7 ms·

No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Ability (2014) [pdf]

64 points by gwern 9y ago

kebman 9y ago
I've never practised guitar a day in my life, yet I'm most likely better than you at it. ;)
- doktrin 9y ago
  my core takeaway from HN these days is that life is but a meaningless expression of conscious carbon, quick to life and quick to death, with the only constant being endless futility.
EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
And yet, any professional musician will claim that practice is an essential part of the craft, required for learning difficult sections and tightening up loose licks. I wonder why these two viewpoints come to such opposite conclusions.
- haberman 9y ago
  > And yet, any professional musician will claim that practice is an essential part of the craft, required for learning difficult sections and tightening up loose licks. It absolutely is. Practice is necessary but not sufficient for high-level musical performance. The study talks about musical ability in terms of rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination -- mental skills around music -- and finds that these are not changed with practice. These two statements are not in conflict.
  - limaoscarjuliet 9y ago
    And, perhaps, cause and effect are reversed: people who are gifted see increase of satisfaction (but necessarily skill) when practicing. Then they report that practice is crucial.
    - haberman 9y ago
      This is easy to falsify by having someone else evaluate whether a musician's performance improves with practice. This is very easy to double-blind: just record "before" and "after" performances and don't tell the evaluator which is which. I would be willing to bet that the effects of practice on a musical performance are very easily measurable.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    But if practice is necessary for high-level musical performance, then that implies it has a causal effect on it. This paradox seems to be resolved by noting that where the paper uses 'music ability' it means scoring well in certain traits (rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination), not being able to perform well.
    - haberman 9y ago
      > This paradox seems to be resolved by noting that the paper uses 'music ability' it means scoring well in certain traits (rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination), not being able to perform well. Exactly. I think the paper is trying to establish that there is some kind of inborn talent that is not affected by practice, even if other things (like performing ability) are.
- shacharz 9y ago
  The article talks about music ability defined by them to be rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination. Not the memorization of a musical piece.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  They're not at all conflicting unless you choose to interpret them in that way. I think the premise here is very well understood, and it's whether or not any amount of practice can make up for what some would argue is an innate lack of musical talent. The benefits of practice thereafter are incontrovertible.
- yasth 9y ago
  They aren't opposite. You need the practice to learn the music, but it doesn't help (apparently) you determine pitch , or pick out rhythmical differences (which is what it actually tested). It doesn't necessarily mean you play, but it will probably affect your ability to self regulate and learn by ear.
- deleted 9y ago
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DonHopkins 9y ago
That's not what Quincy Jones says. http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.html http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.... David Marchese: You’re talking about business not music, but, and I mean this respectfully, don’t some of your thoughts about music fall under the category of “back in my day”? Quincy Jones: Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?
- wickawic 9y ago
  I remember reading an interview with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. He mentions how glad he was that he never joined the singer/songwriter scene because leaning picking and rhyhhm guitar gave him the facility to play whatever he wanted. Edit: here he expresses some of the same sentiment https://youtu.be/OG__SwkV3wg https://youtu.be/OG__SwkV3wg
- watertom 9y ago
  You’re wrong Quincy agrees with the article. The emotion part is what the article addresses. You gotta have that “swing” and that can’t be learned or taught, it can be enhanced, but you can’t practice into having it. As Quincy says it comes naturally, but not everyone has it. If you have the emotion part you can develop the techniques, but no the other way around. My wife is a very good piano player, but she doesn’t have “it”, she sounds like a robot playing, it’s painful to hear, but she plays in time, all the right notes, but it’s just not there. In drawing it’s most evident, some people can draw and others can’t, no amount of practice will help me. The emotion side of things kicks in more so with drawing.
  - doktrin 9y ago
    > My wife is a very good piano player, but she doesn’t have “it” Absurdly subjective. If you can neither qualify nor quantify "it" you shouldn't start levying it as some standard of quality.
macawfish 9y ago
I've been playing music since 4 yrs old, and I've become quite a good musician. I really struggled with rigorous practice routines. I had a teacher once validate that my active listening to music was just as good practice as sitting down at the piano. That was a really important affirmation for me, since a lot of parents and teachers force practicing to a punitive degree, to the point where its possible to develop shame and negative self image around "not practicing enough". Very interesting article! Here's an analogy: say you get a discount on your health insurance if you visit a fitness center regularly. Except that going to fitness centers got you excited. You don't get anything out of them. But you do like biking, going on long hikes and you do a lot of physical activity in your work. So just because you don't go to the gym, should you give up on your fitness? Heck no! Lean into what energizes you to stay healthy.
- hosh 9y ago
  Active listening seems to me to have the sams essential for deliberate practice. Is is where you put your attention an awareness. A punitive practice will not force someone's awareness on the practice. Though someone might be bored and put their attention on the practice. That has been my experience with music growing up and martial arts later. And software programming.
bitL 9y ago
Practice makes permanent, right?
logicallee 9y ago
what's with these obviously false journal titles? "Food is a luxury: caloric intake not necessary for survival." yeah, sure.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Perhaps you should read the paper to find how the title is not false?
  - logicallee 9y ago
