New links found between musical training and cognitive ability
neurosciencenews.com
neurosciencenews.com
The point of the article is that they've found a specific neurological relationship between two types of working memory:
"The results show that if musical training influences visual working memory, then it does so via the “detour” of musical working memory. In other words, by way of its primary benefits for musical working memory, musical training could have a positive effect on visual working memory as well."
Hard to call it a coincidence. I think mind-body training can and does change cognitive ability, it’s almost a given.
If we doubt this, it’s more likely our ways of measuring are goofed up.
Was learning an instrument at the time. Was going really well. Then on bad weeks twinkle twinkle was a foreign concept.
I had to wait for good weeks to make any progress.
Part of the Storm-light archive. An awesome inspirational epic fantasy series. One that helped me during the dark days of recovery.
For a long time I would take a simple memory test online each day to see how I was doing. Results were drastic changes day to day.
I was trying to figure out what effect each of the dozens of medications doctors gave me we’re having.
A simple blood thinner stopped the non-sense.
All blood thinners help with symptoms. Even Asprin helps some.
The main ones. Eliquis and Xarelto both 100% fixed cognitive issue. Side effects are rough. But that’s a separate issue.
And I know plenty of them who play a banjo and a guitar exceptionally well.
The term redneck has quite a funny (if you are from northern Ireland or scotland) origin. Maybe mildly interesting to everyone else :)
Though obviously it's lost that original meaning.
The activity of playing is unlike other skills based learning, including other arts. All this is in the video.
It’s the intersection of applying ephemeral knowledge (music theory, intuition for what sounds good) and active muscle memory building.
Personally, since picking up guitar and piano during lockdown, I’ve definitely noticed I’m faster at pattern recognition, more readily see simpler solutions to logic problems, and can find focus and flow with less effort. I did play saxophone from 5th grade on, but quit after HS; I was playing music before that too. The years in between just feel colorless and uninspired.
Will it make one Einstein? No. But it definitely brings a cognitive perspective, sense of self awareness and agency, nuanced inner monologue, that’s missing in its absence.
I don’t get uptight about proper music theory and all that. I just pluck my way into patterns that sound cool to me, build fluency playing them. It’s more like deep work than desire to succeed; I’ve tried meditating, yoga, etc, over years and nothing brings inner peace and sense of self like playing music.
But you know; ymmv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9xXchxodYg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Reed
He says (quoting from memory): "if we couldn't remember our own songs how could we expect audiences to remember them?"
If a song is hard to remember it may have a hard time becoming a hit.
Musical training is an amazingly fast way to shape your brain if you know what you are doing. It's one of the few engaging activities that offer that quick feedback and covers so many areas of the brain.
You can find hundreds of studies linking music and cognitive ability.
I’ve had this impression as well
not quitting alone will eventually make you better than most who tried and quit
speaking of personal experience
We hear stories of kid prodigies, but are we forgetting that kids have a lot of free time to practice if they focus their efforts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinu_Lipatti
And many, many others besides. The musical child prodigy is a well documented phenomenon and even though 'a lot of free time to practice' is a common theme lots of people with a lot of free time to practice will never even get close to that level. Compare to math prodigies, and other ways in which some people appear to stand out from the crowd.
Of course then you can drag in all kinds of circumstantial evidence that amount to a 'no true prodigy' version of the one about that dude from Scotland but I think the evidence is solid enough to show that there is something there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_music_prodigies
FWIW I also know plenty of the opposite: people that have worked really hard their whole life long to master an instrument and who will never be at the level of one of these gifted children. They play beautifully and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them but they are not under any illusion that it came hard to them when it seems to come so incredibly easy to some others. Outliers do happen.
It's also a matter of finding the right instrument for you, which could turn out to be a surprise.
I suspect I'm older than they typical HN demographic, but I made several attempts to learn piano over the years and was never able to stick with it. I also tried bass guitar and that was fun (and pretty easy!) but you only get so far without playing in a band which I never had the time for. Then I picked up my dad's accordion (of all things) and got to wondering what it would be like to learn to play a simple song on it.
