Listen to the following music clip.
Last week on Casual Friday, we asked our readers to explain what it’s about, in concrete terms. Did you get it right?
Chances are, you did not. It’s a selection from Claude Debussy’s La Mer, from the movement intended to represent the wind and the sea. Only 36 of 357 respondents answered correctly. Even when I gave half-credit for mentioning either the wind, or a storm, or waves, or a boat, only an additional 90 got it. Most respondents — over 200, in fact, got it completely wrong.
I picked seven different clips like this, from seven different works that were all intended by their composers to represent specific things, not just emotions or adjectives. I tried to pick pieces that seemed relatively obvious, based on the composer’s initial intentions. I scored each response on a scale of 0 to 2, with 2 being perfect, and 1 meaning some portion of the response was correct. The average score was a mere 0.38, and 72 percent of the time people got the answer completely wrong.
I was quite generous with my scoring. Take this selection, from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals:
The movement is called “Elephants,” but I also accepted bears, hippos, cows, or any large animal as completely correct. Saying the work was about fat people counted as one point. Still, the average score for this piece was just 0.65. Despite the fact that the scores on this selection were the highest for any piece, most people still got it completely wrong.
But most people who took the test didn’t have much musical training. Surely people with more training performed better, right?
Actually, they did score better — just not much better. Take a look at this graph:
Music majors had an average score of 0.61, compared to non-majors’ 0.36 — meaning they still got it mostly wrong. Professional musicians fared even worse (though still significantly better than non-pros). Interestingly, just having attended a classical music performance within the last month was enough to predict a slightly higher score on the test.
These groups all also said they were more familiar with the works:
That said, when you consider the fact that this scale went from 1 to 5, on balance most people weren’t very familiar with the works. Indeed, familiarity with the works didn’t correlate significantly with accuracy in identifying what the works were about.
Overall, for our readers, it seems that just listening to a musical work isn’t enough to reveal what it’s about. While there is ample evidence that people can recognize some emotions in music, the same doesn’t appear to be true for more concrete subjects of songs — even when the composer is overtly trying to tell a story.
But maybe the problem was how open-ended our initial study was. What if we gave you a multiple choice test? Would you do any better? Here are the other five clips from the study. How many can you get right?
Bonus points in the comments if you can identify the composer and title of each of these works (but don’t peek before you answer the poll!).
Update: Looks like even with a multiple-choice test, we’re still not very good at this. Here are the answers:
1. Ravel, Gaspard de la Nuit: Water nymph
2. Sibelius, Tapiola: Forest
3. Strauss, Don Juan: Duel and death
4. Grofe, Grand Canyon Suite: Sunset at Grand Canyon
5. Schoenberg, Pelleas und Melisande: Parting lovers
As I write this, respondents chose the correct response most often on just two of the clips: 3 and 5. And with clip 5, only 28 percent picked the correct answer.
Finally, a response to some of the commenters who suggested that “music can mean anything.” I agree that there are a variety of possible interpretations of any musical work, but these clips were picked specifically because they came from tone poems, which are constructed with a specific story or text in mind. The question isn’t what the music objectively “means,” but whether by listening to the music, we can figure out what the textual basis for the work was. For the most part, we can’t.