    But the title still obviously is false. Obviously practice increases your musical ability. maybe if you read my paper you would see how you don't need any caloric intake to survive. (If I redefine all the words I just used, in the body of my paper.) Hence my "why the obviously false titles."
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >But the title still obviously is false. Obviously practice increases your musical ability. There's nothing "obvious", unless you can counter both the results and the explanations given in the study. And they haven't redefined anything.
deleted 9y ago
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thinkloop 9y ago
> Music ability was measured using the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test (SMDT) > The SMDT consists of three subtests — pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination The test is of fundamental primitives - not about the ability to play a tune. The study doesn't show that practice does not make better music. For example a deaf person who scores 0 on all the tests, can still visually memorize and practice timings and strokes to produce nice songs.
iandanforth 9y ago
This article defines 'musical ability' very very narrowly. In discriminatory tasks related to rhythm, melody, and pitch there was a strong heritable component. Keep practicing.
crpatino 9y ago
This is Bad!Science of the worst kind. We have found previouslly undernoticed causal relation A->B. Therefore the sage wisdom of C->B must be wrong, wrong, wrong!!! No matter how many generations of actual practicioners of B have found C to be useful. Alternative Hypotesis: The problem is that Perfect Practice Makes Perfect. Defective Practice, on the other hand, Entrenches Bad Habits. Since both twins share the same parents, they'll share the quality of practice that they will get. Therefore, the lazy twin of a Perfect!Practice family will still benefit from it, though to a lesser degree than his more dilligent sibling. In a Defective!Practice familly, on the other hand, the dilligent sibling will benefit from his dilligence, and as a matter of fact the lazy twin would theoretically be in a better position to undo the damage if he were to find a better mentor later in life.
kd0amg 9y ago
Before anyone gets too excited about the headline, the "music ability" test they apply is strictly listening (no playing). It's disappointing that they don't appear to measure/estimate how much of subjects' practice time was spent specifically on ear training.
kartan 9y ago
"A common operationalization of music ability is sensory discrimination of auditory musical stimuli of vari- ous types". Music ability is defined as "rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination". So it´s not about being able to play music, but hearing and classification ability. So it translatates in non-fancy-wording. Being able to differenciate rhythms and melodies depends on your genetics and can not be practiced for improvement. But it says nothing about the effect of practicing on being a better music performer.
lawn 9y ago
Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice make perfect (there is no such thing).
- dkersten 9y ago
  Not perfect practice, but deliberate practice. For example, I practice sleight of hand (for card magic and cardistry). If I just practice, then whatever bad habits and mistakes I make, well I make them permanent. If, however, I, for example, video my practice sessions, watch them back and correct the mistakes I make, then I get better and my technique gets better. The point is to find out where you go wrong and correct for it.
trevyn 9y ago
This paper appears to be deliberately misleading. The "10,000 hours to expert performance" notion originated in Ericsson 1993 (http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.PDF http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...) , which defines a very specific term, "deliberate practice" -- "In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable." Ericsson adds more detail in the full paper. It's not just "are you playing piano for X hours per day". The paper in this post mentions deliberate practice in its review of the literature, but then all of a sudden and without explanation reverts to the more generic term "practice" for all of its contributions, which appears to be defined as "how many hours did you play your instrument". Note that "play" and "practice" are explicitly disambiguated in Ericsson. I have a hard time believing that the authors are unaware of this distinction, especially considering that they heavily reference Ericsson.
- haberman 9y ago
  Whether intentional or not, I think the "deliberate practice" rebuttal is a bit of a "no true scotsman" dodge. Anyone who says they practiced a lot can be interrogated about how methodical their practice was, to see if it counts. The only way, then, to falsify Ericsson's hypothesis is to spend lot of energy on highly methodical practice over a long period of time even though you are not improving very much. Who would spend the time to do that, just to rebut Ericsson? Ericsson's original paper says: "In this article we propose a theoretical framework that explains expert performance in terms of acquired characteristics resulting from extended deliberate practice and that limits the role of innate (inherited) characteristics to general levels of activity and emotionality." They want to claim that the only innate talent that matters is that you are active and emotional, and not that you have any innate talent for music. This paper shows that the amount of time spent practicing appears to have no effect at all on some of these basic musical skills. It shows the presence of innate musical talent, something Ericsson wants to deny. Some people really like to believe the 10,000 hour rule. I have no desire to talk someone out of believing it if they find it motivational. But as a musician, it's obvious to me that inborn talent is absolutely necessary for high-level performance. The idea that anybody can be Joshua Bell if they just put in the time is a wishful fantasy, not reality. This kind of "blank slatism" is popular because it satisfies our desire for the world to be fair and just. We want to believe that we can create a perfectly fair playing field where success comes from effort alone. This is a noble idea, but the danger is when we discount evidence to the contrary -- evidence that sometimes people really are different, possibly having different talents or desires. Because then we look for who to blame when things don't end up the way we thought they should.
doktrin 9y ago
and so it goes, as with all things, gwern becomes irrelevant, out of touch, and unimportant edit : don't think the 0.001 ms downvotes were not noticed, hacker news
- sctb 9y ago
  This comment violates the guidelines in like, a handful of ways. Could you please read them and not post like this again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - happyguy43 9y ago
    Why did you shadow ban me?
    - dang 9y ago
