DISCOVERY 



73 



fork for which he gave 75 per cent, right answers. 

 Very great individual differences were found ; one 

 person could perceive a difference of a quarter of a 

 vibration per second, while another could only dis- 

 tinguish two notes in the same position in the scale 

 if their pitch difference was fifty vibrations per second. 

 Thus in this capacity the best person tested was two 

 hundred times better than the worst — a remarkably 

 wide range. 



An Untrainable Faculty 



The importance of this ability to discriminate pitches, 

 both for the performance and for the appreciation of 

 music, can hardly be questioned. It is therefore not 

 surprising to find that in an examination of members of 

 the Royal Opera in Menna by Stacker, a very fine 

 power of pitch discrimination was discovered, ranging 

 from -I to i-i vibration per second for the A above 

 middle C.^ The question, however, which immedi- 

 ately raises itself in the mind is whether this finer 

 pitch discrimination in musicians and singers is due to 

 their training or whether it is inborn. In other words, 

 has a man fine pitch discrimination because he is a 

 practised musician, or has he become a musician 

 (partly, at least) because he had a fine power of pitch 

 discrimination from the first. If the former alterna- 

 tive were true, the measure of pitch discrimination 

 would reveal musical training and not musical talent. 

 From evidence drawn from a variety of sources. 

 Professor Seashore concludes that the ability to dis- 

 criminate pitch is innate, and is not affected by train- 

 ing. No material difference is found in the pitch 

 discrimination record of a pupil after he has entered 

 on a musical training, although such observations 

 have been made for several years. Nor does this 

 power increase with age. A group of children show 

 the same distribution of the capacity as their parents. 



While sensitive pitch discrimination seems to go hand 

 in hand with spontaneous evidence of musical interest 

 in children, it seems to be practically unrelated to the 

 tendency to give them musical training. In other 

 words, a child with a finely discriminating ear is no 

 more likely to receive musical training than a more 

 ordinary child. This may not be altogether wrong 

 for two reasons. First, it must be noticed that pitch 

 discrimination is not the only factor which makes up 

 musical talent, and all the other factors must be 

 taken into account in deciding what children are 

 suitable for musical training. Secondly, although 

 high musical achievement probably necessitates fine 

 pitch discrimination, something less even than the 

 normal fineness of discrimination is enough for most 

 of the purposes for which musical education is ordin- 



' Professor Seashore, however, throws doubt on the lowest 

 of these figures. 



arily acquired. The fact that he can never be a first- 

 class singer docs not mean that a child will gain no 

 benefit from an education in music. 



Other Tests 



The other investigations followed similar lines, with 

 such differences of e.xperimental method as their 

 different problems required. For testing the sense of 

 intensity, two notes were sounded successively, and 

 the subject was required to say which was the louder. 

 Similarly, for the sense of time, three successive taps 

 were made, and the subject was required to state 

 whether the interval between the second and third 

 was equal to, greater than, or less than, that between 

 the first and second. In the test for sense of con- 

 sonance (sounding of two notes in harmony) two 

 chords were sounded successively, and the subject 

 was required to give a purely asthetic judgment of 

 which of them appeared to him to be the more pleasing. 

 The musical memory test is a more elaborate one. 

 A series of notes ranging in length from two to si.x 

 is sounded twice, one note being altered for the second 

 time of sounding. The subject is required to say which 

 note is different in the second sounding. This test 

 appears ridiculously easy to a person with fairly good 

 musical memory, but other persons find it difficult or 

 impossible to detect the note altered in the longer 

 series. The investigation of auditory and motor 

 imagery follows the general lines of Galton's famous 

 questionnaire,- but it is more detailed. It is, I think, 

 open to the criticism that in giving six degrees of 

 vividness of images of all kinds it introduces a false 

 appearance of exactness. Other more objective tests 

 of imagery have been discovered since Galton's time, 

 but these are less easy to apply. 



The value of such an analysis can be tested by the 

 musical ability which the individual shows in other 

 ways. Such a correlation has been shown by Pro- 

 fessor Seashore to exist. He gives as examples three 

 cases taken from a collection of 308 university students. 

 Mr. White ranked between go and 100 in sense of pitch 

 and consonance, keenness of hearing, memory, singing 

 key, and register of voice, and his worst record — in 

 motility (capability of motion) — was over 60. Although 

 he had had little formal training, he showed great 

 interest and activity in music, and was emotionally 

 responsive to it. Mr. Black ranked 10 or less in such 

 important factors as sense of pitch, time, and con- 

 sonance, and also in auditory imagery, so although 

 he was better in relatively unimportant factors, such 

 as sense of intensity, he might reasonably have been 

 expected to be decidedly inferior in musical talent. 

 This was the case. He had taken music lessons, but 

 met with failure, and had little interest in music. 

 2 Inquiries into Human Faculty, by F. Galton. Appendi.K E. 



