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Singing Ability Assessment: Development and validation of a singing test based on item response theory and a general open-source software environment for singing data

2023; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 56; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3758/s13428-023-02188-0

1554-3528

Sebastian Silas, Daniel Müllensiefen, Reinhard Kopiez,

Music and Audio Processing

We describe the development of the Singing Ability Assessment (SAA) open-source test environment. The SAA captures and scores different aspects of human singing ability and melodic memory in the context of item response theory. Taking perspectives from both melodic recall and singing accuracy literature, we present results from two online experiments (N = 247; N = 910). On-the-fly audio transcription is produced via a probabilistic algorithm and scored via latent variable approaches. Measures of the ability to sing long notes indicate a three-dimensional principal components analysis solution representing pitch accuracy, pitch volatility and changes in pitch stability (proportion variance explained: 35%; 33%; 32%). For melody singing, a mixed-effects model uses features of melodic structure (e.g., tonality, melody length) to predict overall sung melodic recall performance via a composite score [R