Research has shown that people inaccurately assess their own abilities on self-report measures, including academic, athletic, and music ability. Evidence suggests this is also true for singing, with individuals either overestimating or underestimating their level of singing competency. In this paper, we present the Melbourne Singing Tool Questionnaire (MST-Q), a brief 16-item measure exploring people's self-perceptions of singing ability and engagement with singing. Using a large sample of Australian twins (n = 996), we identified three latent factors underlying MST-Q items and examined whether these factors were related to an objective phenotypic measure of singing ability. The three factors were identified as Personal Engagement, Social Engagement, and Self-Evaluation. All factors were positively associated with objective singing performance, with the Self-Evaluation factor yielding the strongest correlation (r = 0.66). Both the Self-Evaluation factor and a single self-report item of singing ability shared the same predictive strength. Contrary to expectations, our findings suggest that self-evaluation strongly predicts singing ability, and this self-evaluation is of higher predictive value than self-reported engagement with music and singing.

中文翻译：

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歌唱能力的自我评价有多准确？


研究表明，人们在自我报告中无法准确评估自己的能力，包括学术、运动和音乐能力。有证据表明，歌唱也是如此，人们要么高估或低估自己的歌唱能力水平。在本文中，我们提出了墨尔本歌唱工具问卷 (MST-Q)，这是一项包含 16 项的简短测量，旨在探索人们对歌唱能力和歌唱参与度的自我认知。使用澳大利亚双胞胎的大样本（n = 996），我们确定了 MST-Q 项目的三个潜在因素，并检查这些因素是否与歌唱能力的客观表型测量相关。这三个因素被确定为个人参与、社会参与和自我评价。所有因素都与客观歌唱表现呈正相关，其中自我评价因素的相关性最强（r = 0.66）。自我评价因素和歌唱能力的单一自我报告项目都具有相同的预测能力。与预期相反，我们的研究结果表明，自我评价强烈预测歌唱能力，并且这种自我评价比自我报告的音乐和歌唱参与度具有更高的预测价值。