The IQ test for musicians: what music training does and does not prove, and which normed subtests fit

0 The short answer

A musician who wants a real IQ score needs a normed general cognitive battery, not a musical aptitude quiz, and the research supports a memory difference between musicians and nonmusicians but not a proven IQ gain from lessons. A 2017 meta-analysis found that musicians outperformed nonmusicians on working memory (g = 0.56), while a 2020 meta-analysis found a null overall effect of music training once study design was controlled, a finding that a 2022 reanalysis disputed. ACIS is one online option with adult norms: Quick is 15 dollars for about 45 minutes, Optimized is 30 dollars for about 110 minutes and Full Scale is 50 dollars for about 175 minutes (prices read October 29, 2026), and Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing and Arithmetic present their items as audio. The decisive limit is that the test is online, unsupervised and not clinical, and none of its 20 subtests measures musical talent.

1 Which IQ Test Fits a Musician, and What Does Each Cost?

Five kinds of test can be sold to a musician as an IQ test, and only some of them return an IQ score from a general cognitive battery. A search for an IQ test for musicians returns musical aptitude quizzes among its first results, and they rate pitch, rhythm and melody and report a score that is not an IQ. A cognitive battery asks a different question: how a person compares with a reference group across several broad abilities. The table sets out the real options with the facts we could verify on October 29, 2026. The training clinic fee is one example of how a clinic prices a whole evaluation, not a survey, and we did not find a private practice fee we could verify, so we state none.

The age range, times and individual administration of the WAIS-5 come from Pearson's product page for the WAIS-5, which also lists it at qualification level C, a professional instrument and not a product for use at home. The clinic fee comes from the University of Wisconsin school psychology training clinic fee schedule. The Mensa fees, the 98th percentile and the absence of an IQ score come from American Mensa's testing page, where a promotion running through October 31 also appears, and we print only the regular prices. The page on where to take an IQ test lists the in person and online options beyond these, and the page on the best online IQ tests compares the online products.

A musician choosing between these should start from the purpose. If the aim is a personal estimate of cognitive standing across reasoning, vocabulary, memory and speed, a normed battery fits. If the aim is a documented evaluation with professional interpretation, a psychologist is the route. If the aim is to find out how good the ear is, a music aptitude test is the right tool and an IQ test is the wrong one. The page on IQ tests for adults explains how an adult chooses among these and what each result can be used for.

2 Do Musicians Have a Higher IQ?

Musicians on average score somewhat higher than nonmusicians on intelligence tests in correlational studies, and the size of that association is small. The correlational evidence is consistent, which is why the claim is so widely repeated, and its weakness is the design: a comparison of people who chose or were given lessons with people who were not cannot show that lessons caused the difference.

Schellenberg's 2006 paper in the Journal of Educational Psychology is the standard correlational example. In Study 1, with 147 children aged 6 to 11, the duration of music lessons was positively correlated with IQ and with academic ability even when family income, parents' education and involvement in nonmusical activities were held constant. In Study 2, with 150 undergraduates, the abstract reports similar but weaker associations between playing music in childhood and intellectual functioning. The author concluded that formal exposure to music in childhood is associated positively with IQ and with academic performance and that the associations are small but general and long lasting. Associated is the operative word: it is a correlation, and the paper itself uses the language of association.

The question that design leaves open is why the association exists. A study by Swaminathan, Schellenberg and Khalil in Intelligence in 2017 tested one answer. Musically trained and untrained adults, 133 undergraduates in the full sample, completed Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices as a test of nonverbal intelligence and the Musical Ear Test as a measure of music aptitude. Duration of music training was associated positively with socioeconomic status (mother's education), nonverbal intelligence, melody aptitude and rhythm aptitude. The association between music training and intelligence remained after controlling for socioeconomic status, but disappeared after controlling for music aptitude, while aptitude kept a strong correlation with intelligence after accounting for training and status. The authors concluded that the link may arise because high functioning individuals are more likely to have good aptitude for music and to take lessons. This is still a correlational study, so it supports a selection account and does not prove it.

