Music Scholarships: What is the Musical Aptitude Test (MAT)?

Updated on January 3rd with links to additional online music tests, see end of article.

Many students applying for secondary schools on a music scholarship will be required to take a Musical Aptitude Test (MAT). This is usually a multiple choice test with 60 questions designing to test a candidate’s sense of musicality. For state schools that use the MAT, very often (but not always) the test is sat in a room full of students and it is a listening exercise. Scroll down to the end to see the variety of MAT often found at private schools.

The group MAT assesses your understanding of Pitch, Melody, Texture and Rhythm. Generally, I find that candidates that score highly in aural and sight-reading tests in their exams find these questions relatively easy as they have a good understanding of the following subjects:

Pitch

Part 1: Intervals (distances between notes)
I encourage all my students to read music by looking at the pitch of the notes on the printed music, then relating that to the keys by working out whether notes are higher or lower. This skill is developed from the very first lesson. For students that have been learning for around 18 months, we then start to explore the measured distance between notes as it is quite easy to spot certain intervals such as thirds that have notes placed on a ‘line to a line’ or a ‘space to a space’. All theory books will explore the concept of intervals. Understanding intervals will help you give a good sense of pitch both visually and aurally.

Part 2: Higher or Lower?
Firstly, try out this quiz and see how you score.  Can you hear if the second note is higher or lower than the first? Ask yourself if the second note is rising or falling which will give an indication of the answer.

Once your are comfortable with the beginner level test above, try this test which is of a similar level as can be expected in the MAT. The MAT tests intervals that are smaller than a semitone that do not exist on the piano but exist on many other instruments such as stringed instruments, woodwind and brass.

Melody
If a student is able to sing back a short melody or play it back on their instrument, this will stand them in good stead for the Melody questions. You can help your child at home by playing their favourite songs and asking them to sing back different sections of the songs to you, just using one syllable such as “la” instead of the words.

The Melody questions will play you one extract of music of 4 bars’ duration. The second version may or may not be different and you will be tested on whether you can hear the difference in a melody line. If you would like to test yourself on this section, try out this quiz.

Rhythm
Sense of rhythm can be developed by plenty of clapping exercises. You can help your child at home with this by playing their favourite songs to them, then asking them to clap back short sections of the song to you. Once they have mastered familiar songs, then present unknown songs to them to see how they cope with unfamiliar rhythms.

Texture
The Aptitude Tests play a chord and ask you to identify how many notes you can hear. A chord is two or more notes. In the tests, they will ask you to differentiate between 2, 3 or 4 notes being played at once. The more notes are in the chord, the more dense the sound appears. This can be practiced in lessons.

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Individual MAT
This is usually conducted one-on-one with the assessor at the piano.

Common questions that can be asked are:

1. Listen to a scale played on the piano and sing it back
2. Clap back a series of rhythms as an echo
3. Listen to a chord and isolate one of the notes and sing it back, i.e. in a 3-note chord, sing the middle note, or in a two-note chord, sing the highest. This is a difficult exercise and may be given to choristers, not instrumentalists.
4. Listen to a note played on the piano and sing it back
5. Listen to a tune and then sing it back
6. Sing at sight from a score whilst accompanied on the piano
7. Play a piece of pre-prepared music, either prepared a few days in advance, or on the day

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Here are two more links to free resources for improving aural, rhythmic and general musical skills:

E-MusicMaestro has some great free aural tests. A link to grade 1 is below but do try and work your way through the lower grades.
http://e-musicmaestro.com/auraltests/grade1/

There is a free demo version of the excellent Auralia software which is an excellent general musicianshop resource. The software runs on both PC and Mac.
http://www.sibelius.com/products/auralia/