ON-topic Poll: Nature vs. Nurture

[Talbert St. Claire]

Please allow me to add to all the wonderful comments here.


I'm part African -American and part Scottish. I grew up without parents my entire 39 yrs of life. I had no real musical background growing up. There was no set music around in the home (although I loved new-age).


At the age of 24 I heard traditional Irish music for the first time and went completely insane! I loved it at first glance! Maybe being part Scottish had something to do with that connection i'm really not quite sure.Again, I was 24 when this happened. I officially started to play music for the first time and had no musical skill throughout my entire life (never played an instrument before.That's late actually in terms of age.) To this day, I'm still trying to play catch up with sleep!! I developed a real passion for the Low Whistle.


It's been 15 long yrs since my early days playing music. It did bring lots of satisfaction. But also those times were very difficult, musically.



Thanks for giving me the opportunity to express that. I hope that perhaps it can add to the rest of the bunch.-Talbert

[BillChin]

I vote genetics, but not in terms of musical ability. Legendary gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi put it this way (paraphrasing), there are many girls that come in to the gym with the raw physical talent to win an Olympic gold medal. What separates the champions from the others is a gleam in her eyes, the heart of a champion.

To translate this to music, I believe that most people can be trained to be decent musicians, good enough to play on a semi-professional level as a band member or in a large orchestra. The rare exceptional fire-brand talent has a drive that compells him/her to achieve a level that most musicians will not seek.

In my own case I have come to music late in life. I am not technically proficent on the whistle. However, when I perform for audiences, they are often entranced by my flow, my connection to the greater consciousness that is the inspiration for my original tunes.
+ Bill

[fluter_d]

I'm teaching fiddle at the moment, mostly to complete beginners. There is a definite split for the first few classes between the people for whom the scale structure and general coordination of the instrument makes sense instantly, even if they've never held a fiddle before, and those who really don't get it, although they may play other instruments well. Over a couple of months, it balances out, so there's not a gap, but right at the start there's a big difference. It's really interesting to watch what comes naturally for each person, and to see what they really have to work on to get right. Which would be a 'both', I believe.

Deirdre

[Funnily enough, my mother falls into the 'makes sense' category with fiddle, right down to intonation, although she has to actively think about notes on whistle (she'll pick one up every now and then, but doesn't actually play). It amazes me every time.]

[Caj]

Aptitude for linguistics is strongly genetic, as is aptitude for music.

I'd be very interested in seeing evidence of a genetic factor in musical aptitude. Have scientists found evidence of such a thing, and how do we go about confirming that anyway?

The only scientific data I know of regarding musical ability suggests that the greatest single factor in what separates musical talent from musical genius is enormous amounts of practice. This is a surprising result, because we tend to believe that there is something beyond talent and skill, a certain special gift that puts some people on a different level from the rest.

Yet, when neurologists asked professors at a conservatory to pick such gifted students, the one common factor among them was thousands of hours more cumulative practice over their lives than other students who were considered very talented, but lacking a "spark of genius." Sorry I don't have a cite with me, I can dig it up tho.

Caj

[jim stone]

I'm convinced there are differnences
in innate muscial aptitude, just as there are
innate differences in other skills.
There are cognitive tasks I nearly
can't do at all, others that I'm pretty good at.
My wife understands how computer software
works intuitively; I can't make much sense
of things like that.

I once knew a retarded girl, aged 10 or
so, who sat down at the piano and
began to play--almost immediately she
was playing beautifully, not any tune
I had ever heard but things that happened
when she played.

[talasiga]

Chuck, your primary poll questions are flawed
because even the inclination towards "hard work"
may be socialised or "genetic" and this in turn sets up another dichotomy
like,
"which is more important - being born into a hard working family or ...... "
ad infinitum.

BTW I answered to no 3 because I reckon LOVE of music is the most
important driver.

Thanks for the poll.
I always like them.

[cowtime]

It's got to be a combination of both genetic predisposition and plain old work that results in a great musician.

Hard work and desire can result in a decent musician, IF, the basic sense of timing is there. Without that, the music will never be good. I've seen this in a person who worked harder than most for years with more desire than most, who still cannot play a thing worth listening to. A case like this is really sad. Fortunately, I think this is an extreme case. For most of us, the desire plus work gives us hope.