      Probably a combination of the personal attack in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304324 and evidence that you've been abusing HN with other accounts. We tend to shadowban new accounts in that case because it's too tiring to engage with serial trolls. When the account has been around longer we tend to post openly that they're being banned and why. Since you've posted mostly good comments since then, we'll unban you. But would you please use the site as intended—for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation—and follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html from now on?
      - happyguy43 9y ago
        I’ve always used it for sincere intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. My posts across all my accounts are more representative of that more than bad faith trolling. You can trace through it yourself. Saying Bryan Cantrell has a massive ego isn’t such a massive or unfounded personal attack if I back it up with well-known evidence. He has a known and decorated reputation in the hacker community for having a massive ego. I mean, really? Having a contradictory or aggressive opinion doesn’t make you a troll if you’re willing to continuously engage in the discussion in good faith. Trolls minimally engage and don’t add. I put effort in my engagement and I try to add to the discussion. My treatment on hacker news has been unfair and I think your handling has been heavy-handed to the point of censorship. That being said, thank you for de-shadowbanning me. It shows you care.
stanfordkid 9y ago
Take something really complex, dumb it down to 3 variables, draw conclusions... profit? Is the difference between Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix measurable by "rhythm, melody, pitch discrimination" and whatever methodology they used to quantify these variables? It's like measuring computer scientists ability by how quickly they can implement binary search. EDIT: it is interesting that musical practice doesn't change those abilities. But I think the title of the article is misleading and grasping.
- deleted 9y ago
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dooglius 9y ago
The title is quite misleading: the notions "practice" and "ability" here refer to different things: "practice" is taken to mean practicing the creation of music with an instrument, while "ability" is taken to discriminate between auditory aspects of music one is listening to. I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination. It's rather unfortunate that the title is so poor, as the paper itself is good aside from that; the study they mention a few times (Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013) found that "more music practice is significantly associated with better music ability" and I'm glad people are going through the effort of checking results like these for causation vs mere correlation.
- tremendulo 9y ago
  >I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination. Yes, and real musicianship is more complicated still since hearing and playing abilities co-evolve as one cycles round and round a new piece. For example, notes previously played too quietly can be played louder merely by hearing them as louder. At least that's the way I experience it. If true it adds a whole new meaning to 'active listening' since motor activity may be included in the loop.
danieka 9y ago
As a former professional musician I was initially provoked since the title clearly does not align with what I experienced when working. What the study refers to as musical ability is in fact the skill to discern different pitches and rhythms. Obviously there is an enormous amount af practice required to master an instrument. But I still find it hard to “agree” with the paper, I’ve noticed large differences in how attuned I am to pitch and rhythm depending on how much I’ve practiced. Hearing pitch, at least for me, is a skill that can be both trained and lost. Which makes me think that maybe it is not the total amount of hours practiced that is important but also how recent that practice was. I can find no mention in the paper of how “fresh” the participants skills were. Also, there is a huge difference in how you practice, how efficient it is etc. To be fair I didn’t fully understand the statistical stuff, but all in all this fells like a somewhat blunt study especially considering the provocative title. Edit: spelling
setgree 9y ago
Ah it took me a minute to parse out that they were distinguishing general music ability from proficiency with an instrument -- yes, this is believable, the weak effects of learning transfer are pretty well-documented in general education and athletics, which Bryan Caplan has been writing about lately http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/learning_transf.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/learning_transf..... On the one hand, I think playing in an ensemble is crucial for learning rhythm discrimination and that there probably would be transfer there. On the other, perfect pitch is all but unlearnable and that presents a huge, entirely genetic advantage for some folks on pitch discrimination tasks.
jancsika 9y ago
Who ever made such a claim? The claim I'm familiar with is that a performer who practices decreases the probability of a catastrophic mistake in the performance and increases the probability that their musical ideas will be conveyed clearly during the performance. So given two performers or roughly equal ability, hire the one who practices.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
This subject always seems to get everyone in a twist. That's because there are at least two different things being discussed: necessary vs. sufficient. The Gladwell version of 10,000 hours was quite clearly a 'necessary' interpretation of deliberate practice. You look at success vs. amount practiced and see that those who practice more tend to be more successful, at least to a point. Fairly simple idea, wrapped up in a neat pop-sci quip. The 'sufficient' argument is a radically different one that suggests that ultimate ability isn't that different between individuals. Immediately, this seems strongly at odds with other observed intellectual metrics such as IQ which is very highly heritable (h = 0.7 to 0.8) and does not suffer from many of the data quality issues that other metrics do. A much better title for this paper would end with 'ultimate ability' or 'potential' or something, because practice is obviously necessary. There's just a lot of people talking past each other here, and several that clearly didn't read even the introduction to the paper which discusses this difference.
cortic 9y ago
? "music ability" eq "rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination" (I'll be honest this bothered me that much i didn't read very much further) Did they design a test specifically to make them feel special? rhythm is subjective within music (think jazz). A 'good' melody is only subjectively different from a bad one. Maybe pitch discrimination could be genetic; partial deafness. They may not be technically wrong, but their definition of practice and perfect seem twisted to click bait.
gtani 9y ago
