Since many musical skills are not explicitly trained, but are developed through repeated and focused engagement with music, the results from this large sample highlight the processes of implicit learning that take place during enculturation with Western music. Relating self-reported musical behaviour to the performance on the listening tests enables us to determine the extent to which skill acquisition and expertise may be related to reported patterns of musical engagement. Data from 147,633 individuals, who took both the self-report inventory as well as the battery of listening tests from the Gold-MSI, are presented. ‘amusics’, ) and highly specialist populations (professional musicians). The instrument is designed to measure the broad range of individual differences in the general population, while placing less importance on the much smaller pathological groups (e.g. This paper describes the development and evaluation of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), a novel instrument that measures musical sophistication in a comprehensive way by explicitly considering a wide range of facets of musical expertise as they occur in a Western society.
However, to date no measurement tool has been created following these lines of thought. The recent works of Hallam, as well as Hallam and Prince, suggest a more multifaceted and nuanced view of musicality that is broader than that typically assessed via traditional tests, which includes musical understanding, appreciation, evaluation, and communication alongside playing an instrument, improvisation and having a good sense of pitch and rhythm. However, as Levitin recently argued, almost all of the scientific instruments used to study musicality and musical achievements in Western society are centred on the ability to play an instrument and the expertise of performing musicians in Western art music, ignoring the skills necessary for successfully engaging with music in other ways besides playing an instrument. Success, excellence, and expertise can be ascribed to performing musicians, composers/song writers, music producers, recording engineers, DJs, music critics, music academics and avid music ‘connoisseurs’ alike. This hierarchical notion of expertise in music persists in Western societies across almost all popular and art music styles and types of engagement. Blacking observed and described in detail how some cultures lack any notion of hierarchy according to musicianship status while others–particularly Western societies–make very clear distinctions between individuals, according to their ascribed specialist music skills and roles.
However, the ways in which members of a society differentiate and specialise in their engagement with music varies greatly between cultures. Participation in musical activities occurs in every known human culture. The ability to engage with music in sophisticated ways is a unique and universal human ability. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical accounts of implicit and statistical music learning and with regard to social conditions of sophisticated musical engagement. Finally, we identify occupation, occupational status, age, gender, and wealth as the main socio-demographic factors associated with musical sophistication. Thirdly, we report results from several lab studies, demonstrating that the Gold-MSI possesses good psychometric properties, and that self-reported musical sophistication is associated with performance on two listening tasks. Next, we develop a novel measurement instrument, the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) to assess self-reported musical skills and behaviours on multiple dimensions in the general population using a large Internet sample (n = 147,636). In this paper, we first describe the concept of ‘musical sophistication’ which can be used to describe the multi-faceted nature of musical expertise. The types of musical behaviours we refer to here are broad, ranging from performance on an instrument and listening expertise, to the ability to employ music in functional settings or to communicate about music. Individuals can differ in their repertoire of musical behaviours as well as in the level of skill they display for any single musical behaviour. Musical skills and expertise vary greatly in Western societies.
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