From a genetic standpoint, I can say that both my brother and I grew up with no music other than TV(50's)when we were very young and our dad occasionally playing the guitar for us.

By the 60's we had moved and had the every Sat. night music making in the neighborhood. From this, we were exposed to both old time and in school-classical music. We both took to music like fish to water. However, my brother, like my dad's mom, developed into a musician who can litterally play anything. Give him a new instrument and 30 minutes and he will play something on it that is decent. He is also a gifted singer, songwriter. He does all this seemingly effortlessly. Not to say that he has not put in many hours on the guitar(his primary instrument).

I, on the other hand, am like my dad, I have to put in much more work to have a tune up to performance level. But, I am lucky, in that I seem to have an ability to pick up a tune quickly(in my head at least), and can anticipate where it is going even if I've not heard it before. I am not drawn to stringed instruments like my brother, but to keyboards and wind instruments.
Both my brother and I have a good sense of timing.

Who knows how much is genetic? Environment?

Neither of my daughters( or my brother's two children )are musicians even though they were immersed in it from birth. All four of them have great timing, and can play several instruments. None of them have the obsessive desire to master any instrument.

I'm anxious to see what develops in my grandaughter. She's 10 months now and for several months she has been "dancing/head bobbing" EVERY time she hears a tune. Will she be musically inclined? I plan on giving her every opportunity. Music has been such a blessing to me, I hope that she will find it too.

[Caj]

But surely everybody agrees that some people take to music more readily than others who have the same exposure and encouragement.
I don't see what that could be based on other than genetics.

That could be all sorts of things other than genetics. Just think of all the ways kids are different with similar exposure and encouragement. They develop different tastes and different interests, different favorite flavors of ice cream, a fear of heights here and an intense dislike of math there.

Most of this is just due to different experiences that are going to happen to people no matter how similar you try to make their exposure to things. I figure you'll never be able to give two kids exactly the same "exposure and encouragement," so much so that there is no explanation other than genetics for a difference in their behavior.

Caj

[Caj]

I'm convinced there are differnences
in innate muscial aptitude, just as there are
innate differences in other skills.

My question is, tho: when should we jump to the conclusion something "innate" is genetic?

My own example: I am left-handed, which is genetic. I have an innate artistic bent, which supposedly is due to my being left-handed or right-brained or such. But then, I've spent my entire childhood being told by everybody that I was innately artistic because I was left-handed, and I was more likely to get art supplies for Christmas. Maybe it was just that?

Caj

[jim stone]

Well, I was raised in the forest by wolves,
and they weren't musical and never told me
I was musical.

Hey, maybe that explains
why I'm not musical!
Also why I keep gnawing on
wooden flutes.

[jim stone]

I want to add that the main thing I
found out about wolves by being
raised by them is that wolves never
take a break. I was out of breath
mostly always. Life (if you can call it
that) was chiefly a matter of keeping
up.

Also, I've observed monkey troops in
the wild and also in cities, for they move
through cities in India as if they are
in the forest. And the chief thing I've noticed
about monkeys is that monkeys
are basically rotten.

Back to music.

[lyndamic]

Great thread. I vote for genetics. My father is an incredible trumpet player, however I rarely heard him play due to the volume of the trumpet and our tiny city row house. (Also, my baby brother would bawl as soon as he saw the trumpet case come out!)
The only music I heard growing up was pop on the radio.
Piano and violin eluded me utterly. Couldn't play a note to save my life. However, when I was a schoolgirl and was given madatory r*c*rd*r lessons, the ancient teacher said I was the best student she ever had. (Though I thought the recorder was a joke.) As an adult I became interested in Itrad. I haven't been playing the whistle long, but I'm progressing very well. Of course the point could be made that my INTEREST and DEDICATION to learning the whistle makes the difference.
However, I picked up my fathers trumpet for the very first time last week, and was actually able to play something resembling a tune.
Perhaps I have the 'Brass and Woodwind' Gene!

[Wombat]

I'm convinced there are differnences
in innate muscial aptitude, just as there are
innate differences in other skills.

