Notes and neurons: Music and psychology

An unsmiling demand: ‘Show me your hands’. This was October 1985 and, having just graduated from pencil to fountain pen, the fingers I showed the woman who was to become my first cello teacher were stained with ink. Her verdict was unenthusiastic. ‘Disgusting! And no good at all for the cello. But you're here now, so sit down and take the test.’

In general, my primary education hadn't dwelt very much on the ideas of inherent ability or fixed potential. The school I attended took a fairly inclusive and child-centred approach to learning, and so this experience felt new and important. I sat down and spent fifteen minutes responding to the disembodied voice of Arnold Bentley. Was the second note higher or lower than the first? How many notes could I hear being played together? Which note in the melody was different second time around? The cello teacher scrutinised what I had written and seemed satisfied. My fingers might be no good, but apparently I could distinguish pitches accurately enough to pass muster. And so I was admitted to her class.

With hindsight this episode seems bizarre, but then a lot of what we remember or half-remember from childhood seems that way. However, the idea that certain people have gifts for music and that their hands or their ears might afford them an easier passage to proficiency in an instrument is still very common. Instrumental music educators are certainly much more preoccupied with the idea of giftedness than teachers in many other fields, and, in some quarters, the quest for ‘the talented students’ is accepted as part and parcel of formal music education.

But is ‘the talented student’ something that really exists? The question of whether elite musicians are born or made typically provokes four kinds of responses. Some people believe strongly in nature, others in nurture. Some researchers say ‘we don't really know [yet]’ and others – including a good number of philosophers and sociologists of music education – reject the question as irrelevant, unhelpful or potentially unethical.

For music educators, however, this question is not one that's going away in a hurry. We ask it because the teaching philosophies that we each construct are to some extent underpinned by our responses to it. And whether we say ‘Every child can learn’ or ‘Oh, she was born to play the violin’, the discipline most often invoked in support of our beliefs about the potential for instrumental learning is the psychology of music.

Unfortunately, despite increasingly frequent use of the phrase ‘studies have shown’, many of the things we read about musical giftedness have no basis at all in psychological research. There's a lot of pseudo-science in the public sphere, and even high-quality research can be distorted by poor-quality reporting. But the sustained efforts of music psychologists have not been totally fruitless. What can we say, then, from the perspective of music psychology, about instrumental learning and the nature-nurture debate? Here are six things that we're reasonably confident that we know:

• There's no clear genetic basis for musicality.
  We know that some traits, like blood type or eye colour, can be predicted by observing either a single gene or a small handful of genetic markers. As far as we can tell, the same isn't true of musicality, although recent research from a team in Finland has suggested the involvement of genetic components in quite specific aspects of musical perception. That's not to say there's no chance that heredity is involved in the development of elite musical skills, but if it is, then the relationship between a combination of contributing genes with the environment is likely to be a highly complex one.
  
  
• Musical aptitude tests don't work.
  To some teachers the idea that we can assess students to discover their aptitude for music is an appealing one. To others, the idea that underwrites tests by psychologists like Bentley, Seashore, Drake and Gordon – that musical ability is largely hereditary and largely fixed – is faintly sinister. What we know about all these tests is that their predictive reliability is very low, which means that, even on their own terms, they don't really work. They tend to be confounded very easily by children's previous musical experience, meaning that they can't distinguish between inherent aptitude and ability that has been developed. They also represent an extremely limited view of the prerequisites for musicianship, ignoring factors like motor skills, motivation, social awareness and perseverance that we know to be extremely important to being a successful musician. Some teachers argue that using tests like these in the classroom or studio can be helpful as long as we properly understand their limitations, but the narrow benefit they offer should be considered in light of the strong message they communicate to students about the ways in which musical skills and knowledge are developed.
  
  
• Expertise can be developed through practice.
  One thing that does seem to be a fairly strong predictor of a person's achievement in instrumental performance is how much time and effort they've spent learning. Empirically, expert musicians have accrued many more hours of activity than others. Research in this area is hampered by the difficulty of accurately recording accumulated hours of practice and by the near impossibility of knowing how many hours of informal learning a person accumulates. That said, a conservative estimate by researcher David Hambrick suggests that 30 per cent of variance in expertise can be directly attributed to hours of deliberate practice, and a 1998 study by Susan Hallam found a much stronger correlation of 0.84 between instrumental achievement and overall learning time. These findings suggest that practice is something from which we can all benefit, but fall short of confirming the ‘10,000 hour rule’ made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers. The best we can say is that deliberate practice and achievement have what Anders Ericsson has called a ‘monotonic relationship’: doing more practice won't hurt, but the extent to which it helps us to improve at any given stage is unpredictable.
  
