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Wombat, ROFL!! My 13-year old has not yet reached the "stroppy" stage, but I know it's just a matter of time.

I've been thinking more about the issue of tone deafness. I won't begin to profess any special knowledge of the topic, but I did a quick search of the literature and was not surprised to find that very little has been done on it. (Searching PsycINFO for 'tone deafness' or 'congenital amusia' [which is how researchers refer to it] yielded only 22 hits of varying relevance.)

An article in Nature Neuroscience (2007, vol. 10, pp. 810-812) reports data suggesting that tone deafness seems to be related to deficits in spatial processing. However, they also note that there is "scant evidence for gross morphological correlates of amusia," and suggest that "the deficit may derive from changes in neural functioning that are invisible to the tools that have been applied to date," (which of course is just fancy language for saying that they don't know what causes amusia).

There was an intriguing recent article in Musicae Scientiae, Vol 12(1), Spr, 2008. pp. 3-26. My university doesn't carry this journal, so I wasn't able to read the whole article, but the abstract summarizes their main points:

Research has suggested that around 17% of Western adults self-define as "tone deaf" (Cuddy, Balkwill, Peretz & Holden, 2005). But questions remain about the exact nature of tone deafness. One candidate for a formal definition is "congenital amusia" (Peretz et al., 2003), characterised by a dense music-specific perceptual deficit. However, most people self-defining as tone deaf are not congenitally amusic (Cuddy et al., 2005). According to Sloboda, Wise and Peretz (2005), the general population defines tone deafness as perceived poor singing ability, suggesting the need to extend investigations to production abilities and self-perceptions. The present research aims to discover if self-defined tone deaf people show any pattern of musical difficulties relative to controls, and to offer possible explanations for them (e.g. perceptual, cognitive, productive, motivational). 13 self-reporting "tone deaf" (TD) and 17 self-reporting "not tone deaf" (NTD) participants were assessed on a range of measures for musical perception, cognition, memory, production and self-ratings of performance. This paper reports on four measures to assess perception (Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia), vocal production (songs and pitch-matching) and self-report. Results showed that the TD group performed significantly less well than the NTD group in all measures, but did not demonstrate the dense deficits characteristic of "congenital amusics". Singing performance was influenced by context, with both groups performing better when accompanied than unaccompanied. The TD group self-rated the accuracy of their singing significantly lower than the NTD group, but not disproportionately so, and were less confident in their vocal quality. The TD participants are not facing an insurmountable difficulty, but are likely to improve with targeted intervention.

The take-home message I'm getting from this is that many more people define themselves as tone-deaf than who really meet criteria for 'congenital amusia,' (in another article, I found an estimate that only 4% of the population can be considered true amusics), and that tone-deafness can be 'improved with targeted intervention,' i.e., focused practice.

It occurred to me in my most recent perusal of this topic, to wonder why, when an adult amateur asks how 'good' people think it's possible to get, that people feel the need to drag "Rachmaninoff, Horowitz and Argerich" into the discussion. What percentage of piano performance majors in the conservatories of the world are going to get as good as "Rachmaninoff, Horowitz and Argerich"? Yet no one thinks to discourage a gifted high school piano student from practicing hard and applying to good schools because "they'll never be as good as Argerich."

I think society in general thinks about these things all wrong. It should be the birthright of every human being to:

*participate in and enjoy physical games and activities
*participate in and enjoy musical expression
*participate in and enjoy artistic expression
*participate in and enjoy intellectual challenge and debate

Unfortunately, what we have now is a society where only those who are "good enough" are "supposed" to participate and the rest of us are supposed to just buy tickets and spectate. Those who are not "good enough" to participate are mocked if they try anyway.

That's screwed up.

I don't think most piano performance majors expect to be the next Horowitz or Argerich. I agree that bringing in comparisons to Rachmaninov etc. is not very reasonable when discussing goals for adults/late starters.

I think a more relevant question/benchmark is how many amateurs will ever get as good as piano performance majors are even right before they start attending at a top conservatory?

I think the answer is a very tiny %.

I agree with you, pianoloverus, but I think the reasons are largely due to those environmental factors we've been talking about (practice, negative self-fulfilling prophecies, lack of motivation, etc.) rather than innate factors.

Hear hear !

I'd like to add Tiger Woods to your list!

What is the probablity of my being able to play the piano like Rachmaninov and play golf like Tiger and tennis like Roger?

I don't need my calculator and come up with 0x0x0 = 0. At least it's not a negative number.

I believe that the expectations for achievement are significantly different for adult learners with a childhood background in piano who return to it versus adults who are late starters.

Maybe that point has already been made? I've lost track at this point.

Steven

Interesting, thanks Monica. I'd be very surprised myself if the figure were as high as 4%, as I wouldn't say I've ever come across one (as opposed to all the people I've met who say they're tone deaf). But maybe I just don't get out much.

Oh, come now - this thread has gone far beyond being a simple response to the OP. But even in the terms of the OP and some of the early part of the discussion, it wasn't clear at all that some people were not saying that sheer work was all that was needed to be at the level of Argerich, et al.



I agree that there should be much more active participation and less spectation. Generally speaking, I myself haven't noticed a lot of mockery of people who try stuff, though (maybe because I don't watch TV?).