The strongest test of whether the association is causal in the general population comes from twins. Mosing and colleagues in Developmental Science in 2016 used a co-twin control design with more than 10,500 twins. The phenotypic associations between music practice and IQ were moderate in their wording, with correlations of 0.11 for males and 0.10 for females. When the analysis controlled for genetic and shared environmental influences, the relationship disappeared: a highly practiced twin did not have a higher IQ than the untrained co-twin. The authors reported that the relationship was mostly due to shared genetic influences and concluded that the associations between music practice and IQ in the general population are non-causal. Our arithmetic is that a correlation of 0.11 squared is about 0.012, so practice by itself lines up with about 1 percent of the variation in IQ in that sample, and a twin comparison is a quasi experimental design that cannot assign lessons at random but controls for family and genes in a way an ordinary comparison cannot.

The page on IQ and musical ability owns the full argument on aptitude, training and talent, and this page does not repeat it. For a musician reading the numbers, the useful summary is narrower: the cross-sectional association is real, it is small, and the twin evidence suggests it reflects shared background, not a product of practice.

3 What Is the Average IQ of a Musician?

No representative published average IQ for musicians as a group exists in the sources we opened, so any single figure quoted for musicians as a whole should be treated as unsupported. The studies above report correlations between practice or lessons and test scores, not the mean IQ of working musicians. A mean needs a clearly defined sample, and the samples in these studies are children in a lessons program, university undergraduates and a sample of twins, none of which is the population of people who earn a living from music.

Two reasons make a single number for musicians misleading. The first is that musicians are not one group: a conservatory trained orchestral player, a self taught guitarist, a church organist and a studio producer enter the work through different routes and different selection pressures. The second is the selection process that the evidence above describes. If people with higher aptitude are more likely to take lessons and to continue, then the average of those who persist reflects who persisted, and says nothing about what lessons do. A group average, moreover, is never an individual prediction: musicians vary as widely as anyone, and a musician's own score will be determined by the person and the day, not the profession.

For readers who want comparisons by category rather than a single number, the closest ACIS pages are the page on average IQ by profession and the page on music taste and intelligence, which covers listeners and not performers. For readers who arrive through a famous composer, the page on how three judges rated Mozart's IQ covers the retrospective estimates. None of these should be used to read an individual musician's score, which is read against adult norms instead, as the section on reading a score explains below.

4 Does Music Training Raise IQ?

The best controlled evidence on music lessons and IQ is a small effect in one randomized trial and a null overall effect in a design controlled meta-analysis, which a reanalysis then partly contested, so no claim that lessons raise IQ is settled. Each of these results has a different strength, and the order matters.

The randomized trial is Schellenberg's 2004 report in Psychological Science. The author assigned 144 children at random to keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama lessons or no lessons, and measured IQ before and after. The paper reports that the children in the music groups showed greater increases in full scale IQ than the control groups, an effect it describes as relatively small, and it notes that the lessons were taught for 36 weeks at the Royal Conservatory of Music Community School. The children were six years old and were tested with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Third Edition. The mean increase was 4.3 points in the control groups and 7.0 points in the music groups, so our arithmetic puts the difference at about 2.7 points. This is the strongest single design on the page, because random assignment removes the family background and aptitude explanations. It is also one study, with six year olds, and it does not show that a gain of that size lasts or applies to an adult.

The design controlled synthesis is Sala and Gobet's 2020 multilevel meta-analysis in Memory and Cognition, which reports a combined N of 6,984 in studies of music training with children. Its abstract states that once the quality of study design is controlled for, the overall effect of music training programs is null and highly consistent across studies. Small statistically significant overall effects appeared only in studies that did not randomly allocate participants and used non-active controls, with an effect of about 0.200. The authors also report that training was ineffective regardless of the type of outcome measure, the age of participants and the duration of training. Their conclusion is blunt: they call researchers' optimism about the benefits of music training empirically unjustified.

