Development and Validation of the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT)

Peter M C Harrison,Daniel Müllensiefen

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-30318-8

Abstract

Beat perception is increasingly being recognised as a fundamental musical ability. A number of psychometric instruments have been developed to assess this ability, but these tests do not take advantage of modern psychometric techniques, and rarely receive systematic validation. The present research addresses this gap in the literature by developing and validating a new test, the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT), a variant of the Beat Alignment Test (BAT) that leverages recent advances in psychometric theory, including item response theory, adaptive testing, and automatic item generation. The test is constructed and validated in four empirical studies. The results support the reliability and validity of the CA-BAT for laboratory testing, but suggest that the test is not well-suited to online testing, owing to its reliance on fine perceptual discrimination.

Highlights

Music listening invokes many cognitive abilities, including for example auditory scene analysis[1], pitch and rhythm perception[2], beat perception[3], syntactic processing[4], and emotion induction[5]
This paper takes a complementary approach: we focus on one beat perception paradigm, and use it to construct a psychometrically sophisticated and well-validated test termed the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT; Fig. 1)
The purpose of this study was to investigate the suitability of the BAT paradigm for Item response theory (IRT) modelling, and to see how well item difficulty could be predicted from beep-track accuracy

Summary

Introduction

Music listening invokes many cognitive abilities, including for example auditory scene analysis[1], pitch and rhythm perception[2], beat perception[3], syntactic processing[4], and emotion induction[5]. Various standardised tests of musical listening abilities have been developed over the last century, ranging from the early Measures of Musical Talents[11] to recent measures such as the Musical Ear Training Assessment (META)[10] and the children’s Rhythm Synchronization and Melody Discrimination tasks[12]. These measures are essential for achieving efficient and objective ability testing in research and education environments, and have supported much research into the origin, nature, and distribution of musical abilities in the human population[6,13,14,15,16]. Successful applications of these tests include identifying auditory and motor areas involved in beat perception and rhythmic reproduction[26], investigating how beat perception abilities relate to other musical abilities and behaviours[6], and predicting which Parkinson’s patients will benefit from rhythmic auditory stimulation therapy[27]

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Methods

Results

Conclusion