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What do music and sports have in common? Oddly enough, a lot: for example, the fact that a person who wants to become a professional in one of these activities requires daily exercise. But if you do not have enough innate abilities, you will not become either a virtuoso performer or a brilliant composer.
The longer sports competitions are held by mankind and the more athletes are involved in the selection system of the best, the more obvious it becomes that victory in competitions is determined not only by the number of man-hours spent on training and the stubbornness of athletes, but also by their genetic data. Among the best basketball players you will not meet a short player for a long time, among world boxing champions people with huge muscle mass predominate, and not lean, by nature not capable of pumping up a mountain of muscles.
It’s the same with great musicians, according to a new study* by a team of psychologists at Michigan State University: If you lack innate ability, you won’t be a virtuoso performer or a brilliant composer.
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Psychology professor David Hambrick and his colleague Elliot Tucker-Drob (David Z. Hambrick, Elliot M. Tucker-Drob) studied 850 pairs of identical twins over more than half a century. The twins in all selected pairs were involved in music, with varying degrees of success. After interviewing all the participants, the scientists came to the conclusion that the differences in the degree of mastery of one or another musical instrument within each pair are not so significant – despite the fact that the number of hours spent by the twins on learning music sometimes differed radically.
Curiously, even how often the twins practiced playing their (or their parents’) chosen instrument also depended heavily on their genetic abilities. The biographies of the participants made it possible to establish that, in most cases, parents decided to invite a tutor after they noticed that their children were rhythmically beating a toy drum or thoughtfully fingering the keys of a piano gathering dust in the apartment.
As the researchers found out, in different children the early interest in music differs dramatically, but in twins the degree of attraction to musical instruments is approximately the same. The role of innate talents turned out to be great in the virtuosity of performance: some pairs of twins were noticeably superior to others even though they spent much less time rehearsing.
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The conclusion made by the authors of the study seems to be confirmed by the results of another study **, which is being prepared for publication in the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, psychologists at the Royal Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, found that such musical abilities as a sense of rhythm, melodies and the ability to distinguish sounds of different pitches are exactly the same in identical twins (a total of 10 pairs of twins took part in this study). Moreover, the tendency to study music, which manifests itself already in early childhood, is approximately 40-70% due to genetic predisposition. “The practice of playing an instrument is not necessarily reflected in the virtuosity of the playing,” the authors of this study say. “However, genetic differences between individuals affect both musical ability and the propensity to play music.”
* D. Hambrick, E. Tucker-Drob «The genetics of music accomplishment: Evidence for gene-environment correlation and interaction». Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2014.
** M. Mosing et al. «Practice Does Not Make Perfect: No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Music Ability». Psychological science, 2014, № 1.