That conclusion is contested. In Bigand and Tillmann's 2022 paper in Memory and Cognition, the authors reanalyzed Sala and Gobet's data file and reported that they did not confirm the effect of randomization. They argued that the original conclusion rested in part on failing to differentiate near and far transfer, and their reanalysis gave a significant effect size of g = .234. They concluded that music may be special in allowing small but statistically significant far transfer effects. A reader should hold both papers: one says the overall effect is null once design quality is controlled, and the other, using the same data, says a small effect remains. The disagreement is about method, and the sources we opened do not resolve it.

A fourth design sits in between. Habibi and colleagues in Cerebral Cortex in 2018 followed children over two years beginning at age 6, comparing a music group with children of the same socioeconomic background who were either in sports training or in no systematic after school training. Their abstract reports no preexisting structural differences at the start, and differences in the maturation of cortical thickness and in corpus callosum fractional anisotropy after two years. The outcome was brain structure, not IQ, and the abstract does not describe random assignment. It shows that music training goes with changes in the developing brain, and it does not say that IQ changes.

What does this add up to for a musician deciding on an IQ test? Lessons are associated with higher scores, one randomized trial found a small gain in young children, and the best controlled meta-analysis found no overall far transfer effect while a reanalysis found a small one. Nothing in these sources supports reading a musician's score as a product of their training, or expecting practice to raise a score. Music is worth learning for the music, and the page on IQ and musical ability draws the same line on lessons and expectations.

5 Which Abilities Does Music Practice Relate To?

Music practice is most consistently related to memory, especially memory for tonal material, and the evidence for broader auditory advantages is mixed. The memory evidence is a meta-analysis, which matters because it combines many studies, and its design is the weak point: it compares existing groups of musicians and nonmusicians, so it cannot say the practice produced the difference.

Talamini, Altoè, Carretti and Grassi in PLOS ONE in 2017 collected 29 studies including 53 memory tasks, all comparing young adult musicians with nonmusicians. Musicians performed better in long term memory (g = 0.29, 95 percent confidence interval 0.08 to 0.51), in short term memory (g = 0.57, 0.41 to 0.73) and in working memory (g = 0.56, 0.33 to 0.80). The type of stimulus influenced the advantage in short term and working memory: it was large with tonal stimuli, moderate with verbal stimuli and small or null with visuospatial stimuli. The authors called the effect small for long term memory and medium for short term and working memory. A medium effect of about 0.56 standard deviations means the average musician in these studies stood about half a standard deviation above the average nonmusician on these tasks. That is a group statement, and many nonmusicians outscore many musicians.

The stimulus result is the useful detail for a musician considering an IQ test. The largest advantage was for tones, the material musicians practice with. The advantage for verbal material was smaller, and for visuospatial material it was small or null. The ACIS working memory subtests, as their pages describe them, use digits, and letters with numbers, not tones, in the two memory subtests presented as audio, so the biggest effect in the meta-analysis has no direct counterpart in the battery. That is our reading of the pages and of the meta-analysis, not a finding that anyone has tested on ACIS, and we cannot say how any individual musician will score.

On hearing, the evidence is more divided. The review by Coffey, Mogilever and Zatorre in Hearing Research in 2017 examined whether musicians understand speech better in noise. Its abstract says recent evidence points to a musician advantage, and also says enhancements have not been universally reported and that the relative contributions of different processes and their relation to preexisting factors have not been disentangled. Auditory processing, written Ga in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model, is defined on the page on the CHC model as perceiving, analyzing and synthesizing patterns among auditory stimuli, and that page notes its importance for language and music. It is the ability a musician is most likely to expect an IQ test to capture, so it is worth saying plainly that the ACIS battery reports six indices (verbal comprehension, fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual spatial, working memory and processing speed) and none of them is auditory processing.

Where does that leave the general claim that musicians are smarter? The page on IQ and memory explains that memory is not one ability and is not the same as intelligence, with working memory the closest link in most batteries. For a musician the practical consequence is to read the working memory index as one piece of a profile and to resist reading it as a verdict on general ability.

