Seashore Measures of Musical Talents (1919)

“MEASURES OF MUSICAL TALENT” · FIRST SERIES

Five double-disk records, each tied to a chapter of the book

Seashore's preface lists the records and the chapters that explain them. They came with a free booklet of directions, norms and interpretations for class experiments, school surveys, music studios, and what he called “scientific entertainment in home circles.” Pick a record.

Sense of pitchPairs of tones; is the second higher or lower? Seashore's laboratory work used tuning forks around a′ = 435, and Table I shows the forks and the disk side by side.Playable below, with his norms.

A second series covered motor tests, using instruments for timed and rhythmic action. Seashore says the first series “will be extended from time to time.”

PLAY · HIGHER OR LOWER

Is the second tone higher or lower?

Seashore's standard was a′ at 435 vibrations per second, the international pitch of his day. You hear it, then a second tone that differs by a few vibrations. The difference shrinks when you're right and grows when you're wrong, stepping through the same differences as his Table I. After 24 trials the page reads your result off his norms.

PITCH · READY

Standard 435 Hz, then the comparison tone.

SMALLEST DIFFERENCE YOU HELD—Your level averaged over the last ten trials.

Use headphones at a comfortable level. Pure sine tones stand in for his tuning-fork record. Percentiles only apply to the pitch test, and only loosely: they were set on 1,265 Iowa students with forks, not on browsers.

TABLE I · NORMS OF THE SENSE OF PITCH FOR ADULTS

Everything in percentile rank

Seashore kept every measurement as a percentile rank, which he called a universal way of putting very different measurements on common terms. Rank 1 is the lowest of a hundred, rank 100 the highest. His pitch table comes from 1,265 university students in or above the sophomore class.

The spread is enormous. The best could hear a quarter of a vibration's difference at 435; the bottom few couldn't reliably hear 34 vibrations, a third of a tone.

% RIGHT FORKS% RIGHT DISKSVIB. DIFF.PART OF TONEPERCENTILE

100%94%0.25.005100

95%90%1.0297

90%86%2.0480

85%81%3.0552

80%77%5.1032

75%71%8.1518

70%66%12.2210

65%62%18.336

60%57%25.463

55%53%34.631

Transcribed from Seashore (1919), Table I, Chapter II. Your row is highlighted after the pitch test.

HOW HE USED THE SCORES

A talent profile, not a single number

CASE STUDY IN CHAPTER I · “THEODORA”Seashore opens with a sample profile of a girl he calls Theodora. She scores high on the sensory measures and has a good voice register, excellent voice quality and “decidedly superior” tonal memory. Her mental age is two years ahead of normal. His conclusion is that she has a rare balance of sensory capacities and an intellectual rather than motor type of mind, and so should not be expected to be as quick in motor skill as in hearing.

Talent is inborn and specific. Seashore treated each capacity as largely fixed and separate. A child could be keen in pitch and poor in rhythm, and training would refine but not create the capacity.

Only loosely tied to intelligence. Comparing students' brightness with their pitch records, he found a slight positive relation, far from the perfect one that would make pitch a stand-in for intelligence.

FROM LAB TO RECORD TO REVISION

Forty years of the Seashore tests

Columbia issues the Measures of Musical Talent records; Silver, Burdett publishes The Psychology of Musical Talent to explain them.Sources [1]

REFERENCES

[1]Seashore, C. E. (1919). The Psychology of Musical Talent. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company (Internet Archive).archive.org

[2]Seashore, C. E., Lewis, D., & Saetveit, J. G. (1960). Seashore Measures of Musical Talents, revised manual. Psychological Corporation (Internet Archive search).archive.org

[3]Wikipedia. Carl Seashore.en.wikipedia.org

[4]Seashore, C. E. (1915). The measurement of musical talent. The Musical Quarterly, 1(1), 129–148.doi

[5]University of Iowa. Seashore Hall and the Seashore legacy (university archives search).search

Editorial record: title page, the five records, the percentile method, Table I, the Theodora profile and the brightness comparison are from the digitised 1919 first edition [1]. The 1939 revision, 1960 manual and biographical dates are from secondary sources and weren't checked against the originals.

KEEP EXPLORING

1884 · Hearing as a measureGalton's Anthropometric LaboratoryGalton's whistle tested the highest audible note, an early sensory measure like Seashore's.1914 · Seashore's audiometerWhipple's ManualWhipple's sensory chapters list Seashore's audiometer among the standard instruments.1880 · The laboratory traditionWundt's Reaction TimeSeashore's precise sound timing comes out of the same instrument-based psychology.

Part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Seashore's records: musical talent on a phonograph disk.

Five double-disk records, each tied to a chapter of the book

Is the second tone higher or lower?

Everything in percentile rank

A talent profile, not a single number

Forty years of the Seashore tests

A good ear is one capacity. Reasoning is another.