That was two years ago and since then I haven't missed a single day of practice, learning, or playing for fun. Which surprises the hell out of me, because I'm the kind of person who bounces from hobby to hobby and project to project and rarely finishes anything. It's frankly amazing to have _something_ I can say I have worked on (and towards) every day for a long time. THAT inspires confidence and some sense of self-worth. (And I generally need all of that I can get!)
Sometimes it's frustrating to get "stuck" on a difficult piece or hand movement that's new to me, but I always have to remind myself that I've been stuck before and that I'll eventually get it right with enough repetition, even if it takes weeks. The joy felt when I finally _do_ get it right is so intense that it probably ranks up there with some of the best drugs, minus the considerable negative consequences.
I'm still early in my journey but from what I can tell, the key to learning piano/accordion is practicing scales and chords more or less relentlessly _before_ trying to play anything more complex than Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Once you get the hang of them, and spend a lot of time playing around with them in various combinations, finding the melody of any given song by ear is quite often trivial.
And for what it's worth, the piano can be a monophonic instrument too. :) On the accordion, I'm still somewhat inexperienced so I generally only play one note at a time on the piano side. Which I can get away with and still sound decent because the bass side of the instrument is far easier to play and sound good on than the piano side. Put together, they sound passable even if you barely know what you're doing (like me!).
Accordion is going to be very tricky. I've been toying around with synthesizing the notes/chords and then to compare the spectrum with the microphone input, that just might work for accordion as well though those tines tend to have lots of harmonics that may make that harder than it seems. I haven't gotten this to work for piano yet, the idea is to have a 'virtual midi' device that just listens to the microphone and turns everything it hears into note on/off pairs. That way you could use the site with non-midi instruments.
Agreed on sheetmusic reading skills being useful. For accordion jazz lead sheets might be useful as well.
> the key to learning piano/accordion is practicing scales and chords more or less relentlessly _before_ trying to play anything more complex than Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Yes... it is also stupendously boring which I think is why a lot of people get turned off from practicing. There has to be some way to make this fun.
> Once you get the hang of them, and spend a lot of time playing around with them in various combinations, finding the melody of any given song by ear is quite often trivial.
Picking out the lead is trivial, picking out all of the chords is not (at least, not for me!).
> And for what it's worth, the piano can be a monophonic instrument too. :)
That's very true :)
> On the accordion, I'm still somewhat inexperienced so I generally only play one note at a time on the piano side. Which I can get away with and still sound decent because the bass side of the instrument is far easier to play and sound good on than the piano side. Put together, they sound passable even if you barely know what you're doing (like me!).
My dad was very good at the accordion, he could play both the clavier one and the 'button' style (chromatic) one. He's long dead so I can't ask him for any tips.
> If you've ever fell in love with a song, or an artist, or totally jammed out to some track in a manner that would be embarrassing had you been observed, or if you constantly walk around with a tune in your head, then yes, learning an instrument is a great idea.
That is very much how I am. I almost feel restless if I'm not listening to music, I wake up with specific songs in my head almost daily; I have a decades-old music collection with all sorts of stuff, from the most commercial pop imaginable to obscure metal bands, or bizarre experimental soundscapes that some people wouldn't even consider "music". Music is one of the constants in my life, and one of the few things that are guaranteed to bring me joy, or peace, or _something_.
> [...] because I'm the kind of person who bounces from hobby to hobby and project to project and rarely finishes anything.
Also sounds like me, 100%. Now I'm wondering if there's an instrument out there that I would be able to stick to. Goodness knows I could use something to keep my brain somewhat in line these days.
One thing that _probably_ helped me stick with accordion is finding a role model early on. He's on YouTube and plays the instrument very well and is super friendly and enthusiastic. He never says, "this is the only way to learn X," like a lot of music teachers do. His philosophy is, "I'll show you some techniques that worked for me, give them a try and see if they work for you." I figure I can call myself successful if I'm only ever as half as good as him, in terms of both musical ability and his general outlook on life.
The other thing is, first and foremost, play for fun! Yeah, it's a slog to get through some of the theory and repetition in the beginning but if you get burned out, find something more engaging to do for a while (e.g. mimicking a catchy pop song) and then come back to the theory later, knowing that grokking it will help you play cool stuff later.