6 Which Normed Subtests Matter Most for a Musician?

The subtests most relevant to a musician are the three presented as audio plus the working memory and speed tasks beside them, because that is where the research expects a difference, but the rest of the battery matters equally for an IQ estimate. The table lists the subtests that bear on the research above. Each row is described only as its page or the ACIS manual describes it, and where a page is silent on presentation we write "not stated".

Digit Span is described on its page as asking how many items can be held in immediate awareness and, in harder versions, how well they can be reversed or reordered, and as measuring immediate auditory-verbal storage and active manipulation of ordered material. Alphanumeric Sequencing asks a person to hold a mixed stream of letters and numbers, separate the two classes and reorder each according to a rule, so it measures working memory under active reorganization. Arithmetic measures mental quantitative problem solving, drawing on number knowledge, basic operations and the ability to hold intermediate values. The page on working memory tests for adults places the first two in the wider family of span tasks, and the page on mental math tests covers the arithmetic skill in its own right.

Quick, at 15 dollars, includes Digit Span and Alphanumeric Sequencing but not Arithmetic, which is only in Full Scale. A musician who wants all three audio subtests and a full profile therefore needs the Full Scale form, at 50 dollars and about 175 minutes. A musician who wants a narrower look can buy a Custom Test at 5 dollars per subtest, where any domain you complete returns its full index score and every subtest returns its scaled score, while the Full Scale IQ needs the Full Scale battery. At 10 subtests the Full Scale form costs the same. The free trial, started from the Full Scale form, needs no card and allows one trial per person.

Two honest limits apply to the table. The first is that a working memory index alone is not an IQ, and a musician who reads only that index will misjudge a profile. The second is that the verbal and reasoning subtests in the battery probably say as much about a musician's general ability as the memory tasks do, which is our reading of how a Full Scale IQ combines several domains and not a finding from the studies above. The page on processing speed tests describes the shortest way to see how a timed ACIS subtest feels, and the page on cognitive ability tests describes the wider category.

7 What Do the Three Audio Subtests Ask of a Listener?

The three audio subtests deliver their items by sound, and what they ask of the listener is memory and calculation, not musical hearing. Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing and Arithmetic present items as audio and need working sound. Their pages describe digit sequences, mixed letters and numbers, and quantitative problems, and none of the three pages describes tones, melodies or rhythm. A good ear does not make the task easier by itself, because the demand is to keep and transform what was heard.

For a musician the audio format has practical consequences. First, the sound must be clear, so a musician who normally monitors through studio headphones should use them, and a volume check before the first subtest is worth more than any strategy. Second, ears get tired: a session after a long rehearsal or a loud gig is a different measurement from a session after a quiet morning, and that is general testing sense, not a measured finding of this page. Third, the subtest pages we read do not say whether an item can be replayed, so we state nothing about replays, and a musician should read the instructions on screen before starting.

Hearing health is a fair concern for anyone who spends time near amplified sound. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders says on its page on noise induced hearing loss, updated April 16, 2025, that at least 10 million adults (6 percent) in the United States under age 70 show hearing-test signs of hearing loss from loud noise, and perhaps as many as 40 million (24 percent) may show these signs. The page lists music through headphones at maximum volume and concerts among the sources of noise, and it does not single out professional musicians, so those figures describe adults in general and not musicians as a group. The practical point is simple: if a musician has any doubt about hearing, a hearing check is the first step, and a person who cannot hear the audio clearly should not read the working memory score as a statement about memory.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing treat this under accommodations. Standard 3.9 says test developers or users are responsible for providing accommodations, when appropriate and feasible, to remove construct-irrelevant barriers, and its comment lists sensory needs among the individual characteristics accommodations respond to. ACIS is not for school accommodations and is not a clinical instrument, so a musician who needs an adapted audio presentation should raise that with a professional who can arrange an accommodated evaluation. The page on auditory memory tests and the page on short term memory tests set out how memory tests of this kind work and how their results are read.