  
• Some types of practice are more effective than others.
  We know that some kinds of practice work better than others. When psychologists talk about ‘deliberate practice’ they mean something that is goal-oriented, structured and effortful. Setting clear goals for each section of a practice session is therefore likely to make most efficient use of the available time. There is some evidence, too, that concentration for practice is higher in the morning and it turns out that the maxim ‘little and often’ has some basis in fact, since there is confirmation of ‘overnight gains’ in performance speed and accuracy. This may be why you can't expect three and a half hours of practice the night before your lesson to have the same effect as half an hour a day over the entire week. Interestingly, there is some evidence too that parents’ personal beliefs about musical talent have an impact on the efficacy of practice time. Gary McPherson and Jane Davidson's research has shown, perhaps unsurprisingly, that parents with fixed views of their child's capacity to learn music provide less effective support for their child's practice.
  
  
• Early exposure to music helps in the long run.
  The environment in which children are first exposed to music appears to have a profound impact on the development of their potential as musicians. Opportunities for children to learn from what they hear start very early, since foetuses have been shown to react to external sounds reliably from 28 to 30 weeks. Colwyn Trevarthen and Stephen Malloch have demonstrated the importance of early musical interactions, beginning with the imitations that occur between parent and baby immediately after birth, and certain specific musical skills such as absolute (or ‘perfect’) pitch are strongly correlated with certain musical exposure in the early years. Even physical development can be affected by early experiences: piano students who start lessons very young have hands that develop differently. Some researchers have conjectured that music – arguably like human language – is easier to learn in a sensitive period of early childhood. And, of course, traumatic early experiences can have profoundly negative effects on children's motivation and ability to learn music.
• Sustained interest and self-discipline are very important.
  Joanne Haroutounian has suggested that ‘sustained interest’ and ‘self-discipline’ are two of the most important defining behaviours exhibited by musically able children. As teachers, we know how crucial motivation can be to our students’ success, and ideally that motivation would come from within. Research in general psychology has not only reinforced this idea but has shown how complex, malleable and subject to change over time the ecology of motivation can be. Tasks and learning opportunities that are intrinsically motivating – that is, are rewarding in and for themselves – seem to work best in the medium- to long-term and an appropriate level of challenge has been shown to be essential to maintaining good levels of motivation.

Time and effort spent learning seem to be a fairly strong predictor of a person's achievement in instrumental performance

My cello teacher turned out to be much more human than she first appeared, and I learned with her for eleven years. I don't know what she really thought about whether cellists were born or made, but in retrospect I believe her pedagogical style mainly emphasised the importance of good practice habits and of maintaining a sense of fun. Her teaching strategies focused on the social aspects of learning; she had very high expectations of her students, and she certainly knew how to sustain interest.

One persuasive response to the nature-nurture debate and its uncertainties is to focus instead on providing the best possible opportunities for the students in front of us. Whether a pupil is ‘gifted’ or ‘average’ the job of a teacher is really just the same. Gary McPherson and Susan Hallam write that musical potential ‘is best thought of as malleable and ever changing, and a dimension of human experience that takes many forms and occurs at many different levels. All children are inherently musical and deserve access to the types of informal and formal experiences that will maximise their own, individual musical potential’. That sounds, to me, like good advice.

Further ReadingIn writing this article I relied heavily on the second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2016) edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut, and in particular on the chapters entitled ‘Musical potential’ by Gary McPherson and Susan Hallam (pp. 433–448) and ‘Practising’ by Harold Jørgensen and Susan Hallam (pp. 449–462). Some other useful texts are listed below:

• Csikszentmihalyi, M., Rathunde, K. and Whalen, S. (1993). Talented teenagers: the roots of success and failure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gladwell, M. (2008) Outliers: the story of success. New York: Little, Brown.
• Haroutounian, J. (2000). ‘Perspectives of musical talent: a study of identification criteria and procedures.’ High Ability Studies, 11, 137–160.
• Hodges, D. A., Handbook of music psychology. San Antonio, TX: IMR Press.
• McPherson, G.E., The child as musician: a handbook of musical development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Shuter-Dyson, R. (1999). ‘Musical ability’ In D. Deutsch (Ed.), The psychology of music (pp. 627–651). New York: Harcourt Brace.
• Trevarthen, C. and Malloch, S. (2002). Musicality and music before three: human vitality and invention shared with pride. Zero to Three, 23(1), 10–18.