BBC R3 test: How Musical Are You?

[french frank]

Apparently it was vital that it appeared during the Mozart bore. Why? It seems to have very little to do with Mozart, apart from the fact that he had some musical facility But then, so do most of the people who's music is played on radio 3.

I assumed that it was part of the whole promotional scheme for the event, considered the best time to attract new listeners to Radio 3?

[doversoul1]

I must confess: I did not read the OP of this thread very carefully but I expect I am not alone, so here is the quote referred in the OP. I have coloured where my attention was caught for various reasons (mostly ambiguous phrasing).

The BBC is teaming up with researchers at Goldsmiths University of London to find out whether personality or practise (spelling!) creates great musicians. The How Musical Are You? test is being launched to tie in with Radio 3's celebration of the music of Mozart. The aim is to establish the most basic musical skills shared by everyone and those achieved through years of training and practise. The test can also be accessed through the BBC's Radio 3 website. Questionnaires and musical tests will be used to evaluate abilities such as picking out beats and memorising tunes.
Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said is presents "a chance for everyone who enjoys music of whatever genre to find out more about their own capacity for engaging with music." Many successful musicians, including The Beatles' Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon, claim never to have learned to read sheet music.
The team from Goldsmiths believe that people's listening habits and their emotional connection with music could predict whether or not they have untapped musical ability. Music psychologist Daniel Mullensiefen said: "We're interested in finding out about the many different ways people can be musical, even without setting foot inside a music school."

[Eudaimonia]

If anyone is interested, here's an interesting journal article about the same area of research:

Simply Listening To Music Affects One’s Musicality

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080813110453.htm

ScienceDaily — Researchers at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have demonstrated how much the brain can learn simply through active exposure to many different kinds of music. “More and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills,” Henkjan Honing (UvA) explains.

“It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops.”* The results were recently presented at the Music & Language conference, organized by Tufts University in Boston, and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Performance and Perception.
The common view among music scientists is that musical abilities are shaped mostly by intense musical training, and that they remain rather rough in untrained listeners, the so-called Expertise hypothesis.

However, the UvA-study shows that listeners without formal musical training, but with sufficient exposure to a certain musical idiom (the Exposure hypothesis), perform similarly in a musical task when compared to formally trained listeners.

[Lateralthinking1]

Interesting and believable. This focusses on all ages. Perhaps the scientists might next have a look specifically at the early developmental stages to see how exposure to music at a young age can make a very significant difference throughout life.