Are you singing and people keep telling you how awful you sound, but you think you sound, alright? Or, you tune your guitar by ear, but anytime someone picks up your guitar, they cringe at how badly it’s out of tune? Well, maybe you’re tone-deaf.
Luckily for you, researchers at Harvard University have created a Tone-Deaf Test so that you can find out for yourself. In the end, if you happen to be tone-deaf, it only makes it more challenging to perform music, but you can still enjoy the music!
In the test, there will be questions for you to answer and some sounds for you to hear, which will test your pitch perception ability – how sensitive you are to minimal changes in pitch – and how fast you perceive them. The tones they play for you to hear are similar to the sounds of piano keys. There are three trials with different pitched tones, either lower or higher, and you have to guess if it’s low or high.
Some of the tones are noticeably higher or lower, making it obvious (unless you’re tone-deaf) to know the difference. However, some sounds are very close in pitch, and they can be difficult to tell whether its higher or lower, even if you’re not tone-deaf. For the test, you can use speakers or headphones, but headphones are recommended because you can adequately hear the tones. The test takes less than 5 minutes.
As a bonus, by participating in this quiz, you are helping the music research team at Harvard University better understand how pitch perception varies worldwide. To take the Tone-Deafness Test, click here.