I also think this is flawed. Wind and orchestral string players (violin, cello etc) must develop a fine ear for pitch/intonation, pianists usually aren't given any choice as to tuning/voicing/regulation of the instruments they have to perform on and I think over time, many lose sensitivity to non Pythagorean intervals and ET deviations from just intonation. So everybody's lumped together, those that play one instrument vs those than are proficient on 3 or more
abalone 9y ago
"Here, we examined... 10,500 Swedish twins" Woah. TIL about the Swedish Twin Registry: https://ki.se/en/research/the-swedish-twin-registry https://ki.se/en/research/the-swedish-twin-registry
bobthechef 9y ago
Silly title. One the one hand, you have skill, on the other ability. Ability is the potential you have to become good at something, skill is actualized ability. So while I may not be able to e.g. play the piano now (no skill), given enough practice, I can actualize my potential into skill. Potential may place a bound on skill, but the only way to convert potential into skill is through practice.
Agathos 9y ago
> Participants were first asked whether they play an instrument (or actively sing). Those who responded positively were questioned about the number of years they practiced during four age intervals (ages 0–5 years, 6–11 years, 12–17 years, and 18 years until the time of measurement) and how many hours a week during each of those intervals they practiced. From these estimates, a sum-score estimate of the total hours played during their lifetime was calculated, with nonplayers receiving a score of zero. I'm a lapsed clarinetist. It's been a few years. I wonder if I would have answered "no" to the first question, and been scored as someone with zero hours of practice. Yet I have a couple of thousand lifetime hours of practice. (But no, most of that practice time did not really drill the skills measured by the SMDT.)
RandomInteger4 9y ago
Complete and utter horse shit.
jdietrich 9y ago
Frankly, I'm completely mystified by this paper. It appears to be built on a circular and self-contradictory logic. The paper compares hours of music practice to scores in the Swedish Musical Listening Test (SMLT). It finds no significant correlation, concluding that there is no causal relationship between musical practice and musical skill. The SMLT does not directly measure practical musical skills, but is treated by the authors as a valid proxy measure because it correlates with hours of musical practice (Ullén et al, 2014). Practice does not improve musical ability because hours of practice are not correlated with scores in the SMLT. The SMLT is a valid proxy measure of musical ability because scores correlate with hours of practice. See the problem? Ullén, F., Mosing, M. A., Holm, L., Eriksson, H., & Madison, G. (2014). Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 87–93. (10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.057)
iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
What if simply believing that one can't learn these things prevents them being learned (by that person)?
melq 9y ago
The paper seems to be talking about deliberate practice of an instrument, but then measuring what jazz musicians call 'ear training'. When I was preparing for conservatory auditions, I did quite a bit of ear training, things like recognizing intervals between notes, cadences/chord progressions, etc after having them played to you. Before I started any sort of training/practice regimen, I'm quite sure I could never identify a tritone or minor third being payed on a piano. After a lot of deliberate ear training, I certainly could. And I suspect most people could as well, but not by just sitting there listening to things you don't understand, but rather by 'deliberate practice' and learning. A major 5th is easily recognized as the interval between the first notes in a popular star wars theme, a minor 3rd is the interval between the first two notes in greensleeves. These sorts of associations were how I taught myself. This study is baffling...
schuetze 9y ago
Psych Science, while published by a somewhat reputable source (the APA has had some questionable positions on torture), is not considered a highly rigorous journal. It prioritizes “sexy” findings that are more likely to not replicate. Within the psych community, these kind of findings are taken with a grain of salt.
ianamartin 9y ago
This is a really badly designed study. I started playing violin when I was 4 and started performing professionally when I was 7, and continued to do so for 20 years. Learning to play an instrument or sing is not the same as studying pitch differentiation or rhythm. There are a surprising number of successful musicians who are bad at these things. But the method laid out here is utterly meaningless. You might assume that practicing the violin would have some affect on these things, but it doesn't necessarily. Many people simply learn these things by wrote for specific pieces of music from their guidance in private lessons and teachers. You might also assume that someone who practices a lot and got a degree is also good at Music Theory or Music History, but that's also false. There are tons of professional classical musicians with graduate and Doctorate degrees who are bad at all the things measured in this study as well as history and theory. I'm really shocked that the authors couldn't figure out that they were measuring two completely different things and calling them the same thing. It almost seems intentional for the sake of publishing a controversial result. People absolutely get better at these specific tasks when they practice _these specific tasks_. Every music curriculum in world specifically requires classes in these exact tasks, although the bar for minimal competence is extremely low. I run a small side business tutoring people who are already professional classical musicians who want to get into a DMA program. They have to demonstrate competency at these tasks, as well as some basic knowledge of Theory and History. They can't; even though they are top-level performers on their instrument and practice hours every day. I offer a 12-week crash course that covers these types of tasks and as well as the knowledge component, and people usually find me because they've already applied to a DMA program and been rejected for failing these prerequisites. I know for a fact that they get better with deliberate practice because after working with a couple of dozen clients, every single one of them gets in on the second try. Not to mention the fact that every single day, there are students in Music degrees who start off really sucking at these specific measures who get enough better at them to pass the class at the end of the semester, through very specifically designed exercises that target these abilities. This whole study is an infuriating waste of time and money, and it's an example of some really bad science that's floating around there in the world I really have a hard time believing this was accepted anywhere for publication.
Tomminn 9y ago
This seems absurd.

