The Music Aptitude Test (MAT) specimen test materials have been created by the SE22 Piano School and music technology experts to help familiarise you with the MAT. The MAT is a test used by state Secondary Schools to select around 10% of their intake of students on a music scholarship program. We have been successfully preparing our students for entry to many London schools on music scholarship programmes for the last 4 years. Schools that have used the MAT in recent years include (please check via the links below whether the school are offering the MAT for entry):
- St Clement Danes School
- The Minster School / Southwell Minster School
- Parmiter’s School
- Dame Alice Owens
- Claremont High School Academy
- West London Free School
- Leventhorpe
- Ashmole Academy
- The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College
- Queens’ School, Bushey
- Rickmansworth School
- Watford Grammar School for Boys
- Watford Grammar School for Girls
- St Mary’s & St John’s CE School, Barnet
- Chelsea Academy COE
- Cardinal Vaughan Boys School
- Haberdasher’s Askes’ Hatcham College
- Bristol Cathedral Choir School
- Hockerill Anglo European College
- Hackney New School
- Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School
- Mill Hill High School
- St Mary’s & St John’s CE School
- Prendergast Hilly Fields
What is the Music Aptitude Test?
The MAT is a series of listening tests that uses electronically generated sounds to provide a level playing field for candidates by not using real instrument sounds. Students that are familiar with the Aural part of ABRSM and Trinity exams may not necessarily be at an advantage as these tests are all conducted at the piano in the examination. The MAT tests uses microtones – intervals smaller than a semitone that do not exist on a piano. This means that pianists are not familiar with these small intervals.
The MAT uses a wide variety of instruments and electronic ‘beeps’ so that instrumentalists do not have any advantage over students that may not have studied music formally. For this reason, we decided to commission a set of sample tests that we can use with our students to prepare them as fully as possible for the MAT.
Here is one of our students taking the test. The questions are all clearly announced and there are 4 sections to each test with either 10 or 20 questions. The video has the first ten questions of Section 1. This clip is taken from Test 3 – Texture.
Using the sample questions from the MAT criteria, we have produced a series of 4 complete tests. We also provide the blank answer sheets and, of course, the answers! For the convenience of a smaller file size for download, we have made the MAT a bit quicker than the actual test. We recommend that you pause the MP3 after each question and take your time to answer it. Once you are more familiar with the exercises, you can try them at full speed.
4 complete training tests of 60 questions each are available to download instantly from our web site here:
https://musicaptitudetest.wordpress.com/buy-the-tests/
