IQ Test for Musicians
Musicians can take this IQ test in about 12 minutes: 25 visual reasoning puzzles that measure pattern logic, and nothing about your ear, timing or musicality.
- Questions
- 25 visual puzzles
- Question types
- 5 sets, each easy to hard
- Time
- 12-minute timer
- Scoring
- Same for every age, not age-adjusted
Free to take and no sign-up to start. After the last question you can choose to unlock your score and report, which is paid. This is not a clinical or diagnostic test.
Musicians often hear that lessons make people smarter, and it is a fair question whether your reasoning score would show it. The evidence is more mixed than the headlines suggest.
This test presents 25 abstract visual puzzles. It contains no sound, no notation and no reading, so it is a fair check of visual pattern reasoning for players of any instrument.
The study behind the claim
The best known result is E. Glenn Schellenberg's 2004 paper "Music lessons enhance IQ" in Psychological Science. He randomly assigned 144 six-year-olds to keyboard lessons, singing lessons, drama lessons or no lessons for 36 weeks.
Every group's IQ rose over the year. The two music groups gained an average of 7.0 points against 4.3 for the drama and no-lesson groups combined, a difference of 2.7 points on the WISC-III.
Schellenberg himself described the effect as small, though it appeared across subtests and on a measure of academic achievement.
Caveats: small, and not simple
The 2.7-point gap is small next to the 4.3-point rise every other child also showed. The children were six, the lessons lasted under a year, and the study says nothing about adult players.
Later work looked at the same question with more suspicion. Sala and Gobet (2020) pooled 54 studies covering 6,984 children in Memory and Cognition. Once study quality was controlled, they found the overall effect of music training on cognitive and academic skills was close to zero.
That does not make music lessons pointless. It means the evidence for a general IQ boost is weak, while the value of music for its own sake is untouched.
Cause or selection?
Most studies that link music training with higher ability are correlational. A child who sticks with piano may already be a stronger student, more disciplined or from a family that can pay for lessons.
Corrigall, Schellenberg and Misura (2013) tested this in Frontiers in Psychology with 118 adults and 167 children aged 10 to 12. Cognitive ability predicted who took music lessons and for how long, and personality traits were at least as good a predictor.
The fair reading is that both routes probably operate: capable, conscientious people are more likely to take lessons, and lessons may add a little. The data cannot yet cleanly separate the two.
How this test works for musicians
- You see a grid of shapes with a piece missing and choose the option that completes the pattern.
- There is no audio, no notation and no general knowledge, so nothing rewards or penalises musical training directly.
- It runs about 12 minutes. Puzzle logic is closer to spotting a repeating rhythm pattern than to playing one.
- It is an online reasoning test, not a clinical assessment and not age-normed.
What a visual score does not capture
Musical ability is a bundle: pitch and rhythm perception, motor control, memory for long pieces, expressive judgment and years of practice. A visual matrix test touches none of them directly.
A high score does not make you more musical, and a low one does not make you less. It is a snapshot of visual pattern reasoning on the day, measured against a scale where 100 is average.
| Score | Beats about | How rare |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 50.0% of people | Common |
| 110 | 74.8% of people | about 1 in 4 score this high |
| 120 | 90.9% of people | about 1 in 11 score this high |
| 130 | 97.7% of people | about 1 in 44 score this high |
| 145 | 99.87% of people | about 1 in 741 score this high |
Computed from the normal curve (mean 100, standard deviation 15). Applies to properly normed tests.
IQ Test for Musicians: FAQ
Do musicians have higher IQs?+
Studies often find a positive link between music training and cognitive scores, but most are correlational. Corrigall and colleagues (2013) found that cognitive ability and personality both predict who takes lessons, so the link is not proof that music raises IQ.
Did Schellenberg prove music makes you smarter?+
Not conclusively. His 2004 study of 144 six-year-olds found music groups gained 2.7 IQ points more than the comparison groups, which he called small. A 2020 meta-analysis of 54 studies found no overall effect once quality was controlled.
Does this test measure musical talent?+
No. It uses silent visual puzzles and measures pattern reasoning only. Pitch, rhythm, technique and expression are outside its scope, so treat your score as unrelated to how good a musician you are.
Will learning an instrument as an adult raise my score?+
The studies discussed here focused on children, and the largest review found no overall cognitive effect after controlling for study quality. There is no solid evidence that adult lessons raise an IQ score.
Is a high IQ needed to be a good musician?+
No. Musical skill draws on many abilities, and deliberate practice explained about 21% of performance differences in music in a 2014 meta-analysis. A reasoning score is not a prerequisite for musical achievement.
Sources
- Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science, 15, 511-514.
- Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Memory & Cognition, 48.
- Corrigall, K. A., Schellenberg, E. G., & Misura, N. M. (2013). Music training, cognition, and personality. Frontiers in Psychology, 4.
- Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25, 1608-1618.