8 How Is a Musician's Score Read, and Against Whom?

A normed score places a person within a defined reference group, so a musician who takes the ACIS test is compared with adults in general and not with other musicians. The ACIS adult norms cover ages 16 to 90. The page on how IQ scores are normed explains the general process of building a reference group and converting a raw performance into a standard score. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014), in Standard 5.8, say norms, if used, should refer to clearly described populations that include the individuals or groups with whom test users will ordinarily wish to compare their examinees. A musician who wants to know how a score compares with other professional musicians needs a reference group of musicians, and none is described in the sources we opened.

Scores arrive on three scales. A scaled subtest score runs from 1 to 19, with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3. An index score and the Full Scale IQ sit on the standard scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, which the page on why the standard deviation is 15 explains. A percentile says what share of the reference group scored at or below the person, and the page on IQ score versus percentile explains why the two should not be averaged. The table converts common standard scores to percentiles. These percentiles are our arithmetic from the normal curve, rounded, and they are not figures from any test. The IQ percentile calculator does the same conversion for any score.

Every ACIS form reports a 95 percent confidence interval around the Full Scale IQ, and it is the honest way to read a single number: the score is the center of a range, not a point. We state no ACIS reliability figure here, and the documentation for the battery is in the technical manual. Precision also depends on how much was measured. A single subtest score rests on one task and is the least precise piece of information a report contains. An index combines several subtests and is better, and a Full Scale IQ combines the most. This is general psychometrics and not an ACIS statistic: the more varied the evidence behind a score, the less one lucky or unlucky task moves it, which is the subject of the page on reliability and validity.

For a musician the consequence is concrete. A high Digit Span score on its own tells little, and a low one on a day after a late show tells little too. The working memory index, which combines the memory subtests, is a better guide, and the profile across all six indices is better still. The page on what IQ measures explains how the abilities combine into a general score and what a Full Scale IQ leaves out.

9 What Can an IQ Score Not Say About a Musician?

An IQ score cannot say how good a musician is, how creative, how expressive or how employable, because none of the 20 ACIS subtests measures musical ability and none is built to predict a musical career. The battery samples verbal knowledge, reasoning, quantitative skill, visual spatial processing, working memory and speed. A musician with a modest score can be an outstanding performer, and a musician with a high score can be an average one, and the evidence above supports only a small association between musical background and test scores, not a rule about any individual.

The research gives one more reason for restraint. In the Swaminathan study, music aptitude, which the Musical Ear Test measured, kept a strong correlation with nonverbal intelligence even after training and socioeconomic status were accounted for. That is a finding about a sample of undergraduates, not a law, and it does not turn an IQ test into a measure of musical talent or a musical test into a measure of IQ. The two kinds of test answer different questions, and the earlier sections of this page set out the relation between them.

Several uses are outside what an online score can support. ACIS is not for hiring and is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, so a score cannot document a learning, attention or hearing condition. An audition, a conservatory entrance process or a hiring panel assesses playing, and nothing on this page claims that an IQ score is a substitute for those judgments. A person curious about how a profession lines up with ability can treat the earlier discussion of group averages as a caution, and the page on IQ tests for engineers shows how a different occupation approaches the same question.

Group statistics are never individual diagnoses. If a musician has concerns about hearing, memory or attention that affect work or daily life, the route is a licensed professional, and an online score is not a substitute. The same applies in the other direction: a high score is not a credential.

10 What Does an Unsupervised Session Need to Go Well?

An unsupervised session works when the conditions match what the test assumes: a quiet room, a working device with clear sound, enough time for the form, and a person who is rested. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing are direct about the environment. Standard 6.4 says the testing environment should furnish reasonable comfort with minimal distractions to avoid construct-irrelevant variance, and its comment names noise, disruption in the testing area and malfunctioning computers among the conditions to avoid. For a musician the practical reading is that an instrument being played in the next room, a metronome, a rehearsal in the building or background music counts as noise.

