Genes are more important for a musician than training

The genes are not the same

Yuri Ilyin, Sounds.<url> based on the materials of The Economist:
Practice may not make perfect. Musical ability is in the DNAThousands of hours spent playing a musical instrument will not necessarily make a new Paganini or Horowitz out of a student in the absence of a genetic predisposition.

Swedish scientists came to this conclusion after examining 1211 pairs of monozygotic (whose genes are completely identical) and 1358 dizygotic (which are genetically similar by only 50%) twins born between 1959 and 1985.

Each participant in the study was asked whether he played any musical instrument (or sang) and, if the answer was positive, how much time a week he spent on exercises in different periods of his life.

Depending on the response received, the head of the study, Dr. Miriam Mosing, an employee of the Karolinska Institute, calculated the approximate number of hours spent on scales and exercises for a lifetime.

Then Mozing conducted research on the musical abilities of the study participants – in particular, their ability to distinguish the pitch of notes (if there were differences – sometimes the same note was played both times), to detect differences between short – from four to nine notes – melodies, if, again, there were any, and a sense of rhythm. During the last "test", participants were asked to listen to a sequence of five to seven notes of the same pitch, but with a different (again, not always) rhythmic pattern.

Notes from the article by Ullen et al. Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality,
the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test (Personality and Individual Differences magazine, 2014) – VM.

Music experts cope with such tasks without difficulty. Mozing assumed that with a sufficient amount of practice, everyone would cope with such tasks at the expert level. However, this was not true.

Mozing failed to see a correlation between practice and the level of musical talent. The one of the twins (monozygotic) who was more engaged in music demonstrated the same level of musical abilities as his twin brother or sister, who spent less time on classes. In one case, the difference was 20,228 hours of classes (that is, one of the twins was engaged in music, the other was not), but both passed the proposed tests with the same results.

This does not mean that practice does not mean anything: performing or singing skills are physical skills that take time to master in any case. However, apparently, the genetic component plays a very important role: achieving genuine musical mastery requires not only hard work, but also a predisposition. At the same time, it seems that the tendency to devote time to practical classes depends on genetics: monozygotic twins treat classes in a similar way, while the views of dizygotic ones may differ dramatically.

Probably, this news should not be shown to music school students: now they will be able to justify their unwillingness to play scales and sketches with "bad heredity".

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru09.07.2014