Assessing and Understanding Individual Differences in Music Perception Abilities

A common approach for determining musical competence is to rely on information
about individuals’ extent of musical training, but relying on musicianship status fails to
identify musically untrained individuals with musical skill, as well as those who, despite
extensive musical training, may not be as skilled. To counteract this limitation, the
working aim of this thesis was to develop a new test battery (The Profile of Music
Perception Skills; PROMS) that measures perceptual musical skills across multiple
domains: tonal (melody, pitch), qualitative (timbre, tuning), temporal (rhythm, rhythmto-
melody, accent, tempo), and dynamic (loudness). The development and validation of
the PROMS are presented in studies 1 to 4. Overall, the PROMS has satisfactory
psychometric properties for the composite score and fair to good coefficients for the
individual subtests. Convergent validity was established with the relevant dimensions of
Gordon’s Advanced Measures of Music Audiation and Musical Aptitude Profile
(melody, rhythm, tempo), the Musical Ear Test (rhythm), and sample instrumental
sounds (timbre). Criterion validity is evidenced by a sizeable relationship between test
performance and a composite of various indicators of musical proficiency as well as
discriminant validity by a generic auditory discrimination task. The application of the
PROMS in examining the structure of music perception mechanism is also presented. In
particular, the relationship between music perception skills and non-musical abilities is
explored in Study 4. The results suggest that the interrelationships among the various
subtests could be accounted for by two higher order factors, sensory and structural
music processing; the structural processing skill is related to short-term and working
memory. Rhythm perception (rhythm and rhythm-to-melody subtests) also shows
significant correlation with general mental ability. An Internet study with the PROMS
was conducted to examine whether the findings of controlled studies can be replicated
with a more diverse population and uncontrolled environment. Most of the findings of
the controlled studies were replicated in the Internet study with several exceptions that
are reported in Study 5. A brief version of the full PROMS is proposed as a timeefficient
approximation of the full version of the battery.