Sound comes first for the three audio subtests. Use headphones or speakers that you trust, set the volume at a comfortable level before starting and make sure notifications are off. Because the audio subtests are only part of the battery, the rest of the session depends on the screen, a mouse or keyboard and a stable connection. The Standards comment on Standard 6.4 lists equipment and connectivity failures among avoidable distractions for technology based administration.

Time is the second condition. The three forms take about 45 minutes for Quick, about 110 for Optimized and about 175 for Full Scale. ACIS allows breaks, saves progress between subtests and gives 30 days to complete a form, so a musician can spread it across several days around a performance schedule. Beginning a long session when tired produces a result that reflects tiredness more than ability, so a rested start is better. This is advice from general testing practice, not a measured finding.

The third condition is honesty about help. Looking up a word, using a calculator on a calculation task or having a friend repeat the audio changes what is being measured. The Standards say in the comment on Standard 6.1 that technology and the Internet make it possible to administer tests in settings where conditions may not be strictly controlled or monitored, and that those who allow a lack of standardization are responsible for providing evidence that it did not affect performance or the comparability of scores. An unsupervised online test cannot supply that evidence for a single session, which is the reason this page calls the result a personal estimate. The free trial needs no card and shows what the format feels like, and the page on a free IQ test explains what the free route includes and what it leaves out.

11 Can Memory Skill From Practice Spread to Other Abilities?

Training one memory skill produces gains on similar tasks, and the best meta-analytic evidence shows no convincing gain on measures of intelligence, so a musician should not expect practiced memory to lift reasoning scores. This is the same question the music studies ask in another form: does practice in a specific domain transfer to general ability?

Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2016 meta-analyzed working memory training studies with a pretest-posttest design and a control group, 87 publications with 145 experimental comparisons. Right after training there were reliable improvements on measures of intermediate transfer, verbal and visuospatial working memory. For measures of far transfer, which included nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension and arithmetic, the authors found no convincing evidence of reliable improvement when training was compared with a treated control condition. They concluded that training programs appear to produce short term, specific training effects that do not generalize to measures of real-world cognitive skills.

The parallel to music is not exact, because music training is broader than a computerized memory program. It does show why the result in the music literature is plausible: a skill that is practiced for years can be strong on tasks that resemble it, and a general gain in reasoning requires a transfer that these meta-analyses have not established.

For reading a profile, the consequence is straightforward. A musician whose working memory index is above the reasoning indices has a pattern that matches the group findings on memory, and it is also a pattern that can arise by chance or from the conditions of the session. Differences between indices are common even in people with no unusual profile, and the page on index score differences explains why a gap is not a finding by itself. The honest reading of a lopsided profile is that it describes the day and the person, and neither the profile nor the page claims that music caused it.

12 Where ACIS Sits, and What a Buyer Should Do

ACIS is one normed online option for a musician who wants a Full Scale IQ and six indices, with real strengths and plain limits, and it is not a music test. The strengths are concrete. Every form reports a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval, adult norms cover ages 16 to 90, and the Full Scale form covers all six domains. It is a one time payment with no subscription: Quick is 15 dollars for 6 subtests in 3 domains and about 45 minutes, Optimized is 30 dollars for 13 subtests in 5 domains and about 110 minutes, and Full Scale is 50 dollars for all 20 subtests in six domains and about 175 minutes. These prices were read on October 29, 2026 and can change. A Custom Test costs 5 dollars per subtest. Breaks are allowed, progress is saved between subtests and a form can be completed within 30 days. The refund policy, quoted literally, is: "Full refund within 5 days if the report does not deliver the features described at checkout or a technical issue prevents you from accessing your results." That is a conditional guarantee, not an unconditional money back one.

