Seashore Measures of Musical Talents: First music aptitude test

About the Seashore Measures of Musical Talents

By the late 1910s, Carl Seashore had been studying musical perception for over a decade at the University of Iowa. He believed that musical ability could be empirically measured by tests of basic perceptual skills - and that such measurement could identify musically gifted children early and direct them toward appropriate training.

The Seashore Measures had six subtests, all administered via phonograph recordings (later, LP records, then cassettes, then CDs): Pitch discrimination (which of two notes is higher), Loudness discrimination (which is louder), Time discrimination (which of two intervals is longer), Rhythm (are the two rhythmic patterns the same), Timbre (do the two tones have the same tone quality), Tonal memory (recognize a melody you just heard).

The test became extremely influential in American music education. School districts used it to identify children for music programs; conservatories used it to screen applicants; the US military used it during WWI to identify potential signal corps personnel (good pitch discrimination correlated with Morse code learning). The 1919 Iowa Tests of Musical Talent went through revisions in 1939, 1956, 1960, and 1971; the test remains in occasional use today and is still cited in music education research.

The 6 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Seashore, C. E. (1919). The Psychology of Musical Talent. Boston: Silver, Burdett & Company.

Public domain (1919 work). Carl Seashore (1866-1949) was Dean of the Graduate College at the University of Iowa and one of the most influential American psychologists of the early 20th century. The Seashore Test went through five editions; the 1919 original is the historical anchor. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/psychologyofmusi0000seas.