My question is, tho: when should we jump to the conclusion something "innate" is genetic?

My own example: I am left-handed, which is genetic. I have an innate artistic bent, which supposedly is due to my being left-handed or right-brained or such. But then, I've spent my entire childhood being told by everybody that I was innately artistic because I was left-handed, and I was more likely to get art supplies for Christmas. Maybe it was just that?

Caj

Not a genuine counterexample and that's the problem with the line you are taking. The alternative you offer us here, while still mixed, would make musical achievement either not innate in your case or, at least, heavily conditioned by a learned predisposition to try hard with the expectation that you would be rewarded.

The number of skills that together make for musical talent would run to dozens, of which maybe a dozen would be very important. Most of these skills are quite subtle things so would very likely be polygenic. High level traits that consist of different clusters of polygenic traits are very complicated.

The mapping of the human genome as an abstract code came in ahead of schedule. What it told us, even given the fact that the decoding has really barely begun, is that the results are very likely to be quite frightening. It might be possible to not only identify a predisposition to a certain disease but actually to predict when it's likely date of onset would be. There's already debate about whether insurance companies should be allowed access to genetic profiles of would-be clients.

There is a certainly a tendency, in some evidence on this thread, for people to think that for musical ability to be genetic, it must be the case that musical parents produce musical children. That would be be a fallacy, even if there were a single gene for musical talent which quite obviously there could not possibly be. The fact that a child can have darker hair than either parent has a genetic explanation that need not implicate the mother in a secret affair: the mom-must-have-been-sleeping-with-the-milkman fallacy.

[Dwight]

I think I remember seeing something in Scientific American about a correlation between scientific ability and musical ability. That is not true in my case. I love science and I'm an acomplished artist. I seem to be lacking the music gene and the spelling gene. The spelling problem was deffinitely not caused by a lack of nurture.

I think I'm like my dog. The part of our brains that is devoted to smell is quite small when compaired to what the dog has. Therefore we are all deficiant in smelling. My dog's brain doesn't have room for much else because so much is devoted to smell.

[GaryKelly]

"In one of the largest comparisons of human and chimpanzee genomic sequence to date, the researchers calculated that the shared sequences were 98.77 percent identical. " (http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org).

Okay, some might argue that the "whistle gene" or "music gene" must be part of the missing 1.33 percent, but I've never seen a monkey playing IrTrad on a whistle or flute.

(Yeah, I'm being a tad disingenuous...those who can bothered to dig deeper into the article will find "The DNA came from three chimpanzees—two males and one female. When aligned, the fragments covered about 49 percent of the human genome sequence. The quality—and therefore the usefulness—of the map will be improved as the human genome sequence is refined").

I sometimes marvel at the way people will hail as the New Grail every advance science comes up with. Not so long ago, it was 'radiation', the wunderkind which would solve all our ills. 'Radiation' is now passe, "atomic motorcars" a distant dream. Even the word "atomic" is rarely used these days.

Today, it's Genetics. "GM" used to be universally accepted as the acronym or abbreviation for "General Motors" (also a most amusing regular in the 'Asterix the Gaul' series, btw). Now, "GM" is either going to solve world hunger or destroy the world (I lean towards the latter view. I can remember how the AEC did so very well telling the world how 'safe and friendly' Mr Atom was before 3 Mile Island and Windscale).

But genetics...ah yes! The magic bullet by which to justify one's personal preferences to a skeptical and critical world. Also a convenient scapegoat on which to hang any number of failures. "I'll never be an astrophysicist, I don't have the genes...".

Hard work and dedication. "You can be whatever you want to be" might sound cheesy, but it's served the human race rather well. You just have to want it enough, and work hard to make the dream a reality.

Let's face it, when the first Paleolithic Man began making flint tools his mates weren't standing around going:
"That beerstud must be genetically predisposed to flintknapping, I'd never be able to make a spear-point like that."
"Yeah, that'll be the &*&^ing Cro-Magnon ancestry I reckon. Come on, let's go and make a fire."
"Can't. I come from a long line of low-brows without the necessary genetic predisposition to acquire the skills necessary. But I can chop wood, or will be able to when clever-clogs over there gets around to inventing the Abbevillian hand-axe."