Musical talent

Musical talent is not one single concept, but it is composed of several subcomponents, which are to be treated (in research: tested) separately. Based on the collection provided by Nardo &

Reiterer (2009), musicality has the following components:

- tonal abilities: pitch perception, sense of tonality, harmony-polyphony;

- rhythmic abilities: metre abstraction, perception of rhythmic structures, rhythmic anticipation, the practo-rhythmic factor, tempo-tapping;

- kinaesthetic abilities: music performance, the ability to improvise, expressivity of the performer, auditory perception;

- aesthetic abilities: expression, appreciation, emotion.

The lack of musical talent is equivalent to the condition called tone deafness (referred to as

“congenital amusia” in the scientific literature). Congenital amusia is to be distinguished from acquired amusia: in our discussion, we will only be concerned with amusia as a defect existing since birth, and the case of tone deafness developing as a result of brain damage will be disregarded.

Amusia has been defined is various ways: some definitions focus primarily on perception and define amusia as “a lifelong impairment of music perception” (Peretz et al. 2007), that is, a pitch perception deficit. According to an extended version of the definition (cf., e.g., Pearce 2005), amusia also subsumes a defect in musical memory and recognition, singing (i.e., difficulty singing in tune, or even a total lack of ability to do so) and timing of music (i.e., rhythm).

As for the relationship between musicality and foreign language skills, although it is common belief that musical talent enhances language learning, the effect of musicality on L2/FL pronunciation skills (or L2/FL skills in general) was not proved by research for many years and thus did not receive recognition in the literature on factors influencing foreign accentedness. For example, Tahta et al. (1981), Thompson (1991) and Flege et al. (1995) have all addressed the issue, but could not prove that musical ability and pronunciation skills were correlated, and Piske et al.’s (2001) widely cited overview of factors affecting degree of foreign accent does not list musicality as a predictor of success in non-native pronunciation acquisition.

In later studies, however, the positive effect of musical talent on pronunciation skills was proved. For example, Milovanov et al. (2004) examined a musical class and an ordinary class of Finnish secondary school students of English (71 participants altogether) and found that the students in the music class performed better both in a production and a perception task (the former involved reading out a passage containing sounds problematic for Finnish learners, and the latter was a sound discrimination test whereby the participants had to choose the one out of three words which was pronounced differently from the other two, e.g., ship–sheep–ship).

Milovanov et al. (2008) provided further proof that musicality and pronunciation skills were correlated: the participants of the study (40 Finnish pupils, aged 10–12) took part in various tests: a musicality test both before and after an 8-week-long English pronunciation training they completed; and perception (discrimination) tests as well as production tests based on English sounds problematic for Finnish learners. The main findings of the study were that the results of the music tests and the pronunciation tests were positively correlated.

Dolman & Spring (2014) was among the first studies on the connection between musicality and pronunciation skills that did not measure musicality as a whole but certain components of musicality only: the results of this study, which focussed on Japanese participants’ pronunciation of English consonants problematic for Japanese speakers, have shown that musical timing ability (but no other components, viz., pitch, loudness, rhythm or tone) and the pronunciation of [r] and [l] were positively correlated.

It is not among the aims of this section to provide a thorough overview of the results of previous research on musicality and pronunciation; the sole purpose here was to highlight that although at first the connection between musicality and pronunciation skills was not recognised, nowadays more and more studies confirm the correlation between them.

Let us now provide a brief account of how exactly musicality has been measured in research on musical talent, because it is based on this overview that the data collection instruments of Experiment 2 were chosen (cf. Section 5.2.4.3). Musicality tests relying on self-reported information will be deliberately ignored (cf. Section 1.2.5), so the discussion below will only be concerned with tools which are able to test the degree of one’s musical talent objectively. The discussion will draw heavily on Rybińska & Gralińska-Brawata’s (2018) collection and review.

Each task type featured in the musicality tests recur in more than one musicality test: for example, typical music perception tasks include noticing deviations in melody and rhythm (“same or different” tasks, i.e., ones where the task is to listen to two musical or rhythmical phrases and decide whether they are the same or they are different), determining the number of

sounds in a chord, identifying whether a chord is major or minor, finding the highest and/or the lowest tone in a sequence, and deciding whether a scale is going up or down. Production tests usually involve imitation tasks (repeating either individual tones or series of tones, and clapping out rhythmic sequences), finishing melodic phrases, or free performance (i.e., singing a song).

