Review of The Psychology of Musical Talent

Abstract

Reviews the book, The Psychology of Musical Talent by C. E. Seashore (1919). In this volume Professor Seashore has assembled his tests on musical talent, which he presents with typical results in simple and untechnical language. Though the volume is addressed to students of applied psychology, the author has evidently had also in mind the music supervisor with little psychological training, for one misses a searching analysis of the data collected, and the treatment can hardly be called systematic though a very definite scheme of classification underlies the work. Musical talent is considered under five heads: musical sensitivity, musical action, musical memory and imagination, musical intellect and musical feeling. As a basis of analysis the author accepts four auditory attributes--pitch, intensity, duration and extensity. For all the technical ingenuity with which Seashore has attacked the important problem of musical diagnosis one feels that somehow the chief feature of musical talent has escaped his "dragnet;" this being the ability to conceive and to think in terms of the musical interval. How far this neglect of a direct test for the sense of interval may impair the results of Seashore's diagnosis, it is not easy to say. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)