The performance of professional musicians on the seashore measures of musical talent: an unexpected finding

During an investigation designed to explore the effects of brain lesions on musical ability in professional musicians, the Seashore Scale was used to discover whether focal damage was associated with specific impairment of any of the basic elements of musical talent. In order to obtain adequate control of the experimental group it was necessary to study a comparable group of professional musicians. For this purpose the Seashore test battery was given to 21 orchestral players. The scores obtained by these professionals were better than an estimate of the population values in only three of the six tests, pitch discrimination, rhythm and tonal memory; they were significantly poorer in the test of timbre. This unexpected finding sheds doubt on Seashore's assumptions about the requirements for high musical talent. It also raises questions on the use of the Seashore battery in certain areas of psychological research.