Assessing Musical Abilities Objectively: Construction and Validation of the Profile of Music Perception Skills

Abstract

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, we developed a new test battery (Profile of Music Perception Skills; PROMS) that measures perceptual musical skills across multiple domains: tonal (melody, pitch), qualitative (timbre, tuning), temporal (rhythm, rhythm-to-melody, accent, tempo), and dynamic (loudness). The PROMS has satisfactory psychometric properties for the composite score (internal consistency and test-retest r>.85) and fair to good coefficients for the individual subtests (.56 to.85). 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 was evidenced by consistently sizeable and significant relationships between test performance and external musical proficiency indicators in all three studies (.38 to.62, p<.05 to p<.01). An absence of correlations between test scores and a nonmusical auditory discrimination task supports the battery’s discriminant validity (−.05, ns). The interrelationships among the various subtests could be accounted for by two higher order factors, sequential and sensory music processing. A brief version of the full PROMS is introduced as a time-efficient approximation of the full version of the battery.

How musical are music video game players?

“…The present study is the first to our knowledge to show thatlike musicians (Law & Zentner, 2012;Schneider et al, 2002)-people with experience playing music video games have better music listening skills than do people who do not play music video games or a musical instrument. There are at least four potential explanations for this result: (1) Playing music video games and taking music lessons causes enhanced musical aptitude; (2) musical aptitude causes individuals to take music lessons and to play video games; (3) a third, unrelated factor (such as personality) drives both music aptitude and choice of hobbies; or (4) differences in musical aptitude or auditory processing skills drive some individuals to select environments that promote better listening skills, creating a circular, cascading interaction between aptitude and experience.…”

“…The Profile of Music Perception Skills (PROMS) task is a musical perception battery that objectively tests for musical skill and can be administered to individuals with or without music training (Law & Zentner, 2012). The brief PROMS consists of four subtasks (tuning, tempo, melody, and rhythm; see the supplementary information) in which participants make "same"-versus-"different" judgments between standard and comparison stimuli using the following response categories: definitely same, probably same, probably different, definitely different, and I don't know.…”

Tuning the mind: Exploring the connections between musical ability and executive functions

“…In addition, our processing tasks measured only melodic and rhythmic discrimination and did not assess musical production, sensitivity to timbre, or any number of other aspects of musical ability. These limitations were necessary given time constraints, however the development of more comprehensive measures of musical ability (e.g., Law & Zentner, 2012;Müllensiefen, Gingras, Musil, & Stewart, 2014) will be of great benefit to future work on the relationships between musical and non-musical abilities.…”

Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise

“…The PROMS (Profile of Music Perception Skills, Law and Zentner, 2012) assesses perceptual musical skills across multiple dimensions (melody, timbre, rhythm, etc. ) (http://www.uibk.ac.at/psychologie/forschung/tests_and_diagnostics/).…”

“…On the PROMS (Profile of Music Perception Skills, Law and Zentner, 2012), which assesses auditory perceptual musical skills across multiple dimensions, musicians outperformed controls on each of the subtests (all Ps<0.001; see Table 1). …”