TuneTwins: An Intrinsically Motivating Game Paradigm for Scalable Music Cognition Research

Researchers across the behavioral sciences are increasingly using games as a means of data collection. Intrinsically motivating digital games are especially promising for music cognition, where large, diverse, and engaged samples are needed. In this article, we focus on a specific class of game paradigms suited to cross-cultural contexts and applicable across the developmental lifespan: auditory matching-pairs (Memory) games. We present the conception, design, and initial evaluation of TuneTwins, a solitaire auditory matching-pairs paradigm developed to study musical memory and auditory cognition. Building on self-determination theory and prior game-based research, TuneTwins employs an 8-pair (4 × 4) board to balance playability with psychometric sensitivity. Our web-based auditory adaptation introduces clear visual–auditory mappings, a three-click turn structure, and a dual scoring system that distinguishes memorized matches from lucky guesses and memory errors. Large-scale simulations of chance and optimal strategies guided the choice of board size, demonstrating that this configuration yields meaningful separation between performance extremes while avoiding ceiling effects. We further report empirical evidence from three implementations: a proof-of-concept online study, a cross-cultural field study with Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers, and an online global deployment. Across these settings, TuneTwins captured systematic performance differences between stimulus conditions and elicited high voluntary engagement, including repeated play and the completion of multiple difficulty levels. We argue that matching-pairs games such as TuneTwins provide an engaging, intuitive, and scalable paradigm for collecting behavioral data using primarily auditory stimuli—and that they can be used to probe the mental representation of music across cultures, across development, and potentially across species.