64 points by gwern 9y ago

kebman 9y ago

I've never practised guitar a day in my life, yet I'm most likely better than you at it. ;)

doktrin 9y ago
my core takeaway from HN these days is that life is but a meaningless expression of conscious carbon, quick to life and quick to death, with the only constant being endless futility.

EtDybNuvCu 9y ago

And yet, any professional musician will claim that practice is an essential part of the craft, required for learning difficult sections and tightening up loose licks. I wonder why these two viewpoints come to such opposite conclusions.

haberman 9y ago
> And yet, any professional musician will claim that practice is an essential part of the craft, required for learning difficult sections and tightening up loose licks. It absolutely is. Practice is necessary but not sufficient for high-level musical performance. The study talks about musical ability in terms of rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination -- mental skills around music -- and finds that these are not changed with practice. These two statements are not in conflict.
- limaoscarjuliet 9y ago
  And, perhaps, cause and effect are reversed: people who are gifted see increase of satisfaction (but necessarily skill) when practicing. Then they report that practice is crucial.
  - haberman 9y ago
    This is easy to falsify by having someone else evaluate whether a musician's performance improves with practice. This is very easy to double-blind: just record "before" and "after" performances and don't tell the evaluator which is which. I would be willing to bet that the effects of practice on a musical performance are very easily measurable.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  But if practice is necessary for high-level musical performance, then that implies it has a causal effect on it. This paradox seems to be resolved by noting that where the paper uses 'music ability' it means scoring well in certain traits (rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination), not being able to perform well.
  - haberman 9y ago
    > This paradox seems to be resolved by noting that the paper uses 'music ability' it means scoring well in certain traits (rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination), not being able to perform well. Exactly. I think the paper is trying to establish that there is some kind of inborn talent that is not affected by practice, even if other things (like performing ability) are.
shacharz 9y ago
The article talks about music ability defined by them to be rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination. Not the memorization of a musical piece.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
They're not at all conflicting unless you choose to interpret them in that way. I think the premise here is very well understood, and it's whether or not any amount of practice can make up for what some would argue is an innate lack of musical talent. The benefits of practice thereafter are incontrovertible.
yasth 9y ago
They aren't opposite. You need the practice to learn the music, but it doesn't help (apparently) you determine pitch , or pick out rhythmical differences (which is what it actually tested). It doesn't necessarily mean you play, but it will probably affect your ability to self regulate and learn by ear.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

DonHopkins 9y ago

That's not what Quincy Jones says. http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.html http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.... David Marchese: You’re talking about business not music, but, and I mean this respectfully, don’t some of your thoughts about music fall under the category of “back in my day”? Quincy Jones: Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?

wickawic 9y ago
I remember reading an interview with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. He mentions how glad he was that he never joined the singer/songwriter scene because leaning picking and rhyhhm guitar gave him the facility to play whatever he wanted. Edit: here he expresses some of the same sentiment https://youtu.be/OG__SwkV3wg https://youtu.be/OG__SwkV3wg
watertom 9y ago
You’re wrong Quincy agrees with the article. The emotion part is what the article addresses. You gotta have that “swing” and that can’t be learned or taught, it can be enhanced, but you can’t practice into having it. As Quincy says it comes naturally, but not everyone has it. If you have the emotion part you can develop the techniques, but no the other way around. My wife is a very good piano player, but she doesn’t have “it”, she sounds like a robot playing, it’s painful to hear, but she plays in time, all the right notes, but it’s just not there. In drawing it’s most evident, some people can draw and others can’t, no amount of practice will help me. The emotion side of things kicks in more so with drawing.
- doktrin 9y ago
  > My wife is a very good piano player, but she doesn’t have “it” Absurdly subjective. If you can neither qualify nor quantify "it" you shouldn't start levying it as some standard of quality.

macawfish 9y ago

I've been playing music since 4 yrs old, and I've become quite a good musician. I really struggled with rigorous practice routines. I had a teacher once validate that my active listening to music was just as good practice as sitting down at the piano. That was a really important affirmation for me, since a lot of parents and teachers force practicing to a punitive degree, to the point where its possible to develop shame and negative self image around "not practicing enough". Very interesting article! Here's an analogy: say you get a discount on your health insurance if you visit a fitness center regularly. Except that going to fitness centers got you excited. You don't get anything out of them. But you do like biking, going on long hikes and you do a lot of physical activity in your work. So just because you don't go to the gym, should you give up on your fitness? Heck no! Lean into what energizes you to stay healthy.

hosh 9y ago
Active listening seems to me to have the sams essential for deliberate practice. Is is where you put your attention an awareness. A punitive practice will not force someone's awareness on the practice. Though someone might be bored and put their attention on the practice. That has been my experience with music growing up and martial arts later. And software programming.

bitL 9y ago

Practice makes permanent, right?

logicallee 9y ago

what's with these obviously false journal titles? "Food is a luxury: caloric intake not necessary for survival." yeah, sure.

coldtea 9y ago
Perhaps you should read the paper to find how the title is not false?
- logicallee 9y ago
  But the title still obviously is false. Obviously practice increases your musical ability. maybe if you read my paper you would see how you don't need any caloric intake to survive. (If I redefine all the words I just used, in the body of my paper.) Hence my "why the obviously false titles."
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >But the title still obviously is false. Obviously practice increases your musical ability. There's nothing "obvious", unless you can counter both the results and the explanations given in the study. And they haven't redefined anything.

