Frank Zappa - Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch

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Music reviews of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch

Music Review: Science once again proves Zappa's worth
Rating: 5 Stars

The Test:
To assess the melodious class or "musical-caliber" of a song, a musically knowledgeable control group (e.g., exceptional jazz, rock and symphony orchestra musicians) rated each song on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all good) to 10 (excellent). The ratings provided by our controls were reasonably consistent (a = .72). We thus calculated the musical value of each song, producing a final of (a= .76). The analysis of the unisonant classification levels revealed that the songs ranged from the very bad (e.g., "any disc by The Grateful Dead" / Mean expert rating = 0.2) to the exceptional (e.g., "Ship Arriving To Late To Save A Drowning Witch" disc / Mean expert rating = 8.7). Highest scoring song: "Teenage Prostitute" (Mean expert rating = 9.7)

Our test subjects were then chosen at random from a vast cross-cut of everyday American society, and these subjects thereupon rated each song on the same 10-point scale used by the musically conversant control group. Afterward, we compared the participants "ability to recognize what's good" with that of the average control subject in our employ by providing a elementary percentile ranking. In this study, percentile rankings could range from 99 (I'm able to recognize what's good) to 50 (I'm fairly average) to 0 (I'm a conservative republican who listens to Bluegrass). High-scoring participants were rewarded for superior performance with peanut butter crackers.

The Results:
On average, test participants ability to recognize what is superlative, musically speaking, was in the 26th percentile, which lagged behind the actual mean percentile (50, by definition) by 24 percentile points, one-sample t (64) = 7.02, p < .0001. This underestimation occurred even though the ratings were significantly correlated with the measure of actual ability, r (63) = .39, p < .001. A practical field demonstration of this euphonious quandary effect can be seen in the continuing popularity of Korn or Coldplay.

However, our main focus was on the perceptions of the especially confused participants, which we defined as those whose test scores fell in the bottom quartile (n = 13) and those who listen to Conway Twitty. As this model depicts, we grossly overestimated their ability. Using the agreed upon 1-10 rating system, some individuals in this bottom category had rated songs as "11," "yes" or "b". In fact, two participants were invalidated when they inadvertently swallowed their pens.

Summary:
Because the profoundly disordered participants scored at the very bottom of the distribution, it was nearly impossible for us (or them) to underestimate their performance. There were also some unanticipated results, such as the chimpanzee test group scoring significantly higher than the test group of Hip-Hop listeners. To be sure, they had an inkling that they were probably less musically inclined than the chimps, as evidenced by the significant contrariety between perceived and actual ability and the uneven distribution of peanut butter crackers. Eat more Zappa.

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