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When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time improvising on the piano. I had been taking classical music lessons for years, but always loved to play around on the piano, composing little pieces for myself—mostly they were pop inspired pieces, nothing complicated. One day, some researchers worked with my school to administer a test to find out if there was a connection between standardized test scores (in our case, the ACT) and musical aptitude. Pattern matching was the way they decided to test this. They set a tape recorder in the middle of the room and gave us a multiple choice sheet. First, they played the beginning of a melody, which stopped abruptly. Then, they played four different ways the melody could resolve. Our goal was to choose the most likely. Sometimes, the pieces would be something classic, like Mozart or Beethoven. Other times, they were more contemporary. I glanced around the room to see the reaction of the other students. The choices all seemed very obvious to me. Afterwards, I asked around and most people said they had to guess on most of them. The next day, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that I had scored the highest in the school. I never did follow up to see what the results of the research was, but to this day, I believe I wouldn't have done that well if I had not spent a lot of time listening to music and tinkering with melody lines in my free time. |