deleted 9y ago

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thinkloop 9y ago

> Music ability was measured using the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test (SMDT) > The SMDT consists of three subtests — pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination The test is of fundamental primitives - not about the ability to play a tune. The study doesn't show that practice does not make better music. For example a deaf person who scores 0 on all the tests, can still visually memorize and practice timings and strokes to produce nice songs.

iandanforth 9y ago

This article defines 'musical ability' very very narrowly. In discriminatory tasks related to rhythm, melody, and pitch there was a strong heritable component. Keep practicing.

crpatino 9y ago

This is Bad!Science of the worst kind. We have found previouslly undernoticed causal relation A->B. Therefore the sage wisdom of C->B must be wrong, wrong, wrong!!! No matter how many generations of actual practicioners of B have found C to be useful. Alternative Hypotesis: The problem is that Perfect Practice Makes Perfect. Defective Practice, on the other hand, Entrenches Bad Habits. Since both twins share the same parents, they'll share the quality of practice that they will get. Therefore, the lazy twin of a Perfect!Practice family will still benefit from it, though to a lesser degree than his more dilligent sibling. In a Defective!Practice familly, on the other hand, the dilligent sibling will benefit from his dilligence, and as a matter of fact the lazy twin would theoretically be in a better position to undo the damage if he were to find a better mentor later in life.

kd0amg 9y ago

Before anyone gets too excited about the headline, the "music ability" test they apply is strictly listening (no playing). It's disappointing that they don't appear to measure/estimate how much of subjects' practice time was spent specifically on ear training.

kartan 9y ago

"A common operationalization of music ability is sensory discrimination of auditory musical stimuli of vari- ous types". Music ability is defined as "rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination". So it´s not about being able to play music, but hearing and classification ability. So it translatates in non-fancy-wording. Being able to differenciate rhythms and melodies depends on your genetics and can not be practiced for improvement. But it says nothing about the effect of practicing on being a better music performer.

lawn 9y ago

Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice make perfect (there is no such thing).

dkersten 9y ago
Not perfect practice, but deliberate practice. For example, I practice sleight of hand (for card magic and cardistry). If I just practice, then whatever bad habits and mistakes I make, well I make them permanent. If, however, I, for example, video my practice sessions, watch them back and correct the mistakes I make, then I get better and my technique gets better. The point is to find out where you go wrong and correct for it.

trevyn 9y ago

This paper appears to be deliberately misleading. The "10,000 hours to expert performance" notion originated in Ericsson 1993 (http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.PDF http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...) , which defines a very specific term, "deliberate practice" -- "In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable." Ericsson adds more detail in the full paper. It's not just "are you playing piano for X hours per day". The paper in this post mentions deliberate practice in its review of the literature, but then all of a sudden and without explanation reverts to the more generic term "practice" for all of its contributions, which appears to be defined as "how many hours did you play your instrument". Note that "play" and "practice" are explicitly disambiguated in Ericsson. I have a hard time believing that the authors are unaware of this distinction, especially considering that they heavily reference Ericsson.

haberman 9y ago
Whether intentional or not, I think the "deliberate practice" rebuttal is a bit of a "no true scotsman" dodge. Anyone who says they practiced a lot can be interrogated about how methodical their practice was, to see if it counts. The only way, then, to falsify Ericsson's hypothesis is to spend lot of energy on highly methodical practice over a long period of time even though you are not improving very much. Who would spend the time to do that, just to rebut Ericsson? Ericsson's original paper says: "In this article we propose a theoretical framework that explains expert performance in terms of acquired characteristics resulting from extended deliberate practice and that limits the role of innate (inherited) characteristics to general levels of activity and emotionality." They want to claim that the only innate talent that matters is that you are active and emotional, and not that you have any innate talent for music. This paper shows that the amount of time spent practicing appears to have no effect at all on some of these basic musical skills. It shows the presence of innate musical talent, something Ericsson wants to deny. Some people really like to believe the 10,000 hour rule. I have no desire to talk someone out of believing it if they find it motivational. But as a musician, it's obvious to me that inborn talent is absolutely necessary for high-level performance. The idea that anybody can be Joshua Bell if they just put in the time is a wishful fantasy, not reality. This kind of "blank slatism" is popular because it satisfies our desire for the world to be fair and just. We want to believe that we can create a perfectly fair playing field where success comes from effort alone. This is a noble idea, but the danger is when we discount evidence to the contrary -- evidence that sometimes people really are different, possibly having different talents or desires. Because then we look for who to blame when things don't end up the way we thought they should.

