Are You Tone Deaf?

I'm not much of a singer. I've been reminded of that pretty consistently my whole life. Here's an excerpt from a real conversation with my dad from thirty years ago:

Dad: "What did you do with that money?"
Me: "What money?"
Dad: "The money you should have spent on singing lessons."

Okay, so I've accepted that I can't sing. But I have a good ear. In other words, I can tell whether or not someone else is singing in tune. That was always a brag, until I found the Distorted Tunes Test online. The web site is provided by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The test actually measures one's ability to determine pitch. It's simple. One at a time, snippets of several songs are played, and you answer whether the snippet was played correctly or not. The songs are all standards, so recognizing the song itself should be easy.

In this case, my self-confidence was justified, as I judged 26 out of 26 samples correctly. Apparently the money I spent on listening lessons was well-spent.