C-sharps by the seashore.(Carl Emil Seashore's Seashore Measures of Musical Talents)(Brief Article)

Optometrists call it the Snellen Eye Chart, but most people who squint at its shrinking letters probably remember it best for its cryptic message: E ... FP ... TOZ ... LPED.... The Brannock Device, a fixture of every shoe store, assigns footwear sizes, making allowances for hammer toes and bunions. College Boards, Breathalyzers, Hermann Rorschach's inkblots, August von Wasserman's blood test, and a legion of other standardized measures classify and quantify everything from intelligence, relationships, personality, health, skills, careers and aptitudes, to hat and ring size. And, for much of the twentieth century, a Swedish-born psychologist's test for musical aptitude was widely used in public schools to separate the talented from the tone-deaf.

The son of a farmer who moonlighted as a carpenter and Lutheran lay preacher, Carl Emil Sjostrand (1866-1949) emigrated as a boy to Iowa. (He later changed his name to Seashore.) He was formally introduced to music in Sunday school and became a church organist before majoring in philosophy as a graduate student at Yale. In 1897, he returned to the Midwest as assistant professor at the University of Iowa, with which he forged a lifelong link. His articles in professional journals on tests to measure musical abilities culminated in 1919 with The Psychology of Musical Talent. Opera fans can still find much of interest in his later writings on the thorny subject of vibrato, with which he became intrigued in the early 1930s. Attempting to place its aesthetics on a scientific foundation, he measured it in terms of speed and change of pitch, using the recordings of thirty "golden age" opera singers, from Maria Jeritza (fast and wide) to Louise Homer (slow and tight). He summarized the results of his studies in Psychology of Music (1938).

But it was for the Seashore Measures of Musical Talents that he gained widest recognition. First issued in 1919 on 78rpm phonograph records, the test originally comprised six sections and was intended for use with children as young as ten years old. Like the driver's test for color blindness, the Seashore was used as a sorting device, identifying students who stood to gain little from performing in a band or glee club or from receiving the instrumental training that many public schools once offered. For them, "appreciation" of longhair music would be enough. This was available to all in the classroom, where a smattering of culture was acquired by learning to recognize and name, often aided by racy mnemonic lyrics, such monuments of the Western musical legacy as Paderewski's Minuet in G and MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose." (The William Tell overture, of course, was universally known from radio as The Lone Ranger and Sibelius's Valse Triste as "I Love a Mystery.")

Extensive research led to technical refinements and more precise criteria, and revised editions appeared in 1939 and 1960. Three of the tests have since been dropped, amid mounting criticism of their validity as indicators of innate musicality -- even as the idea of "musicality" itself is deconstructed and revised. Adults can take the test at the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation, with offices located ...