> The other thing is, first and foremost, play for fun! Yeah, it's a slog to get through some of the theory and repetition in the beginning [...]
That's what I struggled with when I was attempting to learn. I felt like it required a bigger time investment than I could justify to myself, and with the slow progress I kind of just let it fall to the side. Which is weird, because I usually have no trouble pushing through learning a new skill if it's something I enjoy.
I'll definitely have to give it another shot, since I already have the instrument here. Trying out different instruments to see if one of them clicks also sounds like good advice, so thank you for that!
If you have a free moment and you have your keyboard hooked up to the computer use Chrome and give pianojacq.com a try, let me know if I can help somehow.
Some reasons:
- Wind instruments are fairly physical to play. That can be rewarding/refreshing after a day of playing in the geek world. As an aside, this makes them great for the many people with ADHD/ADD too!
- Most wind instruments are monophonic. The complexity of an accompanying/polyphonic instrument is its own can of worms...
- In many parts of the world, especially the western world, it's relatively easy to find a larger ensemble fairly quickly. The group can be a real anchor point.
Polyphonic instruments posing a problem with ADHD is not an absolute rule, but I've seen more than a few people, especially at younger age, benefit immensely from a change from piano or guitar to the saxophone specifically.
The reasons could be many. Less reading while still struggling with technicalities, more deterministic fingering, less going on are just a few.
That bit about them being good with people with ADHD reminded me of a friend I had in university. She had ADHD, and had been playing the saxophone since she was 14 or 15, and said that she found it very relaxing.
I keep coming back to this idea of learning an instrument every year or so, and the last time I thought about it I was considering the violin. I absolutely love the sound of it. But I might have to give this some thought, because apparently I've just been ignoring an entire family of instruments.
Don't get discouraged if you run out of wind quickly in the beginning, that will build up fast, and don't overdo it with practice until you've built up some lip strength or you'll end up with claret all over your nice reeds.
My dad put above average pressure on me to learn piano as a kid. I got somewhere between decent to quite good but never a prodigy or anything (could read almost any piece of moderately difficult sheet music and play on sight, never really got into writing my own music).
When I was in early high school I made an argument that I wanted to quit and he said it would be up to me but that I would regret it later in life. I ignored him, gave up piano, and now 100% without a doubt wish I could go back in time and stick with it.
Still, I'm grateful I got the opportunity to learn music, as now it's a huge part of my life (tinker on guitar, always on the hunt for new artists to listen to, etc).
I have my own kids now, and it's fun watching them get interested in the instruments we've got around the house, but I'm also trying to figure out how to navigate the right amount of influence I should try and put on them to focus on music themselves.
Stated vs Revealed preferences, and all that.
I was very fortunate to have the opportunity of a piano in the house (my sisters both had wind instruments too, so I got to try them; I really like clarinet).
I credit piano providing an emotional outlet with saving my sanity, and perhaps my life when I was a depressed teen.
I'm terrible at piano, incidentally, I'm practically arhythmic and every lesson had my teacher saying "relative values".
TL;DR is, I think, that opportunity matters, it's not just I couldn't be bothered to try.
I think this is something most parents struggle with, myself included. I have a 17-year-old and 14-year-old, and still trying to figure that out.
We'll see how that turns out. As a toddler he pretty naturally pushes himself to master skills at his own pace; hopefully that attitude will continue.
We started when he was 5 and he's 7 now. So far things have worked out, highs and lows abound. Stick to it, it's worth it.
I feel like the best way to learn/improve at something is by making it fun. Often times different people find different things fun so if I'm able to have fun doing something that others find to be a chore then I have a natural competitive advantage.
Not sure my wife would agree with that -- we'll see what happens when we get there. :-)
After all, I mostly enjoy my work; if I didn't have a job I'd still be doing a lot of programming. As you say, it's more about gaining discipline, so you can harness that energy into something worthwhile.
On top of that I still get huge enjoyment out of soccer and guitar, and I see many of my peers experiencing regret that they did not take those sorts of hobby type pursuits more seriously as a kid.
