Intercorrelations Among Musical Aptitude Profile and Seashore Measures of Musical Talents Subtests

Abstract

IN 1919 THE FIRST standardized group aptitude test, the Seashore Measures of Musical Talent} was published. This battery, in its latest revised form (Seashore, 1960), is comprised of six subtests which measure basic auditory sensory discrimination. According to the test author (Seashore, 1938), everything that is rendered as music or heard as music may be expressed in terms of the concepts of the sound Pitch, Loudness, Rhythm, Time, Timbre} and Tonal Memory are tested by requiring subjects to compare a pair or short series of tones which are produced on a beat-frequency oscillator (except on the Tonal Memory subtest). Because these subtests are supposedly void of the interaction of melody, rhythm, and expression, music psychologists (Mursell, 1937) have described and condemned the battery as being atomistic and unmusically-oriented. Specifically, the omnibus group, antagonists of the Seashore approach, believe that musicality consists of more than just the ability to discriminate audio-acoustical differences in the sound wave. Further, these music psychologists, many of whom are European (Lowery, 1940; and Mainwaring, 1947), argue that aptitude is not compnsed of separate abilities, but rather, that it is one general ability. They contend that a instrument should be used as the medium for stating music test items and that the content of each item should, in and of itself, have musical meaning. The comparatively new Musical Aptitude Profile (Gordon, 1965) has been described as an eclectic test because both preference and nonpreference subtests constitute the test battery and also because, while the content of the test items is and is performed by professional musicians, the battery does, nevertheless, provide for the evaluation of seven postulated dimensions of aptitude. The dimensions measured by this standardized group test are classiSed into three main divisions: Tonal Imagery, Rhythm Imagery, and Musical Sensitivity. Two separate subtests are provided for each of the nonpreference tests: Melody and Harmony for Tonal Imagery, and Tempo and Meter for

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