Least Musical

I got home this evening to find a message on my answerphone from the local paper, asking if I could help them with a story.  She said that Goldsmiths had done a study and found out that our town was one of the 10 least musical places.  She said that she was sure it couldn't be true and she wanted to talk to people to get a different angle on it. While I was debating whether to ring them back (my last experience with the paper wasn't an entirely pleasant one and I've been a much happier person since I stopped buying or caring about what was in it), I noticed that they had tweeted their story.
Town Has No Musical Talent

I was surprised that they hadn't gone to more effort to talk to me (or any other musical person in the town), after all, they have my mobile number and my e-mail address and our town has a top choral director in one of the churches, a doctor of music who is an expert organist, a top class Saxophone quartet, a thriving folk scene and rock scene in the pubs and has produced musicians and performers by the bucket-load.  Whether you are a fan of X-factor  or not, it is undeniable that Sam Callahan is famous for music and comes from this town, although they did send him a tweet.

I have now read the full research paper and it is fascinating reading if you are a musically inclined Psychology nerd, who is prepared to wade through lots of statistics.  (Oh, how I've missed a good Pearson Correlation) What I am unable to find is any of the statistics broken down town by town, so it seems as though our local paper may have got their story from the Mirror On Direction Star Harry Styles' home town is least musical in UK .

The study Musicality Study was a psychology tool to measure musical sophistication of non-musical members of the general public.  It was a self-reporting tool that was delivered by the BBC Lab UK website.  They had put together a series of tests to determine how musically sophisticated someone was.  They conducted 5 different studies on the data. The first three studies  were to validate the effectiveness of their tests.  I used to work for a Psychology Company that delivered Psychometric testing and they will be thrilled to be able to add Musical Sophistication to their battery of tests.

The forth study looked at the correlation between how musical someone said they were in comparison to the tests score. They found that the correlation was very moderate, although for people who had received musical training the correlation was much better.

The fifth and final study looked at the socio-demographic results. 147,633 people took the online test and for this part of the study they used the results from the 90.474 participants from the UK.  When comparing location of participants they only used the 70,097 (this is 0.11% of the UK population) who had provided a valid postcode.  They analysed the data for age, level of education, occupation and used postcodes to aggregate the scores of each of the 379 British local authorities.  There were some interesting results from these analyses.  Musical training improved all scores (no surprise), women performed significantly worse on beat perception tests and the melody memory tasks were tackled better by older people.  People in creative occupations and teaching (an extremely creative occupation in my experience) did better in all tasks, as did people with higher levels of education. They compared the data from the local authority aggregate scores with the National income survey and found the people from wealthier areas performed better on the tests.

This study raises some interesting questions for me.  I want to know how many people were in our local authority sample.  I am also interested in the idea that you can measure musical sophistication, as if it is an innate ability.  I think that anyone can learn to be musical and if our area is lacking ability then we need more funding in our area for musical education, so that it can reach all children, as it does in London.  I am curious about who took the test.  I knew nothing about it and I love an online test; in the last week I have discovered what kind of animal I am, who I should go drinking with, which president I am, which Jane Austen character I am and which brand of toilet cleaner I am. Maybe the people of our town were too busy making music in the many orchestras, bands and choirs to take the test.