Musical ability by
John Sloboda
Department of Psychology,
Abstract.
Musical ability is the ability to 'make sense' of music, and develops in
most people over the first decade of life through normal enculturation. Whether
this ability is developed to a high level usually depends on the decision to
start learning a musical instrument, which forces high levels of focused
cognitive engagement (practice) with musical materials. Performance ability has
both technical and expressive aspects. These aspects are not always developed
equally well. Factors contributing to the development of a well-balanced
musical performer include (a) lengthy periods of engagement with music through
practice and exploration, (b) high levels of material and emotional support
from parents and other adults, (c) relationships with early teachers
characterized by warmth and mutual liking, and (d) early experiences with music
that promote, rather than inhibit, intense sensuous/affective experiences. It
is argued that much formal education inhibits the development of musical
ability through over-emphasis on assessment, creating performance anxiety,
coupled with class and sex stereotyping of approved musical activities. Early
free exploration of a medium is a necessity for the development of high levels
of musicality.
What is musical ability?
The use of the term
'musical ability' may already seem to presuppose too much. Such a term suggests
that there is some common factor, or set of factors, underlying all
accomplishments in the sphere of music. How does this square with the fact that
there are singers who cannot read music, pianists who cannot sing in tune,
performers who cannot compose, and music critics who can neither play an
instrument nor compose? Do all such people possess some common attribute in
virtue of which they can be said to be musically able? Those who have applied
the concepts and methods of contemporary cognitive psychology to music would
answer `yes' to this question. They would say that musical ability is a
particular sort of acquired cognitive expertise, entailing at its core the
ability to make sense of musical
sequences, through the mental operations that are performed on sounds (whether
real or imagined). The term 'make sense' is somewhat analogical. Musical idioms
are not
languages, and do not have referential meaning in the way that languages such as English do. They do, however, have complex multi-levelled structural features which resemble syntax or grammar (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983).
How do we know if and when a person is `making sense' of some music? There are a number of ways in which psychologists have operationalized this ability. First, people who are `making sense' of music should be able to remember music which conforms to a cultural `language' better than music which does not. There are many demonstrations that this is so, even in fairly young children (e.g., Deutsch 1980, Zenatti 1969). This exactly parallels findings in other domains such as chess. Chess players recall meaningful (Le., game-plausible) boards better than random boards (Chase & Simon 1973). Second, people who make sense of music tend to make plausible substitutions when asked to recall music they have just heard (Sloboda & Parker 1985, Sloboda et al 1985, Oura & Hatano 1988). This is similar to the well-established finding that people rarely remember verbal information word-for-word, but reconstruct in their own words something that means the same as what they heard. This kind of finding suggests that people generally store something more abstract than the actual words or notes.
A third criterion for making sense of music is the ability to correctly judge whether or not given sequences are acceptable according to cultural rules. There is strong evidence that most children can reject blatant violations, such as discords, by the age of seven, and more subtle ones, such as unfinished cadences, by the age of ten (Sloboda 1985). A final criterion is the ability to correctly identify the consensual mood or emotion of a musical passage. Again, we have rather strong evidence that the broad parameters of this ability are in place for most children by the age of five (Pinchot-Kastner & Crowder 1990).
Although
people vary quite widely in the level of sophistication to which they have
developed their ability to make sense of music, the available evidence points
to the conclusion that the vast majority of the population have acquired a
common receptive musical ability, clearly evident through experimental
demonstration, by the end of the first decade of life, regardless of accomplishment in any particular sphere of musical performance,
and regardless of having been in receipt of any formal musical education or
training.
How is musical ability acquired?
What features of music and the human mental apparatus make this widespread ability possible? There is broad agreement between music theorists and psychologists (e.g., Bregman 1990, Deutsch 1992, Huron 1991, Lerdahl 1988, Meyer 1956, Narmour 1990) that the most prevalent musical idioms have structural and mathematical properties that make them easily analysable by universal pre-cultural mechanisms of auditory perceptual grouping. Connectionist models of learning applied to music (e.g., Bharucha 1987, Gjerdingen 1990) demonstrate one way in which complex mental representations might be built up from such simple groupings on the basis of repeated exposure to a variety of musical examples sharing similar structures. There is also the beginnings of an understanding of how the confirmation and violation of expectations built up within such a system may lead to the experience of music-induced emotion and mood (Jackendoff 1991, Narmour 1991, Sloboda 1991). We may, therefore, make the strong conjecture that exposure through enculturation to certain types of music can be a sufficient condition for the development of musical ability. What remains to be explained is why individuals develop at different rates and to different levels.
