New child music index could transform how primary schools teach music

A new child-friendly measure of musicality is challenging the idea that only technically able children are truly “musical” – and could reshape how music is taught in primary schools.

Doctoral researcher Chloe MacGregor redesigned the globally used Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) originally created for adults by Professor Daniel Müllensiefen, so it can meaningfully assess 6–13-year-olds. 

The original Gold-MSI focuses on five facets of adult musicality –active engagement, musical training, emotional engagement, singing ability, and perceptual ability. It has become the standard measure in music psychology, cited in around 1500 papers and read over 70,000 times. But, as MacGregor explains, this adult framing does not fit children: 

“The adult version captures aspects that are most relevant to musicality in adulthood… Children, for example, might not be likely to be engaging with lots of reading and writing about music. Musicality during childhood just looks very different.”  

Working with colleagues in the US, MacGregor first adapted questions from the adult Gold-MSI and combined them with items from existing children’s music questionnaires, before asking 6–13-year-olds to complete the survey and then running a statistical factor analysis on their responses. Rather than clustering around technical skills, the strongest patterns in the data pointed to two core dimensions: children’s enjoyment of music making, and what MacGregor terms “musical drive” – their motivation, enthusiasm and even “obsession” with music. When she compared these new scores with traditional perceptual ability tests of pitch and rhythm, they did not strongly line up, providing evidence that a child’s passion and drive for music is a distinct and crucial aspect of musicality, not simply a reflection of current technical skill. 

The new Child Musicality Index produces three main scores – reflecting a child’s general musicality, enjoyment of music making, and musical drive – shifting the emphasis from technique to motivation, joy and engagement. Typical items include: “Making music is a lot of fun for me” and “I like making music or singing many times during the day.” 

Professor Müllensiefen believes these findings underpin a powerful developmental hypothesis: that children’s early motivation and drive for music may be a better guide to their future musical lives than what they can technically do at a given moment. Drawing on work where his team has tracked musical engagement alongside intelligence and working memory, he argues that active music-making can shape cognitive development over time, but that it usually starts with an inner spark of interest. “Skills and drive and motivation are two different things. It’s often necessary to be motivated and have drive in the first place. You don’t go by the skills that you see right now but go by the potential that might be expressed as motivations, interest, drive, obsession with music.”    

Müllensiefen sees the child index as the basis for longitudinal studies that follow pupils from the first years of primary school onwards, to test whether those scoring highly on “musical drive” go on later to make music a central part of their identity. Such long-term tracking, he suggests, would give educators and policymakers a way to spot musical potential early and target lessons, resources and opportunities towards children whose passion is strong, even if their technical skills are still emerging. 

MacGregor is critical of a narrow focus on early instrumental skills: “Instrument learning is far too heavily focused on in primary school years. We should be focusing to a greater extent on engagement through singing and dancing and musical play, listening to lots of different styles of music, nurturing children’s enthusiasm.” The impact of focusing too heavily on instrument learning, she conjectures, can be evidenced by many adults describing themselves as “not musical” after negative early experiences with instruments: 

 “People say, ‘Oh, I’m not musical’ because they’ve tried to learn the keyboard or the recorder during primary school and decided it’s not for them, perhaps because they didn’t receive enough encouragement from parents or teachers or because they didn’t feel inspired to keep on practising. However, everyone has the capacity to be musical, and it is important that children don’t get put off," MacGregor said.

Developed in collaboration with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where Professor Erin Hannon’s lab is already using the scale across multiple studies, the child Musicality Index is now being shared as a free research tool. By helping teachers see beyond who can sing in tune or play an instrument early, it offers a way to spot and support musical potential in far more children – including those whose strongest asset, for now, is a powerful drive to make music.