Assessing Intonation Skills in a Tertiary Music Training Programme

[Abstract]: Buttsworth, Fogarty, and Rorke (1993) reported the construction of a battery of tonaltests designed to assess intonation abilities. A subset of the tests in the batterypredicted 36 per cent of final scores in an aural training subject in a tertiary music course. Inthe current study, the original battery of fourteen tests was reduced to six tests andadministered three times throughout the academic year to a new sample (N = 87) oftertiary music students. Three research questions were investigated. Firstly, it washypothesised that tests in the battery would discriminate among the different auralclasses at USQ, which were grouped according to ability level. The results fromdiscriminant function analyses provided strong support for this hypothesis. Secondly,it was hypothesised that students should improve their performance on the pitchbattery across the three administrations. A repeated measures analysis of variancefailed to find evidence of overall improvement. Finally, it was hypothesised that therewould be significant differences on the intonation tests between musicians of differentinstrumental families. Again, no overall differences were found. The results indicatedthat intonation tests appear to tap an ability that (a) is not significantly modified bytraining, (b) is more or less the same across different instrument families, and (c) isrelated to success in music training programmes