Assessing and understanding individual differences in music perception abilities

• Main Author: Law, Lily
• Other Authors: Zentner, Marcel
• Published: University of York 2012
• Subjects: 780
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.561089

A common approach for determining musical competence is to rely on information about individuals’ extent of musical training, but relying on musicianship status fails to identify musically untrained individuals with musical skill, as well as those who, despite extensive musical training, may not be as skilled. To counteract this limitation, the working aim of this thesis was to develop a new test battery (The Profile of Music Perception Skills; PROMS) that measures perceptual musical skills across multiple domains: tonal (melody, pitch), qualitative (timbre, tuning), temporal (rhythm, rhythmto- melody, accent, tempo), and dynamic (loudness). The development and validation of the PROMS are presented in studies 1 to 4. Overall, the PROMS has satisfactory psychometric properties for the composite score and fair to good coefficients for the individual subtests. Convergent validity was established with the relevant dimensions of Gordon’s Advanced Measures of Music Audiation and Musical Aptitude Profile (melody, rhythm, tempo), the Musical Ear Test (rhythm), and sample instrumental sounds (timbre). Criterion validity is evidenced by a sizeable relationship between test performance and a composite of various indicators of musical proficiency as well as discriminant validity by a generic auditory discrimination task. The application of the PROMS in examining the structure of music perception mechanism is also presented. In particular, the relationship between music perception skills and non-musical abilities is explored in Study 4. The results suggest that the interrelationships among the various subtests could be accounted for by two higher order factors, sensory and structural music processing; the structural processing skill is related to short-term and working memory. Rhythm perception (rhythm and rhythm-to-melody subtests) also shows significant correlation with general mental ability. An Internet study with the PROMS was conducted to examine whether the findings of controlled studies can be replicated with a more diverse population and uncontrolled environment. Most of the findings of the controlled studies were replicated in the Internet study with several exceptions that are reported in Study 5. A brief version of the full PROMS is proposed as a timeefficient approximation of the full version of the battery.