"Can You Sing Happy Birthday In Tune?"

[Ruro]

This was just posted on another forum i visit, the forum itself completely unrelated to Music infact, but this sprung up and thought I would share ^_^ I'm basicaly gonna quote from the thread, because I can't be bothered to spend time writing this, but I'm sure others here will find it interesting!

Can you sing Happy Birthday in tune? You might think so, but your nearest and dearest might beg to differ. At the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Dr Lauren Stewart is running an on-line experiment to study tone-deafness.

Several percent of the population are deaf to large changes in pitch. They can't sing in tune, but are completely oblivious to their duff notes. These sufferers have what is known as amusia - to them, one tune sounds pretty similar to the next and listening to music becomes a pointless, even unpleasant chore.

To find out your musical listening scores, go to: https://www.delosis.com/listening/

Apologies if a similar thread is already floating about, but I have looked around!

[cosine]

Bummer! I only got 23 out of 30. I found that the examples in minor were easier to identify as either same or different, and that linear melodies were easier to identify rather than hops, skips, and jumps for melodies.

[invictus]

30/30

Remember, I am synaesthetic.

I can still hum the tunes to you after 3 hours

or backwards

fun

[henrah]

30/30

Remember, I am synaesthetic.

I can still hum the tunes to you after 3 hours

or backwards

fun

Synaesthetic? Please explain...

[quantum]

Synaesthetic? Please explain...

Mixing the senses.  Commonly in music as seeing colours for a particular pitch. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

[perfect_pitch]

For christ sake... Can they make it any easier?? Every single music test these people throw at us... I always get top marks....

It's getting boring as hell. Is there a challenge out there???

[emmdoubleew]

For christ sake... Can they make it any easier?? Every single music test these people throw at us... I always get top marks....

It's getting boring as hell. Is there a challenge out there???

At least you're not pretentious about it. 

[Tash]

ok i can't be bothered doing this because i have better things to do, but that's exactly what we had to do for the unsw music audition, and it was generaly ok unless i tuned out and forgot what the first melody was

but speaking of happy birthday, putting that one high note in the middle was a really dumb idea because it's always ridiculously flat, and everyone sings in different keys anyway, i find it hilarious and can't ever sing the song without laughing my head of at the lack of singing talent in the room

[maxy]

no good...

got 26/30 

[allthumbs]

Interesting test, but not that hard if you're a musician.

I am a liitle suspicious though that once your score is given, the site asks you if you want to participate in future studies and then asks you to provide your full name and date of birth.

I wouldn't recommend providing those details to anyone you don't know, or you can't verify that the request is legitimate.

Beware!


Cheers

allthumbs

[cosine]

Boy, I'm feeling lonely. Only one other person scored similarly to me. 

And no, I didn't give them any personal information. Something smelled fishy.

[lagin]

Doh!  I did!  Great, and I can't take it back either.  What do I do?  Get ready for alot of spam, or change my name and move to another country?

[perfect_pitch]

I would... Hey Lagin - if your interested.. Australia has plenty of room...

HEE HEE!!! I wouldn't worry too much about it...

[annoying_airhead]

I dunno... Melbourne is pretty crowded with the Games going on (YAy!)  =)

B.

[pianorama]

I'm surprised at how many I got wrong... I only got 21. Then again, having my brother playing rock music in the background probably didn't help.

[pianorama]

invictus, how far have you memorized pi? In the wiki thing about synaesthesia, there was a link about pi, and some Japanese person memorized it to over 80,000 digits!

[gorbee natcase]

Not normaly, but I will see if squeezing my nuts in a vice helps

[jas]

Yay, 30/30.

Although, it would have been more challenging if they'd altered the melody rather than just sticking a jarring dissonance into the second one that's near impossible to miss...

Oh, well. It allowed me a few minutes of procrastination.

Jas

[donjuan]

22/30 for me! I think the fact that the tunes were not recognizable in anyway made it hard.

[freakofnature]

24... during the test I thought the score would be higher

[bnatural]

i got 30/30.

[BoliverAllmon]

I had my friend take it. He is always bragging about his musical ear and how superior he is to everyone. It was awesome he scored a 21. LOL!!! I didn't take it. I know that I suck.

[BoliverAllmon]

Holy Cow!!! I actually got a 26. LOL!!! I guess I did better because I wasn't really trying. I just let the music set in.

[tompilk]

25... real music rather than midi would have made it easier i think... dont ask me why...
Tom

[cfortunato]

24.  Actually better than I thought - when picking out melodies by ear I often substitute something close and harmonic for the right one.  But I wonder which ones I got wrong so I could hear them again.

[Mozartian]

26/30.

not bad for a hopelessly untrained ear.

[nik0]

26..

