We also enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with BBC Lab UK, who adapted the Gold-MSI for their How musical are you? online test, which was taken by more than 140,000 participants. This became the Gold-MSI, which is now widely used by music cognition researchers. The Gold-MSI testĪround 2010, a team of researchers at Goldsmiths (London, UK), comprising Daniel Müllensiefen, Lauren Stewart, Jason Musil, and myself, decided to develop a self-report questionnaire to evaluate musical sophistication and to pair it with a short battery of tests of musical ability. Other questionnaires focus on specific aspects, such as the Musical Engagement Questionnaire, or the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, which measures how much pleasure people experience when engaging in musical activities. Ollen’s questionnaire, and more recently the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, or Gold-MSI, were developed to solve this problem (one advantage of the Gold-MSI is that it combines the objective measurement of musical aptitudes with a self-report questionnaire assessing other facets of musicality). However, these tests tend to ignore other facets of musicality, such as musical creativity, music appreciation, emotional responsiveness to music, and so on. Modern tests, which can generally be completed online in less than 20 minutes, include the Profile of Music Perception Skills, the Musical Ear Test, and the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Among older tests, we find Wing’s Standardized Tests of Musical Intelligence and Gordon’s Music Aptitude Profile. Testing for Musicalityīeginning with Seashore, several tests have been developed to attempt to objectively measure musical aptitudes such as the ability to detect small differences between two melodies or rhythmic patterns that are almost identical. However, one disadvantage of Ollen’s Musical Sophistication Index is that it relies on an evaluation by a music expert, which makes it less suitable for people with no musical training, as well as somewhat subjective and difficult to administer on a large scale.
Ollen’s concept of musical sophistication drew on the work of Susan Hallam, a professor at University College London, who suggested that evaluating musical ability should go beyond basic skills such as pitch or rhythm perception and include the capacity to understand and appreciate music, as well as the ability to compose or improvise. Therefore, she developed a “Musical Sophistication Index” in an attempt to solve this issue. Ollen sought to develop a simple method to assess general musicality (not just musical aptitude) but felt that simply using the number of years of musical training as a measure of musicality was inadequate, as people with no formal training can display a high level of musical ability. The term “musical sophistication” was introduced by Joy Ollen in 2006, a researcher then working at Ohio State University. Although these musical aptitude tests are now widely used and spurred major developments in research on musical ability, they are not well-suited to the evaluation of broader aspects of musicality, including creativity and appreciation. Since then, many tests have been developed, generally following Seashore’s approach. In the early 20th-century, a more scientific approach was introduced in the United States by Carl Seashore, who focused on the objective measurement of musical aptitudes, such as pitch and rhythm discrimination. The first attempts to define “musicality”, a general term used to define musical talent and sensitivity, date back to 19th-century Germany (Michaelis) and Austria (Billroth). For example, some people may be very good at hearing the difference between two pitches close in frequency (pitch height), but these same people may display poor or limited musical creativity. Thus, it is a multifaceted concept that captures different forms of engagement with music, and individuals may vary in their level of sophistication on these different facets.
Specifically, musical sophistication refers to musical skills, expertise, and achievements, but also to musical understanding and appreciation. Similar to IQ or emotional intelligence, musical sophistication is defined as a psychometric concept, that is, it aims to objectively measure a skill, aptitude, or personality trait.
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