The most famous and/or most frequently used musicality tests are as follows:

1. Seashore Measures of Musical Talent (Seashore 1919):

The Seashore Measures of Musical Talent, also called the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability, is the oldest and most widely known standardised musicality test, developed by Carl Emil Seashore in 1919. The tests (which Seashore preferred calling “measures”) include pitch, loudness, tempo, timbre and rhythm discrimination tasks. The advantage of the tests is that they are highly elaborate, which means however that the tests take quite long to do. The tests have not been adapted for online use either, therefore they can only be taken in a traditional pen-and-paper format. The Seashore test served as the basis for all the other musicality tests that were developed later.

2. Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (cf. Peretz et al. 2003):

Another widely used musicality test is the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA). The test consists of six components, of which five are “same or different” tasks testing the participants’ perception of contour, scale, interval, rhythm and metrics. The sixth component is a test on musical memory. The full test takes approximately 90 minutes to complete.

3. The Bentley Test (Bentley 1966):

The Bentley Test (also called the Musical Aptitude Test) was developed in 1966 and the tasks were designed to target younger participants (elementary school children). It is no longer used widely, but it was immensely popular in England at the time, especially because it was the first set of standardised tests aimed at children.

4. The Musical Ear Test (Wallentin et al. 2010):

The Musical Ear Test (MET) was developed with the aim of creating a relatively short musicality test (can be completed in approximately 20 minutes). The test thus focusses on two musicality components only (melody and rhythm), and contains tasks of the “same of different”

type.

5. Profile of Music Perception Skills (PROMS):

The advantage of the Profile of Music Perception Skills test is that it contains a variety of different tasks (just like the Seashore test and the Bentley Test, but in contrast to these two, the PROMS test is fully available online). Furthermore, the PROMS test has multiple versions,

each of which takes a different amount of time to complete (from 3 to 60 minutes), therefore the version to be used can be chosen based on the purpose the test is needed for.

6. Mandell’s music tests (http://jakemandell.com/):

These include four musicality tests designed by radiologist Jacob C. Mandell, who, before starting medical school, pursued a brief career as a composer of electronic music, releasing three full-length albums between 1999 and 2001. What led to his creation of the four musicality tests was that he was a member of a research team working at the Music And Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School), and they conducted experiments which were designed to examine neuro-anatomical correlates of congenital amusia. The musicality tests were created as part of the research project, because they needed a relatively quick way to test tone deafness, and existing musicality tests were not suitable in this respect.

Mandell’s four musicality tests (a tone-deaf test, a rhythm test, a pitch test and an associative musical visual intelligence test) are available freely online on his website. The results submitted are evaluated automatically. The sound files featured in the tests are all Mandell’s own copyright, and the complexity of the musical phrases contributes significantly to the fact that his tests are more difficult than other tests of the same kind (Mandell himself points out that the tests were made extraordinarily difficult on purpose, and even professionally trained musicians rarely score above 80% in his tone-deaf test, for example). It follows from this that while other tests are able to screen for tone deafness, they are most probably unable to reveal differences between an average and an exceptional performance, which Mandell’s tests are able to do.

Until 2021 spring, Mandell’s tests have not been used in research on language apart from a series of experiments conducted in Poland (Jekiel & Malarski 2017, Jekiel & Malarski 2021, Malarski & Jekiel 2016). The experiment to be introduced in Section 5.2 contributes to the limited use of Mandell’s tests in language-related studies as three of the four tests were used as data collection instruments in the experiment. The three tests in question will therefore be described in even further detail in Section 5.2.4.3.

7. Some further tests:

Some further musicality tests that are not as influential as the ones described above but which are also worth mentioning are The Tone-deaf Test (http://tone-deaftest.com/), which is a much shorter (but thus also less meticulous) test for measuring tone deafness than Mandell’s; and the Distorted Tunes Test (https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/tunestest/take-distorted-tunes-test), which is unique in the task type used (the task is to decide whether some well-known tunes were played

correctly or incorrectly), but a disadvantage of which is that it requires the participants’

familiarity with each of the tunes used.

This completes the discussion of musical talent, but this variable will be addressed again in Section 5.2.