Actually, there was something rather sweet that BBC Radio 3 did over the last few weeks, which was to include amateur piano performances from some UK amateur fest (I think associated with the Leeds competition) in their programming.

And I have to say that the number of amateurs putting their stuff up on YouTube is surprising, and seems to get a lot of positive response. I do wonder why so many put stuff up that they freely admit is not close to "ready" - that seems odd to me.

Well, that seems to be the point on which people disagree most strongly. I guess those people who argue for a strong, perhaps dominant, role for innate ability are going to say that people who lack such talent are going make make limited progress however hard they work. Which is kind of sad.

I tend towards the view that there is a definite innate ability which plays a significant role, though I wouldn't attempt to put a percentage on it! However, that doesn't mean this innate ability will always show itself clearly from the start, and I'm certainly not going to make statements such as you suggest. It also depends what you mean by "limited". Everyone's progress is limited to some extent, I suppose. We just don't know what each person's limit is. That's the important thing.

I'm not sure what you're describing as sad: the consequence of innate ability that you mention, or that anyone should actually say it.

Steven

Both, to some extent. If it is indeed true that no amount of diligent work can make up very much for an innate deficiency of talent, then that's kind of sad. If it isn't true, then it's kind of sad that people should be wrongly discouraged from pursuing something that they might enjoy and might even, eventually, excel at.

Personally I don't think anyone with sufficient sensitivity to music to be willing to put in the requisite amount of diligent work is likely to be innately deficient in talent. If you took fifty people off the street and forced them to take up piano you might run across some "innately untalented" individuals but I doubt that many of them would voluntarily subject themselves to hours of disciplined piano practice.

I have not come across any convincing studies which quantify the degree to which one’s level of piano playing (or a similar endeavor) is a result of talent versus hard work. If you have found studies which you feel really do shed insight into this (and are not as flawed as the Ericsson study), please bring them to our attention. It would be extremely difficult to conduct such a study. If, for example, one were to take a sampling of people on this forum for a study, the widely different backgrounds that we have would make comparisons difficult. The degree to which people have practiced varies considerably. Some have had much better instruction than others. It is often pointed out that the age at which one learns to play the piano seriously makes a significant difference. Someone who learns the piano at age 4 and makes significant progress before the age of 10 is going to have considerable advantages over someone who is not exposed to the piano until age 24.

If one took a rigorously sampled group of people of the same age who had not yet been exposed to playing the piano, exposed them to exactly the same piano training and practice regimen over several years, and carefully tracked their progress, it might be possible to make some progress in answering this question. However, it would be extremely difficult to conduct such a study. How could one enforce the same piano instruction and practice schedules for all participants over several years? If people dropped out of the study, this would bias the results.

Also, there are many factors that go into becoming a good pianist. These include technical ability to play the notes, musical expressiveness, sight reading ability, speed of memorization, ability to improvise, compositional skills, etc. The relative degree to which talent and hard work are important for these various skills most likely differs.

I don’t think that it is possible to resolve this debate simply because we don’t have enough empirical evidence to quantify in a rigorous way the degree to which one (i.e. talent/hard work) is more important than the other.

Adoption and twin studies are not impacted by any one of the problems you identified above. That's precisely what makes these specific studies so valuable.

Here is an excellent writeup on how adoption studies work and why they are important.

"Modern twin studies have shown that almost all traits are in part influenced by genetic differences"

"For IQ, adoption studies show that, after adolescence, adoptive siblings are no more similar in IQ than strangers (IQ correlation near zero), while full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.86), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0)."

If musical talent is anything like IQ, then we'd expect genetics to play a very large role.

This information does not address the question of the degree to which talent or hard work plays the dominant role in piano playing. That is the topic I was discussing in my previous posts. Furthermore, I am not aware of any twin/adoption/IQ study which sheds meaningful and convincing light on this issue.

You raise the separate question of the degree to which musical talent is similar (perhaps correlated) with IQ. That opens another can of worms which I am sure that people have widely different views on.

You brought up the "talent vs. hard work" regarding musicality. My contribution is to point out that a significant portion of the equation is found right in the ol' genes.

There is evidence that heredity is influential on IQ, but it's a big step to assume that those results can be extrapolate to musical skill. As others have said, I'd be very interested to see any hard evidence on this.

I don't know much about music teaching, but I know a bit about the general education of children. One thing I've noticed is that children at the age of five or so show huge variations in their abilities at basic scholastic skills such as reading. But by 15 or so, those differences have levelled out. There are still differences, to be sure, but anybody who can't read competently at 15 is considered to have some sort of cognitive problem, that won't be overcome by ordinary teaching.

The reason, I think, is that in general scholastic skills, we do the opposite of what we do in music -- we pour all our resources into teaching people who are least able. We just don't allow people to get to adulthood and be unable to read and write if we can possibly avoid it. So it seems to me, in at least some areas of endeavour, we can overcome the limitations of our genes with hard work.

I wonder what would happen if we took the same approach to music? If we decided, for example, that no child should leave school without being able to play a musical instrument competently? What that be possible, or would the 'ol genes make it a doomed enterprise?

I don't know, and I suspect nobody else does.