Say he first chooses playing an instrument and diligently spends some time every week at it, but then gets into chess and decides that is the skill that he wants to focus on.
My recollection of childhood is that most kids had interests in things that took several years to master, but most never actually mastered any of them because they didn't stick with any particular one long term.
Family did similar with musical instruments, I wasnt interested, as this was when singles and record players were becoming mainstream as a primary school kid I was doing some of the basics for dj'ing, way before Technic's 1200's/1210's things like beat cancelling by turning the bass down, scratching that sort of stuff, real elementary stuff. It really really annoyed the family, doing all this weird stuff to records and look at how DJ's are festival gods today! I wished I stood up to them more but as a kid thats not possible, so you take the next best option and do some coding because family want a quiet life, dont want kids causing hassle things like that.
You should really look into a string path, like ukulele to guitar once their hands get large enough.
https://musicstrive.com/guitar-sales-statistics/
Its got the advantage of being a convenient instrument unlike a piano or a keyboard that probably lives in one room for the most part. Its polyphonic so you can feel like you can play an entire song without wanting for a band necessarily. Plus these days there are so many youtubers teaching you how to play every song imaginable, and a lot of software too that helps people learn.
Piano skill is pretty transferrable to other instruments. It has the same advantages as the guitar in that you can play entire chords at once and you don't have to empty your saliva out of it, but I at least think it's easier to get into music theory when you have the white and black keys in front of you.
I did guitar lessons twice… once at 10 years old on a classical, and stopped after my 8th lesson when I came home crying about how I had no interest in the material and wanted to play on electric with distortion.
Picked it up again at 14 on an electric, learning rock songs I wanted to play. Massive difference, I would often hole up in my room playing 4-5 hours at a time. Still play 30 years later.
He oscillates from finding it a chore to being really proud of his achievements (he's a drummer for now). It's kinda funny sometimes he does both in the same day.
Overall I'm comfortable with it being mandatory, as a parent my job is to raise him to be a well functioning and happy adult, not to make him happy right here and now, and he gets it.
The job is surely to get both, the balance being the harder part of that. Surely, you want them to enjoy their whole life?
but you too can go back, find a teacher and start learning again!
In my adult life I kinda do regret not keeping up with it and have tried to pick it up more than a couple times. Each time though, it dawns on me just how absurdly time consuming it would be to get back to the point of being even remotely decent. Getting good is a different story and is existentially exhausting!
Saying this as someone who picked up drumming in my adult life with many hundreds of hours of intentional practice. So I'm not shy to continuously improving playing an instrument.
That said, I think if you keep your expectations reasonable, it can be a great experience!
W/R/T:
> but I'm also trying to figure out how to navigate the right amount of influence I should try and put on them to focus on music themselves.
Looking back, I've found the best thing that encouraged me and my siblings growing up was the interest and positive support my parents showed towards all of our interests. My mom would always comment on how much she liked hearing me play, even though I'm sure she was as sick of hearing the same song for the 800th time as I was. She was also super interested in the little gadgets I'd hack together when that started peeking my interest even if she didn't understand them at all. My dad made a point of always seeing if I wanted to help work on our cars when the mechanical aspect fascinated me, etc. And of course they remained supportive whenever our interests changed as we got older.
I had that same experience in 8th grade. I went from a school with fun instruction to a band teacher that seemed more concerned that your parents signed a practice sheet than in how well you actually played. I think the teacher seriously disliked his job.
I don't regret it, though. I just did choir the next year or two (and again in college). Realistically, though, I always prioritized art over music and still make artwork (am over 40, so its been some time)
I would not loose any sleep over that. Most music performance is a repeat movement which causes great stress for tendons and it could potentially make it worse. There really isn't anyhthing speciall or natural in playing instrument - its as artificial as typing on keyboard.
And I say this as someone who loves practicing on guitar (and been doing it for at least 15 years without any success really and had my own deal of joint problems). And for last few months I started to take keyboard touch typing seriously which really does not help.
