Take note – being 'musical' covers a wide scale of talents

DID you decide, at eight years old, that you would never get along with music because you couldn't get a decent tune out of a recorder? Was the baby thrown out with the bath water when you abandoned your junior violin because the cat was howling? Or did some insensitive teacher place you at the back of the host of angels in the Christmas show because you "couldn't hold a tune"?

A bad early experience can scar you for life and certainly make you doubt that you have a musical nerve in your body. We also somehow perceive we are not musical if we have simply never had the opportunity to learn to sing or play an instrument under formal tuition. These suppositions may be very wide of the mark.

The old ideas of what it meant to be musical – including accurately playing a scale or singing back a short piece of music after one hearing – have come to be questioned by a new breed of musical researchers, psychologists and neuroscientists.

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They now ask whether a whole range of behaviours around engaging with music, for example enjoying it regularly as a listener, being able to appreciate it in some depth, discuss it intelligently and respond to it emotionally, as well as being able to clap or dance in rhythm or join in a vocal harmony are signs that many more of us are potentially musicians that we ever realised. Musicality is being given a wider definition, and a new BBC research project designed in conjunction with psychologists from Goldsmiths University of London should pinpoint how musical we are as a nation by exploring our "hidden musicality" via an online test anyone can log on to sign up for.

They're calling on members of the public to take part and find out about their musical profile, doing short practical musical tasks like categorising very short bursts of music into different genres, spotting whether an artificial beat played over a piece of music is on or off the rhythm, spotting whether two pairs of musical passages are completely the same or not, and a battery of questions about lifestyle, musical tastes, learning and responses to music.

"The ability to play music is just one aspect of musicality", says Dr Lauren Stewart, senior lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths. "Some people may not be able to play a musical instrument but are able to move easily to the beat while dancing. this is clearly another dimension of being musical, yet they might consider themselves to be totally unmusical".

The scientific data gathered online over the next year wll be analysed to establish whether people who are untrained but passionate about music can be just as musical as those who have been formally trained. After all, Paul McCartney had no formal musical training when he began to compose some of the world's best-loved and enduring melodies, and he has also gone on to write classical oratorios. He and Jimi Hendrix are examples of self-taught individuals with a high level of musicality who grew to understand many levels of music through the act of making music but without being conversant with technicalities such as diatonic chords.

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Music psychologist Dr Daniel Mullensiefen, also of Goldsmiths, says: "Our central hypothesis is that many people are more musical than they think, and traditional methods have been too narrow in how they measure musicality and too biased towards classical music. Most tests don't test for the full range of abilities, and that's why we're asking people to take part in a wide ranging test which covers musical activities which include going to concerts of all kinds, and responses to music such as whether it can give you a shiver up your spine. We'll be doing a factor analysis to see which behaviours, alongside a lot of practice, make a good musician.

"Some people may never have played much music but have a great way of appreciating, understanding and speaking about it across a wide range. You see that in many of the music bloggers on the internet. Music is a very complex skill and can take a while to develop, yet children often get told off for 'getting it wrong'. They give up after an early bad experience, when often you can simply not gel with one instrument, but could be very good at another – given the chance to have a go. We are too quick to write people off, I think, although there is a fascinating condition called amusia, which means a person just does not 'get' music in a pathological sense, no matter how much you train them."

To take the test go to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 and follow links to How Musical Are You?