- 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.
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.
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.