doktrin 9y ago

and so it goes, as with all things, gwern becomes irrelevant, out of touch, and unimportant edit : don't think the 0.001 ms downvotes were not noticed, hacker news

sctb 9y ago
This comment violates the guidelines in like, a handful of ways. Could you please read them and not post like this again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- happyguy43 9y ago
  Why did you shadow ban me?
  - dang 9y ago
    Probably a combination of the personal attack in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304324 and evidence that you've been abusing HN with other accounts. We tend to shadowban new accounts in that case because it's too tiring to engage with serial trolls. When the account has been around longer we tend to post openly that they're being banned and why. Since you've posted mostly good comments since then, we'll unban you. But would you please use the site as intended—for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation—and follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html from now on?
    - happyguy43 9y ago
      I’ve always used it for sincere intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. My posts across all my accounts are more representative of that more than bad faith trolling. You can trace through it yourself. Saying Bryan Cantrell has a massive ego isn’t such a massive or unfounded personal attack if I back it up with well-known evidence. He has a known and decorated reputation in the hacker community for having a massive ego. I mean, really? Having a contradictory or aggressive opinion doesn’t make you a troll if you’re willing to continuously engage in the discussion in good faith. Trolls minimally engage and don’t add. I put effort in my engagement and I try to add to the discussion. My treatment on hacker news has been unfair and I think your handling has been heavy-handed to the point of censorship. That being said, thank you for de-shadowbanning me. It shows you care.

stanfordkid 9y ago

Take something really complex, dumb it down to 3 variables, draw conclusions... profit? Is the difference between Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix measurable by "rhythm, melody, pitch discrimination" and whatever methodology they used to quantify these variables? It's like measuring computer scientists ability by how quickly they can implement binary search. EDIT: it is interesting that musical practice doesn't change those abilities. But I think the title of the article is misleading and grasping.

deleted 9y ago
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dooglius 9y ago

The title is quite misleading: the notions "practice" and "ability" here refer to different things: "practice" is taken to mean practicing the creation of music with an instrument, while "ability" is taken to discriminate between auditory aspects of music one is listening to. I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination. It's rather unfortunate that the title is so poor, as the paper itself is good aside from that; the study they mention a few times (Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013) found that "more music practice is significantly associated with better music ability" and I'm glad people are going through the effort of checking results like these for causation vs mere correlation.

tremendulo 9y ago
>I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination. Yes, and real musicianship is more complicated still since hearing and playing abilities co-evolve as one cycles round and round a new piece. For example, notes previously played too quietly can be played louder merely by hearing them as louder. At least that's the way I experience it. If true it adds a whole new meaning to 'active listening' since motor activity may be included in the loop.

danieka 9y ago

As a former professional musician I was initially provoked since the title clearly does not align with what I experienced when working. What the study refers to as musical ability is in fact the skill to discern different pitches and rhythms. Obviously there is an enormous amount af practice required to master an instrument. But I still find it hard to “agree” with the paper, I’ve noticed large differences in how attuned I am to pitch and rhythm depending on how much I’ve practiced. Hearing pitch, at least for me, is a skill that can be both trained and lost. Which makes me think that maybe it is not the total amount of hours practiced that is important but also how recent that practice was. I can find no mention in the paper of how “fresh” the participants skills were. Also, there is a huge difference in how you practice, how efficient it is etc. To be fair I didn’t fully understand the statistical stuff, but all in all this fells like a somewhat blunt study especially considering the provocative title. Edit: spelling

setgree 9y ago

Ah it took me a minute to parse out that they were distinguishing general music ability from proficiency with an instrument -- yes, this is believable, the weak effects of learning transfer are pretty well-documented in general education and athletics, which Bryan Caplan has been writing about lately http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/learning_transf.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/learning_transf..... On the one hand, I think playing in an ensemble is crucial for learning rhythm discrimination and that there probably would be transfer there. On the other, perfect pitch is all but unlearnable and that presents a huge, entirely genetic advantage for some folks on pitch discrimination tasks.

jancsika 9y ago

Who ever made such a claim? The claim I'm familiar with is that a performer who practices decreases the probability of a catastrophic mistake in the performance and increases the probability that their musical ideas will be conveyed clearly during the performance. So given two performers or roughly equal ability, hire the one who practices.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago

This subject always seems to get everyone in a twist. That's because there are at least two different things being discussed: necessary vs. sufficient. The Gladwell version of 10,000 hours was quite clearly a 'necessary' interpretation of deliberate practice. You look at success vs. amount practiced and see that those who practice more tend to be more successful, at least to a point. Fairly simple idea, wrapped up in a neat pop-sci quip. The 'sufficient' argument is a radically different one that suggests that ultimate ability isn't that different between individuals. Immediately, this seems strongly at odds with other observed intellectual metrics such as IQ which is very highly heritable (h = 0.7 to 0.8) and does not suffer from many of the data quality issues that other metrics do. A much better title for this paper would end with 'ultimate ability' or 'potential' or something, because practice is obviously necessary. There's just a lot of people talking past each other here, and several that clearly didn't read even the introduction to the paper which discusses this difference.

cortic 9y ago

? "music ability" eq "rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination" (I'll be honest this bothered me that much i didn't read very much further) Did they design a test specifically to make them feel special? rhythm is subjective within music (think jazz). A 'good' melody is only subjectively different from a bad one. Maybe pitch discrimination could be genetic; partial deafness. They may not be technically wrong, but their definition of practice and perfect seem twisted to click bait.

gtani 9y ago

I also think this is flawed. Wind and orchestral string players (violin, cello etc) must develop a fine ear for pitch/intonation, pianists usually aren't given any choice as to tuning/voicing/regulation of the instruments they have to perform on and I think over time, many lose sensitivity to non Pythagorean intervals and ET deviations from just intonation. So everybody's lumped together, those that play one instrument vs those than are proficient on 3 or more

abalone 9y ago

"Here, we examined... 10,500 Swedish twins" Woah. TIL about the Swedish Twin Registry: https://ki.se/en/research/the-swedish-twin-registry https://ki.se/en/research/the-swedish-twin-registry

bobthechef 9y ago

Silly title. One the one hand, you have skill, on the other ability. Ability is the potential you have to become good at something, skill is actualized ability. So while I may not be able to e.g. play the piano now (no skill), given enough practice, I can actualize my potential into skill. Potential may place a bound on skill, but the only way to convert potential into skill is through practice.