[mutedstring]

i guess anyone with good short term memory, and of course, who can sing in tune, would think it's easy... it would be harder if the tunes were longer and the ones that are different aren't out of harmony...

[getcool]

Although, it would have been more challenging if they'd altered the melody rather than just sticking a jarring dissonance into the second one that's near impossible to miss...

Exactly!

If they changed a note of the melody to another note of the appropriate chord rather than to some random, dissonant pitch, it would actually be a challenge, and I probably wouldn't have scored a 30/30.

Or how about some rhythmic alterations?

[liszt1022]

29/30

I agree... the ones that were "different" usually had a non-diatonic note in there that stuck out like a sore thumb.

some of my classmates can hear "wrong" notes in certain kinds of 12-tone pieces without having heard them before.

[jlh]

30/30

Yeah, most of em were easy because of the ugly tritone that was stuck in there.  Of course, having perfect pitch helped with the others... 

[sergei r]

27. My only problem was forgetting the first tune...

[annoying_airhead]

28... while my problem was my mind wandering off, only to come back and forget the tune itself.  =)  That did NOt make sense; ah well...

[ce nedra]

30/30... it reminds me of those little keyboard toys you buy for 1year olds to learn to recognise melodies.

I need a challenge. That was kind of stupid as the difference was dissonant and almost impossible to miss, even for an untrained ear.

[franzliszt2]

26 haha I wasn't concerntating on the 1st one, i just listened to the second one, whiich had thumpin dissonances in lol, its hard to remain concerntrated throughout,I got bored during it

[csharp_minor]

Test 1 : 28/30

Test2: 29/30

I've never done a online test thing like that so it was fun until I started geting bored after listening to about 10 of them, then my concentration stated to wonder.   

[db05]

If they changed a note of the melody to another note of the appropriate chord rather than to some random, dissonant pitch, it would actually be a challenge, and I probably wouldn't have scored a 30/30.

Or how about some rhythmic alterations?

The second part has rhythmic alterations, but they sound random too. I would have been harder if both melodies didn't sound right. Since the first one always sounds right, I just listen if the second sounds right too. Occassionally, both would sound right to me, then that must be when I got the wrong answer.

Test 1: 27
Test 2: 25

btw, it has little to do with singing Happy Birthday in tune. I can't do that to save my life. The starting unison and the high parts are the hardest for me. Also difficult are school/ church/ national hymns. Awkward intervals and high ranges I can't normally reach.

[mad_max2024]

You scored 27/30 and 30/30

I think I would have scored 30 in the first if I hadn't started getting suspicious about everything being so obvious and started hearing subtle errors that weren't there... 

[communist]

23/30 17/30

[richard black]

29/30 and 29/30, but I found maintaining concentration harder than discerning the differences as such!

[pianowolfi]

28/30 and 29/30. But where the heck is happy birthday Lol I remember that I have come across this thread 2 years ago and did that test. Don't remember my results from back then though

[G.W.K]

Where does "Happy Birthday" come into this? I too found it more difficult to concentrate, especially in Part 2 as I began to get bored!

Part 1 ~ 22/30
Part 2 ~ 22/30

How unusual that I scored the same mark for each test...

G.W.K

[kelly_kelly]

30/30 on both parts. But the second part was easier for me - I was more suspicious of the melodies than of the rhythms. I randomly did a question every few minutes, so it wasn't hard to concentrate.

[quantum]

Part 1: 27/30
Part 2: 30/30

After a while I realized that Part 1 only dealt with pitch variations, while part 2 dealt with rhythmic variations using the same melody.  Consequently I felt there should have been a Part 3 which would deal with both melodic contour and rhythm simultaneously. 

There were some very obvious melodic alterations in Part I, mostly one or two notes transformed by accidental to a non scale tone pitch.  It would have been interesting to see variations of melody which occurred within the harmonic structure.  Eg: C-E-G-E-C vs. C-G-E-G-C

[healdie]

28/30
22/30

2nd test i lost alot of my concentration and doing it in a classroom wasn't wise

but i am happy with the first test result

[mrba1979]

ARRRRG!!  The KIDS!  THE DOG!  How hard would ya think it is be to undistributed for eight lousy minutes!

[faulty_damper]

There were some problems with the test melody fragments.  One of the obvious ones were the melodies often sounded like antecedent phrases.  Consequently, consequent phrases could be formulated in the mind which can skew the results.

[healdie]

ARRRRG!!  The KIDS!  THE DOG!  How hard would ya think it is be to undistributed for eight lousy minutes!

In a college classroom vey hard

[borealis]

My first post on this forum...

I scored 29 and 30 on the two parts.

[28lorelei]

30/30
also curious: can anyone here sing a tritone in tune?