I have a 7 yr old. Her kindergarten required either piano or violin, and we opted for piano. At that time, we implemented a daily '5 minutes of piano' mini-lesson where I'd help her with her current lesson/song. We're doing homeschool now, but have kept up the '5 minutes of piano'. My daughter doesn't really like it that much, tbh, but I've made her stick with it because: a) she's actually quite talented -- great pitch/rhythm, and can already play by ear, for example, and I'd like to get her to a point where she can really enjoy that talent, and b) as a general lesson in perseverance/grit/skill mastery.
But I really struggle with the notion that the above is simply a rationalization and that I'm really trying make up for my own failure[1] to achieve my own musical goals vicariously through my daughter. And I've also struggled not to force it too much. I've bent over backwards to make it fun -- I make up games, do a variety of musical/rhythmic activities like drumming, dancing, or even playing pattycake, or do things like watching Fantasia or even listening to pop songs. And I've had to put the brakes on thoughts like "we're going to polish the crap out of this song so we can impress the relatives" and focus more on the overall process: is she having fun? On the other hand, I'm trying to not reward a "this requires some effort so I'm going to quit" type of mindset.
It's definitely been a tough balancing act.
[1] How I used to perceive it -- I no longer feel that I was a "failure" so much as I chose a suboptimal path.
[0] I know I'm somewhat mischaracterizing this article, but that's what the mainstream press makes of it.
You don't train on music, you train on technique (and practice music, or play).
You were not born with the innate "cognitive ability" to know what these symbols mean, you must train yourself to recognize them, read them in many configurations, iow stay training or go dumb.
The link OP found is the same link between spending extra on education and the expected outcome.
I imagine there would be a significant difference in mental engagement when playing different kinds of instruments. Drums vs monophonic instruments vs polyphonics engage an ever increasing range of musical fundamentals and skill: from only rhythm and volume to a single line of melody to multi-line and harmony.
A similar range of engagement (and control) may be needed to play instruments with fewer vs more degrees of freedom (three valves on one hand for a trumpet vs all fingers of both hands for a clarinet (yet monophonic) vs both hands for guitar or violin (asymmetric) or piano (symmetric) (all polyphonic). Instruments that make melody without frets also seem like they'd be more demanding (and more engaging) to play than those with. Instruments that allow more subtlety of expression should be more demanding cognitively too, like the human voice.
I would imagine learning to play more complex instruments is more difficult later in life too (than learning to play those less complex), since the older brain is less plastic or absorbent.
- Person 1: Wow, you're an incredible musician!
- Musician: Thanks, it's taken a lot of work.
- P1: How is it possible you play so well!
- M: Lots of practice?
- P1: It must be inborn talent!
- M: No, it's mainly practice...
- P1: You must have musician genes!
And, to be honest, I kind of thought this myself as well. When I saw the scene in "Soul" where the piano player figures out the key of the song after playing one wrong chord, then one right chord, I thought, "Miraculous!" Now, after playing bass for just over a year, yeah, not as big a deal as I thought originally.
- How do you know what code to type in?
- Ummm… I know what I want the program to do, and just write it down step by step.
- No, I mean, how do you know what symbols to write??
- I… I learned their meaning…?
- You’re so lucky! I would never be able to learn such things, I was always bad at math xDi used to look up AC/DC, but now that i know how _literally_ all their songs work i find it rather boring and not very intellectually challenging
> Practice does not make perfect: no causal effect of music practice on music ability
> Abstract
> [...]
> We found that music practice was substantially heritable (40%-70%). Associations between music practice and music ability were predominantly genetic, and, contrary to the causal hypothesis, nonshared environmental influences did not contribute.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25079217/
> Genome-wide linkage scan for loci of musical aptitude in Finnish families: evidence for a major locus at 4q22
> [...]
> Result:
> The heritability estimates were 42% for [Karma Music test; KMT], 57% for [Seashore pitch], 21% for [Seashore time] and 48% for the combined music test scores. Significant evidence of linkage was obtained on chromosome 4q22 (LOD 3.33) and suggestive evidence of linkage at 8q13-21 (LOD 2.29) with the combined music test scores, using variance component linkage analyses.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2564861/
The methodology doesn't seem to be measuring the musician's capability of producing music. Rather it measures their ability to hear and detect pitch and comprehend melodies and rhythms, something that's critically required for musicians. And unfortunately that does appear to have a very significant genetic component, one that does not benefit from practice as much.