Agathos 9y ago

> Participants were first asked whether they play an instrument (or actively sing). Those who responded positively were questioned about the number of years they practiced during four age intervals (ages 0–5 years, 6–11 years, 12–17 years, and 18 years until the time of measurement) and how many hours a week during each of those intervals they practiced. From these estimates, a sum-score estimate of the total hours played during their lifetime was calculated, with nonplayers receiving a score of zero. I'm a lapsed clarinetist. It's been a few years. I wonder if I would have answered "no" to the first question, and been scored as someone with zero hours of practice. Yet I have a couple of thousand lifetime hours of practice. (But no, most of that practice time did not really drill the skills measured by the SMDT.)

RandomInteger4 9y ago

Complete and utter horse shit.

jdietrich 9y ago

Frankly, I'm completely mystified by this paper. It appears to be built on a circular and self-contradictory logic. The paper compares hours of music practice to scores in the Swedish Musical Listening Test (SMLT). It finds no significant correlation, concluding that there is no causal relationship between musical practice and musical skill. The SMLT does not directly measure practical musical skills, but is treated by the authors as a valid proxy measure because it correlates with hours of musical practice (Ullén et al, 2014). Practice does not improve musical ability because hours of practice are not correlated with scores in the SMLT. The SMLT is a valid proxy measure of musical ability because scores correlate with hours of practice. See the problem? Ullén, F., Mosing, M. A., Holm, L., Eriksson, H., & Madison, G. (2014). Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 87–93. (10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.057)

iovrthoughtthis 9y ago

What if simply believing that one can't learn these things prevents them being learned (by that person)?

melq 9y ago

The paper seems to be talking about deliberate practice of an instrument, but then measuring what jazz musicians call 'ear training'. When I was preparing for conservatory auditions, I did quite a bit of ear training, things like recognizing intervals between notes, cadences/chord progressions, etc after having them played to you. Before I started any sort of training/practice regimen, I'm quite sure I could never identify a tritone or minor third being payed on a piano. After a lot of deliberate ear training, I certainly could. And I suspect most people could as well, but not by just sitting there listening to things you don't understand, but rather by 'deliberate practice' and learning. A major 5th is easily recognized as the interval between the first notes in a popular star wars theme, a minor 3rd is the interval between the first two notes in greensleeves. These sorts of associations were how I taught myself. This study is baffling...

schuetze 9y ago

Psych Science, while published by a somewhat reputable source (the APA has had some questionable positions on torture), is not considered a highly rigorous journal. It prioritizes “sexy” findings that are more likely to not replicate. Within the psych community, these kind of findings are taken with a grain of salt.

ianamartin 9y ago

This is a really badly designed study. I started playing violin when I was 4 and started performing professionally when I was 7, and continued to do so for 20 years. Learning to play an instrument or sing is not the same as studying pitch differentiation or rhythm. There are a surprising number of successful musicians who are bad at these things. But the method laid out here is utterly meaningless. You might assume that practicing the violin would have some affect on these things, but it doesn't necessarily. Many people simply learn these things by wrote for specific pieces of music from their guidance in private lessons and teachers. You might also assume that someone who practices a lot and got a degree is also good at Music Theory or Music History, but that's also false. There are tons of professional classical musicians with graduate and Doctorate degrees who are bad at all the things measured in this study as well as history and theory. I'm really shocked that the authors couldn't figure out that they were measuring two completely different things and calling them the same thing. It almost seems intentional for the sake of publishing a controversial result. People absolutely get better at these specific tasks when they practice _these specific tasks_. Every music curriculum in world specifically requires classes in these exact tasks, although the bar for minimal competence is extremely low. I run a small side business tutoring people who are already professional classical musicians who want to get into a DMA program. They have to demonstrate competency at these tasks, as well as some basic knowledge of Theory and History. They can't; even though they are top-level performers on their instrument and practice hours every day. I offer a 12-week crash course that covers these types of tasks and as well as the knowledge component, and people usually find me because they've already applied to a DMA program and been rejected for failing these prerequisites. I know for a fact that they get better with deliberate practice because after working with a couple of dozen clients, every single one of them gets in on the second try. Not to mention the fact that every single day, there are students in Music degrees who start off really sucking at these specific measures who get enough better at them to pass the class at the end of the semester, through very specifically designed exercises that target these abilities. This whole study is an infuriating waste of time and money, and it's an example of some really bad science that's floating around there in the world I really have a hard time believing this was accepted anywhere for publication.

Tomminn 9y ago

This seems absurd.