swaminathan, Kragness and Schellenberg, Behavior Research Methods). A total of 72 sits near the middle (52nd percentile) and 81 is better than about four in five of them (82nd percentile). This page borrows the MET's split into melody and rhythm and adds pitch and intervals, but it is shorter and asks differently, so its numbers don't translate into MET scores.

Can you improve your musical ear?

Yes, every part, and pitch faster than most people expect: in a lab study, adults with no musical training needed 4 to 8 hours of practice to hear pitch steps as fine as classical musicians did (Micheyl and colleagues, 2006). Intervals grow with a few minutes a day (interval ear training), melody memory with singing tunes back, rhythm with tapping along to songs. A routine that fits in ten minutes is below, and making music does the rest: hum a line into Brumm and it becomes an instrument inside a club track.

Other musical ear tests online, and what each one measures

"Musical ear test" covers very different tests. What each one asks decides what its score means.

Some quizzes give pitch steps in hertz. A hertz step is a different interval on every note: 10 Hz is 39 cents above A4 (440 Hz) and 77 cents above A3 (220 Hz). Cents compare across the range, which is why this test uses them.

Tone deaf, relative pitch, perfect pitch: three different questions

Tone deaf. Real tone deafness (congenital amusia) is trouble hearing pitch changes in a melody. The NIDCD quotes 2 to 5 % of people; a 2017 estimate by Peretz and Vuvan puts it nearer 1.5 %. Most people who call themselves tone deaf hear pitch fine and find singing in tune hard, which is a different skill (Cuddy and colleagues, 2005, found that about one university student in six called themselves tone deaf, yet hardly any of them had amusia): the tone-deaf test checks the first, can I sing in tune? the second.

Relative pitch. A relative pitch test asks for the distance between notes, or for a note's name once you are given another one. Relative pitch is what musicians train and what most YouTube ear tests check when they play a reference note first. The intervals part of this test is its first step; interval ear training takes it further.

Perfect pitch. Naming a note with no reference at all. An estimate quoted since the 1950s is about one person in 10,000 in Europe and North America; it is far more common among musicians who started young and among speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin (Deutsch and colleagues, 2006). Without note names there are rough checks. Researchers play a tone, wait, and ask you to find it again on a slider, and that kind of test has found perfect pitch in people with no musical training (Ross and colleagues, 2003). Singing a favourite song in its recorded key is a weaker sign: in Levitin's 1994 study of 46 students, trained and untrained alike, two in three came within two semitones of the recording on a first try and one in four hit it exactly. Naming notes is the plain test: the perfect pitch test checks it.

A ten-minute ear training routine

1. Two minutes of higher or lower with small steps, until the direction is easy.
2. Three minutes of intervals, two or three at a time, each tied to the opening of a song you know.
3. Two minutes of major or minor.
4. Two minutes of the melody memory test, or a tune heard once and sung back.
5. One minute of the rhythm test, or clapping on the beat of whatever is playing.

Ten minutes most days. Take this test again in two or three weeks and compare the rows, not only the total.

Musical ear syndrome is something else

Musical ear syndrome is the name, made popular by Neil Bauman, for hearing music or singing that isn't playing. It is most often reported by people with hearing loss and has nothing to do with musical ability. No listening quiz, this one included, can show it; whether it goes away is a question for a doctor.

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