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Many creative musicians “hear” shapes when they listen to music. I’ve labeled the ability to do this logically as associative musical visual intelligence, or “amvi” for short. This flash-based test attempts to quantify one’s ability to represent musical phrases as shapes. It’s a challenging test to complete successfully, but the logic throughout the test is consistent. For instance, here are two example answer choices for a musical phrase:

The actual musical phrase consists of two short repeated elements: first played by one instrument (black), then a second instrument (red). There is also a third instrument whose pitch direction is going up throughout the phrase (blue arrow). Therefore, the symbol on the right would be correct. If the pitch direction of the third instrument were downwards, then the symbol on the left would be correct.
Give it a try yourself, and of course I welcome your feedback.

You can find the test here. 

“But I’ve never heard of being rhythmdeaf,” you may ask. Someone who is “rhythmdeaf” has difficulty perceiving changes in a beat. This handicap would make it extremely difficult for such an indivual to succeed in a career of reality television cavorting with the well-toned, too-tanned B-list crowd.

If you think that you may have this problem, please take a new test I just made. It is very similar to the tonedeaf test that has so far had more than 100,000 submitted scores. Any comments you may have on this new test are very welcome.

You can find the test here.

If you enjoyed taking the tonedeaf test, then you will also have fun with this one. This is a completely new test designed to quickly measure how well you can tell two tones apart.

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

You will get instant results after taking the test. I recommend having a good sound system or headphones. Flashplayer 8 or 9 is required.

You can find the test here.