Singing Ability Assessment (SAA)

The Singing Ability Assessment (SAA; Silas, Müllensiefen, & Kopiez, 2023) is a test of singing ability which can be launched in R/Shiny via the psychTestR package.

Author

Seb Silas, sebsilas@gmail.com

Demos

Short SAA with feedback: https://adaptiveeartraining.com/SAA-demo

Prototype adaptive-SAA(aSAA) with feedback: https://adaptiveeartraining.com/aSAA

Installation

  1. Install nodeJS: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

  2. Install R: https://cloud.r-project.org/

  3. Install RStudio: https://posit.co/downloads/

  4. Launch RStudio

  5. Install the devtools R package by pasting the following command into the RStudio terminal:

install.packages('devtools')

  1. Install the SAA package:

devtools::install_github('sebsilas/SAA')

Usage

Once you have completed the above steps, you can run the SAA test by doing the following:

  1. Create a folder which will contain your app. The name of this folder will become the app_name argument when you run the SAA or SAA_standalone functions later.

  2. In the folder, create an R file called app.R. In this file, paste your code to run the SAA there, like below:


# Load the SAA package

library(SAA)

# Run a short test with feedback:

SAA_standalone(app_name = "my_SAA_app",
               num_items = list(long_tones = 2L, arrhythmic = 2L, rhythmic = 2L),
               feedback = TRUE,
               SNR_test = FALSE,
               get_range = FALSE,
               examples = 0)

Remember that the app_name argument should match the name of your folder.

  1. Make sure that your current directory is the app folder you created. You can check the current directory by using getwd(). You may need to set the app directory by placing setwd('/Users/musicassessr/my_project/my_SAA_app') at the beginning of your app file.

  2. Run the app. To do this in RStudio, use the shortcut Command + Shift + Enter on Mac (Ctrl + Shift + Enter on Windows).

  3. If the above steps were successful, the SAA test should load in your web browser, and as you progress through the test, you should receive feedback after each trial. Recorded audio should appear in the /app_name/www/audio/ directory.

If not, go to our Troubleshooting page or raise an issue on Github.

Usage notes

  • This has not yet been comprehensively tested on Windows. Please get in touch if you have any issues.

  • The test requires internet connectivity.

  • The SAA runs in your web browser. It is only recommended to run the test in Google Chrome or Opera. You will need to set one of these to be your default browser for RStudio to launch the test there (restart RStudio after doing this).

Citation

We advise mentioning the software versions you used, in particular the versions of the SAA, musicassessr, psychTestR, and psychTestRCAT packages. You can find these version numbers from R by running the following commands:

library(SAA)
library(psychTestR)
library(psychTestRCAT)
if (!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools")
x <- devtools::session_info()
x$packages[x$packages$package %in% c("SAA", "psychTestR", "psychTestRCAT"), ]

References

Silas, S., Müllensiefen, D., & Kopiez, R. (2023). Singing Ability Assessment: Development and validation of a singing test based on item response theory and a general open-source software environment for singing data. Behaviour Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02188-0