From what I understand it doesn't mean that hard work isn't needed or that there is no point for someone without the genetics to not practice music. Rather it just puts a limit on what level of skill one can achieve through hard work.
Given a couple years of regular-ish, semi-structured practice, you would be shocked by how much you can do. When you dive into music theory even just a small amount, it becomes very easy to improvise a melody in a given scale, or write a nice chord progression. It becomes Math.
Most songs that you memorize are very similar, and the ones that are different you simply learn through muscle memory. I can't explain to you how exactly I can fingerpick a song like Blackbird, but I can do it and all it took was rote repetition until my fingers do it quite literally without my thinking about it.
It turns out, you don't get very far learning to play music without also incidentally gaining an intuitive understanding of how most songs are constructed.
For example, most modern music is based on about three or four main chords put together in a certain sequence and then repeated throughout the song. If you know song well enough to hum it, and can figure out (or look up) what those chords are, then you are 80% of the way toward being able to _play_ the song because the melody is (mostly) made of up the notes within those chords.
One of the big one is the selection bias by parents.
I would guess that most musical training starts in childhood and is facilitated by parents.
Also, most parents who are this involved would place schoolwork above musical training. Thus, the kids enrolled in musical training are ones that are doing well in their classwork.
In order to develop better motor skills, you need to be guided by the resulting sound compared with an intention, an idea of the sound you want. This implies that the first thing that has to change is perception and imagination.
There's a literature on how to practice music. Many of the techniques you'll encounter really have to do with aiding perception (the idea, the sound, awareness of what you are actually doing) and interfering with "muscle memory" so that you can break down and improve execution.
Coordination, rhythm, or pitch will not improve until perception does, but perception can certainly be trained and improved!
Also -- just try practicing something intensely for 10 minutes, then practice/play something else. Then come back next day after a good sleep. The improvement that happens while you sleep is almost creepy.
It all takes active thinking as I play so if I’m keeping time, my chord changes are bad, if I hear lyrics, my strumming ends up matching the cadence of the vocal track.
Despite all that, I do enjoy playing what I can play. It just isn’t much.
Music is synchronization of all these skills that are built over time. You could read a book on calculus and start solving problems but you wouldn't be able to read a book on the piano and start playing any meaningful sounding pieces.
So much of training, especially classical music, puts heavy emphasis on fundamentals I listed. It's only when you reach a certain breakthrough in proficiency in all the skills listed, you are in position to start taking on new scores but even then requires you to apply the same set of training although sight reading is probably the biggest measure of one's musical abilities.
There's probably many domains it overlaps and assists with (not to mention the general philosophies that translate to other domains like creativity, continuity of motion, practice/discipline/feedback/improvement -- e.g. "music is the tool to express life" Herbie Hancock). Though naturally, excellence in one domain does not grant the knowledge necessary to be a master in another
(This is more of a experimental design question than anything else - am interested)
It's a bit like assessing one's memory of a dance routine by asking how many steps were taken.
Video games and guitar are like the foundation of my career. I needed to know how they both worked, and that journey exposed me to so much cool stuff. I really can’t see how a musical instrument would hurt, and I see plenty of reasons as to why it would help.
The key is wanting to play.
if you mess up in live performance, nobody is gonna notice unless it's real hard and if they do, they likely won't be able to remember
Joke aside, I do not think that visual memory matters that much when it comes to doing our job. All we need is problem solving skills and there are definitely alternatives to improve those skills. One crucial being solving many problems on what we want to be good at!
"Musicians as Programmers" : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musicians-programmers-michael...
"... IBM preferred to recruit and train programmers from two different groups: musicians and accountants..."
...Now after this Quicksort implementation...Can you please do a "All the Things You Are" transposition into D Major using Java and without triggering java garbage collection? Let me know if the task is not clear. You have 30 minutes.