Are you tone deaf? Take the test... for science!

[demizach]

If I scored 26/26, that’s pretty much definitive proof the test is bunk.

Though several of those snippets were very life-like portrayals of me attempting to sing those tunes!

[bradejensen]

I wouldn’t say I feel tone deaf, I feel more like mute. Just don’t know what to say on the spot. I can arrange and come up with nice lines and phrases before hand, and arrange them around in a nice way. But in my mind it feels more mute than tone deaf.

[Mr_Samsa]

@Troy

Kidding aside this test is presumably measuring sensory capabilities but is mostly just testing your familiarity with the tunes. If you don’t know the tunes, and the notes aren’t obviously detuned or distorted in some way, I don’t see how anyone is going to know those are the wrong ones.

Yeah, I was going to do this until I quickly figured that out. You certainly could make a guess about those tunes that you don’t know based on what sounds “off”, but that “offness” is really just dictated by our culture and our expectations on how music is supposed to sound. If one takes that aside, then there’s nothing off about these tunes. There are notes that we wouldn’t expect normally but could fit depending on the context and whatever the author wanted to express. Calling that tone deafness is really just reinforcing the notion that music is supposed to adhere to our expectations of how it should sound. The methodology of this study is not really valid, imo.