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Recently, a perfect-pitched colleague informed me that I am tonedeaf. In fact, not only can I not reproduce a pitch, as most people with relative pitch could do, I cannot even recognize whether my reproduction is higher or lower than the original sound. It was suggested that my tonedeafness is so severe that it comes not from lack of musical training, but poor genes. Furthermore, it’s apparently a lot rarer for people who speak tonal languages, e.g. Mandarin for me, to be tonedeaf. I am really one-in-a-million!!
Fascinated by my brain, I embarked on more research. So I found the following tests:
- Tonedeaf Test
- Adaptive Pitch Test
To my surprise, I actually did quite well on them. I got 88.9% correct on the tonedeaf test (93rd percentile) and discriminated pitch up to 0.225Hz (99.1st percentile). Maybe I am not tonedeaf after all.
On the Rhythmdeaf Test, on the other hand, I only got 68% correct (31st percentile). So I still can’t dance.
I guess I also now have less of an excuse for listening to bad music. Recently I’ve been listening to the sappiest song in the world (translation). My only excuse is that I don’t really understand German, so my bad taste in that domain barely counts.
P.S. I still do badly on the relative pitch test when given a middle C.
“Woffles”.
(HT: Woffles, via Simon Charlow.)