Cognitive psychologists who study expertise in general have come to a simple but far-reaching general solution to the problem of individual differences, which may be summed up in the old proverb `practice makes perfect'. More precisely, level of expertise seems to be a monotonic function of the duration of relevant cognitive activity. Most computer-based models of expert systems, including connectionist models, function according to this principle, because the relevant learning takes place through the processing of a large number of examples. The more examples processed, the more elaborate are the knowledge structures. If exposure to music is at least one of the preconditions for relevant cognitive activity, it is clear that different developmental trajectories may start very early indeed. For example, pregnant mothers who sing may provide their fetus with a particularly rich early database. Lest it be thought that the neonatal brain does not have the capacity to analyse and store music, I should point to recent evidence that infants exposed to particular pieces of music before birth show distinct preferences for those same pieces after birth (Hepper 1991).
Perhaps, however, the most common way by which young people come to increase their degree of cognitive involvement with music is by starting to perform it, through singing, or by learning a musical instrument. Such involvement forces cognitive engagement in a way that mere exposure may not. For most observers, it is the ability of people to perform well which constitutes the evidence on which we judge their musical ability.
We
need, however, to be quite clear that there are several distinct abilities
involved in performing a musical instrument, and only some of them are
`musical' in the sense I have been discussing. The other abilities are what I
would call `technical'. For example, a pianist may be able to play a difficult
passage very quickly, very evenly, and very accurately. This will be possible
because of very highly developed control systems for execution of hand and
finger movements. The development of such systems to high levels will have
required much practice, and they are manifestations of expertise. It is,
however, possible that a person could learn to play a piece of music
`technically' without having 'understood' it musically at all. Such a
technically perfect performance could
equally well be generated by
mechanical means.
Expressive performance
It is well
established that notationally perfect performances of
music are experienced by most listeners as dull, mechanical and uninteresting.
What makes any performance musically interesting are
the slight fluctuations in duration, loudness, pitch and timbre which together
constitute expressive performance. Such fluctuations are what distinguishes one performance from another, and their
importance is what keeps professional performers in business. Were it not for
this, we could get computers to generate once-and-for-all perfect performances
of musical works, and close most of our symphony halls and conservatories!
Recent
research has made it increasingly clear that the existence of expressive
performance is the best evidence we can obtain that musicians understand the music they are playing.
This is because expressive variations are by no means random or idiosyncratic.
A wide range of studies (e.g., Clarke 1988, Gabrielsson
1988, Shaffer 1981, Sloboda
1983) has shown that microvariations are highly
systematic, both within the same performer and across different performers.
Many of such variations are designed to make important structural features of
the music more prominent to the listener. Their systematicity
therefore depends upon the performer having understood what are the important structures. The
best test that this understanding is deeply rooted in a performer is to ask
that performer to sight-read some music he or she has never seen before. If a
performer can apply appropriate expression in such a situation, then his or her
understanding must be fully internalized. Evidence of such ability does indeed
exist (Sloboda 1983), and it is often so deeply
internalized that performers are not fully aware of the details of their own
expressive repertoires; they have become intuitive and semi-automatic. This
should not surprise us, because it is another well-documented characteristic of
all cognitive expertise. Many people mistakenly assume that intuitive behaviour
must be innate. This is a major fallacy. Any well-practised habit eventually
becomes automatic.
It
may seem at first sight that the statement that expression is systematic
conflicts with the existence of interesting differences between performers. The
contradiction is, however, more apparent than real. Performers differ from one
another not so much in the nature of expressive devices used, but in their
distribution and intensity. So, for example, one performer may achieve by
subtle dynamic fluctuations what another achieves by temporal fluctuations.
Such differences between performers, or between the same performer
at different times, can be characterized as differences in expressive `style' (Sloboda 1985).