Assessing intonation skills in a tertiary music training programme

[Abstract]: Buttsworth, Fogarty, and Rorke (1993) reported the construction of a battery of tonal tests designed to assess intonation abilities. A subset of the tests in the battery predicted 36 per cent of final scores in an aural training subject in a tertiary music course. In the current study, the original battery of fourteen tests was reduced to six tests and administered three times throughout the academic year to a new sample (N = 87) of tertiary music students. Three research questions were investigated. Firstly, it was hypothesised that tests in the battery would discriminate among the different aural classes at USQ, which were grouped according to ability level. The results from discriminant function analyses provided strong support for this hypothesis. Secondly, it was hypothesised that students should improve their performance on the pitch battery across the three administrations. A repeated measures analysis of variance failed to find evidence of overall improvement. Finally, it was hypothesised that there would be significant differences on the intonation tests between musicians of different instrumental families. Again, no overall differences were found. The results indicated that intonation tests appear to tap an ability that (a) is not significantly modified by training, (b) is more or less the same across different instrument families, and (c) is related to success in music training programmes

Predicting aural performance in a tertiary music training programme

[Abstract]: Selection of students for entry to tertiary music training programmes is a difficult task traditionally undertaken by painstaking individual auditions, perhaps under highly variable local conditions as the selection team moves from region to region. A number of musical aptitude batteries have been developed but do not appear to have been widely embraced largely because of poor predictive validity. In the present study, a battery of tests designed to assess aural skills, an important component of musical training, was developed by a team of psychologists and musicians at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ). The battery consisted mostly of tests of pitch discrimination and intonation. All students (N=91) currently enrolled in the Music Programme at USQ completed the musical tests. A regression model was then constructed using test scores as independent variables and students' end of semester aural training performance scores as the dependent variable. The resulting model accounted for 36 per cent of the variance in scores on final exam results, a result well beyond chance expectations. Further testing with a revised version of the battery is underway