BBC R3 test: How Musical Are You?

[french frank]

I'm amazed to discover that I am not alone

I've always felt I hardly connect at all with music on an emotional plane. It doesn't seem to me to be what music is for. Yet, for others, it's everything. Ah, well ...

[Bert Coules]

I'm just trying this now, but I've run aground on the very first test, Group the Music, the one with the coloured squares. When I click on each square I get a very brief snatch of music - rather less than half a second's worth.

Is that what's supposed to happen? Am I really expected to categorise different sorts of music from mere blips of sound?

[mercia]

Is that what's supposed to happen?

Well that's certainly what happened with me which is why I skipped this section.

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes. Hold on, less than half a second's worth? No. Some of them are very short though.

[subcontrabass]

I'm just trying this now, but I've run aground on the very first test, Group the Music, the one with the coloured squares. When I click on each square I get a very brief snatch of music - rather less than half a second's worth.

Is that what's supposed to happen? Am I really expected to categorise different sorts of music from mere blips of sound?

Yes. It appears to be testing based on a claim that most people can identify a "genre" after hearing less than half a second. Difficult when most of the so-called "genres" involved are things I never encounter.

[Bert Coules]

Thanks for the replies. I've skipped that section.

[StephenO]

I've always felt I hardly connect at all with music on an emotional plane. It doesn't seem to me to be what music is for. Yet, for others, it's everything. Ah, well ...

That's why some of us love to wallow in Wagner, Mahler and Stauss for hours on end! I haven't done the test yet but I'm expecting Emotional Connection to be the only part where I do well.

[Lateralthinking1]

I would have thought everyone listens to urban, ragga, krautrock and alt country.

[Eudaimonia]

V: Well, just because you're insensible to the Dionysian aspects of music doesn't mean that those who are must be equally insensible to the Apollonian. It simply doesn't follow. I've done my time poring over manuscripts and scores at the National Library six hours at a stretch for the sheer pleasure of it--to equate having an emotional response to music with a lack of appreciation for musical structure is just plain misguided.

And for what it's worth, I consider your "plenty of time for Tchaikovsky" comment to be gratuitously insulting. Fighting words, even.

[Donnie Essen]

Enthusiasm: 62%
Musical Perception: 53%
Emotional Connection: 6%
Social Creativity: 33%
Musical Curiosity: 65%

I kinda screwed it up in places. My PC is buggy and draggy with the sound, so I probably shouldn't have done the rhythm one. I had trouble with the placing the genres and when I have trouble with things I get impatient and so I just whacked them in any old way in the end. I think it depends how you conceptualize what you're hearing, what categories you got in your head. If it told me I was listening for a difference between pop and hip-hop, I might've done it differently. I didn't recognise anything there as what I know as hip-hop. Where's the bling? Where's the bitches?

I got half a second of sound for the clips. Is that right or not?

I do not use music to 'manage' my mood or to motivate myself like it's a tool for self-aid. I don't believe music is for anything. I don't like that notion. So you answer it in your own fashion and it judges you a certain way for it. Doesn't mean I don't appreciate it emotionally. Dumbasses.

Regarding some posts here, I don't think it's an either/or regarding emotion or even linked to classical/romantic too much. I feel emotion is at the heart of it, of all of music, but doesn't stop other kinds of appreciation. Some music, I might appreciate more in an emotional sense, others in another sense. But emotion's there in all of it. Got some Haydn playing. Symphonies 98 & 99. It's not necessarily unemotional, I find. See, I'm not crying or nothing, but I ain't sitting here stroking my chin neither.

I didn't recognise the person the site described of me either. He sounded like a douchebag I wouldn't wanna know, the type who owns about 10 lame-ass CDs and pounds out a Coldplay song on guitar at every given opportunity.

[mercia]

ragga

Is that what I wipe my paintbrushes on?

[Lateralthinking1]

Quote - "If it told me I was listening for a difference between pop and hip-hop" - Those were the two I had problems with. I identified the others clearly but I had in my head the categories "easy listening" instead of "pop" and "funk" instead of "hip-hop". The latter muddled the boundaries a bit. Seeing that the experiment is to honour Mozart, I wonder if classical music is being treated fairly? (hercule - ragga is short for raggamuffin (sic). It is patois.).

[Bert Coules]

Well, this is how I did:

Enthusiasm: 67%
Musical Perception: 99%
Emotional Connection: 93%
Social Creativity: 3%
Musical Curiosity: 38%

Personally, I would have scored Curiosity much lower and Enthusiasm rather higher, but the test can't determine if someone is very enthusiastic about just a narrow range of music.

[James Wonnacott]

Better than I expected (for someone with absolutely no musical training): 40 - 55 %
The only one I got completely right was the tune at a different pitch.
It backs up a post I made the other day- no-one can call me a musical elitist

[french frank]

Well, I know I shouldn't have answered 'Neither agree nor disagree' to most of the questions, but I was put off by the first question (the 1-second clips which I didn't understand). So:

Enthusiasm for music 12%
Musical perception 11%
Musical curiosity 59% (which I deny, I'm not curious about music at all.)
Social creativity (What is it?) 12%
Emotional connection 0%



Curiously, I did best on Musical memory (10 out of 12)...