The limits are as concrete. ACIS is online and unsupervised, it is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, it is not for hiring, school accommodations or admission to high IQ societies, and it is in English only. The manual states that verbal and knowledge tasks are affected by English proficiency and educational exposure, which matters for musicians trained abroad. Three subtests need working sound. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) frame the user's responsibility. Standard 5.8 asks that norms refer to clearly described populations, Standard 6.4 asks for a comfortable environment with minimal distractions, and the comment on Standard 6.3 says that for environments that are not monitored, such as the Internet, the report on scores should note that standardized conditions were not guaranteed. This page notes exactly that. The American Psychological Association's Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation (2020) are the profession's guidance for psychologists on selecting and interpreting assessments. We could not open the guideline text from our network on October 29, 2026, so we do not paraphrase it, and we cite the Standards as the yardstick this page tries to meet, not as an endorsement of ACIS.

A buyer should do this, in order:

1. Decide the question. If it is how good your ear is, take a music aptitude test and stop. If it is a profile of reasoning, verbal ability, memory and speed, continue.
2. Check your hearing and your setup. Use clear headphones, a quiet room and a working device, and see a hearing professional first if you have doubts about your hearing.
3. Pick the form that fits. Quick is a first look at 6 subtests, Optimized adds breadth, and Full Scale is the only form with Arithmetic and all six indices. The comparison table near the top of this page sets out the other routes, including a psychologist.
4. Start with the free trial. It needs no card and shows what the format feels like before anything is spent.
5. Read the report as one source. Keep the confidence interval in view, compare the index profile and not only the total, and do not use the number for an audition, a job or a diagnosis.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every figure above is traceable to one of the following, and each is linked at the point where it is used. Prices and facts were read on October 29, 2026 and can change. Any figure we derived ourselves is labeled in the text as our arithmetic.

• Schellenberg EG. Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science, 2004, volume 15, issue 8, pages 511 to 514. Abstract and the paper's text, read in the author's posted copy.
• Schellenberg EG. Long-term positive associations between music lessons and IQ. Journal of Educational Psychology, 2006, volume 98, issue 2, pages 457 to 468. Abstract read in the author's posted copy.
• Swaminathan S, Schellenberg EG, Khalil S. Revisiting the association between music lessons and intelligence: Training effects or music aptitude? Intelligence, 2017, volume 62, pages 119 to 124.
• Mosing MA, Madison G, Pedersen NL, Ullen F. Investigating cognitive transfer within the framework of music practice: genetic pleiotropy rather than causality. Developmental Science, 2016, volume 19, issue 3, pages 504 to 512.
• Sala G, Gobet F. Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Memory and Cognition, 2020, volume 48, issue 8, pages 1429 to 1441.
• Bigand E, Tillmann B. Near and far transfer: Is music special? Memory and Cognition, 2022, volume 50, issue 2, pages 339 to 347.
• Habibi A, Damasio A, Ilari B, and colleagues. Childhood music training induces change in micro and macroscopic brain structure: Results from a longitudinal study. Cerebral Cortex, 2018, volume 28, issue 12, pages 4336 to 4347.
• Talamini F, Altoe G, Carretti B, Grassi M. Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 2017, volume 12, issue 10, article e0186773.
• Coffey EBJ, Mogilever NB, Zatorre RJ. Speech-in-noise perception in musicians: A review. Hearing Research, 2017, volume 352, pages 49 to 69.
• Melby-Lervag M, Redick TS, Hulme C. Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of far transfer: Evidence from a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016, volume 11, issue 4, pages 512 to 534.
• American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association and National Council on Measurement in Education. Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, 2014. Standards 3.9, 5.8, 6.1, 6.3 and 6.4 and their comments, read in the open access edition.
• American Psychological Association. Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation, 2020, cited by title as professional guidance; the text could not be opened on October 29, 2026 and is not paraphrased.
• Pearson Assessments. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fifth Edition (WAIS-5) product page. Age range, administration times and qualification level, read October 29, 2026.
• American Mensa. Take the Mensa Admission Test. Regular fees, qualifying percentile and absence of an IQ score, read October 29, 2026.
• University of Wisconsin school psychology training clinic. Fee schedule. Psychoeducational evaluation fee and sliding scale, read October 29, 2026.
• National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Noise-induced hearing loss. Prevalence figures, page updated April 16, 2025, read October 29, 2026.

14 Frequently Asked Questions