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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused as to how you could get anything but 26/26...

The tunes which are "wrong" aren't subtly off, they're grossly distorted - to the degree where on some of them it's hard to tell what the tune was meant to be, but you know that you're listening to some kind of godawful mess, and the answer must therefore be "No".

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Well, for one, you could not know the tunes and think it's all random chromatic scale piano playing and thus all played « correctly ».

Except it's made clear from the way the test is designed that that's not the case

If you have some musical knowledge or experience it's pretty easy to tell which tunes are wrong even if you've never heard them. Assuming you have knowledge of the western musical tradition, e.g. modes, major/minor keys, etc, it's usually pretty clear where a melody should be going even if you haven't heard it (i.e. it will probably remain in the tonal centre of the piece).

If you don't recognize the songs you don't know if something is intentional or not. You can stay in-tune while not playing a song correctly.

That's interesting, do you have any links you could point me to in order to learn more about this? For instance, let's say we're in C Major.

Tune1 = C D F A G C

Tune2 = C F D A G C

How can you tell which (if any) is wrong or not and how?

I got 21/26, as of my comment the lowest score in the comment section here, but the website said it was a fine sense of pitch. Honestly I thought I'd get less than 50% before I began. I also did not recognise some of the melodies.

Some also sounded right, but cut out the last tone. Not sure if those are supposed to be counted as correct or incorrect so I did a 50/50 on those.

> Some also sounded right, but cut out the last tone. Not sure if those are supposed to be counted as correct or incorrect so I did a 50/50 on those.

Those should be counted as correct.

The webpage states the following:

"Research shows that 2 to 5 percent of the U.S. population has problems with pitch perception."

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