IQ Test for Musicians

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.