The "10,000 hours to expert performance" notion originated in Ericsson 1993 (http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...) , which defines a very specific term, "deliberate practice" -- "In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable." Ericsson adds more detail in the full paper.
It's not just "are you playing piano for X hours per day".
The paper in this post mentions deliberate practice in its review of the literature, but then all of a sudden and without explanation reverts to the more generic term "practice" for all of its contributions, which appears to be defined as "how many hours did you play your instrument".
Note that "play" and "practice" are explicitly disambiguated in Ericsson.
I have a hard time believing that the authors are unaware of this distinction, especially considering that they heavily reference Ericsson.
Whether intentional or not, I think the "deliberate practice" rebuttal is a bit of a "no true scotsman" dodge. Anyone who says they practiced a lot can be interrogated about how methodical their practice was, to see if it counts. The only way, then, to falsify Ericsson's hypothesis is to spend lot of energy on highly methodical practice over a long period of time even though you are not improving very much. Who would spend the time to do that, just to rebut Ericsson?
Ericsson's original paper says: "In this article we propose a theoretical framework that explains expert performance in terms of acquired characteristics resulting from extended deliberate practice and that limits the role of innate (inherited) characteristics to general levels of activity and emotionality." They want to claim that the only innate talent that matters is that you are active and emotional, and not that you have any innate talent for music. This paper shows that the amount of time spent practicing appears to have no effect at all on some of these basic musical skills. It shows the presence of innate musical talent, something Ericsson wants to deny.
Some people really like to believe the 10,000 hour rule. I have no desire to talk someone out of believing it if they find it motivational. But as a musician, it's obvious to me that inborn talent is absolutely necessary for high-level performance. The idea that anybody can be Joshua Bell if they just put in the time is a wishful fantasy, not reality.
This kind of "blank slatism" is popular because it satisfies our desire for the world to be fair and just. We want to believe that we can create a perfectly fair playing field where success comes from effort alone. This is a noble idea, but the danger is when we discount evidence to the contrary -- evidence that sometimes people really are different, possibly having different talents or desires. Because then we look for who to blame when things don't end up the way we thought they should.
There's a more fundamental problem. This study tests two different musical skills - i.e. playing (which is what most people think of as practice) and listening.
No one with a musical background will be surprised that ear training (i.e the ability to hear musical details) is only distantly related to finger training, especially if the finger training happens on an instrument with discrete pitches, like a piano.
Ear training is a separate process, and has to be practiced separately. Playing will improve it a little, but won't fully develop it.
In fact amateur keyboard players are notorious for poor pitch discrimination. Keyboards are just switches. You don't have to find the pitch while listening for intonation, as you do on instruments that don't have frets and require very precise finger or mouth control, as well as the ability to listen to the rest of an ensemble.
David Marchese: You’re talking about business not music, but, and I mean this respectfully, don’t some of your thoughts about music fall under the category of “back in my day”?
Quincy Jones: Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?
I remember reading an interview with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. He mentions how glad he was that he never joined the singer/songwriter scene because leaning picking and rhyhhm guitar gave him the facility to play whatever he wanted.
You’re wrong Quincy agrees with the article. The emotion part is what the article addresses. You gotta have that “swing” and that can’t be learned or taught, it can be enhanced, but you can’t practice into having it. As Quincy says it comes naturally, but not everyone has it. If you have the emotion part you can develop the techniques, but no the other way around.
My wife is a very good piano player, but she doesn’t have “it”, she sounds like a robot playing, it’s painful to hear, but she plays in time, all the right notes, but it’s just not there.
In drawing it’s most evident, some people can draw and others can’t, no amount of practice will help me. The emotion side of things kicks in more so with drawing.
As a former professional musician I was initially provoked since the title clearly does not align with what I experienced when working.
What the study refers to as musical ability is in fact the skill to discern different pitches and rhythms.
Obviously there is an enormous amount af practice required to master an instrument. But I still find it hard to “agree” with the paper, I’ve noticed large differences in how attuned I am to pitch and rhythm depending on how much I’ve practiced. Hearing pitch, at least for me, is a skill that can be both trained and lost. Which makes me think that maybe it is not the total amount of hours practiced that is important but also how recent that practice was. I can find no mention in the paper of how “fresh” the participants skills were. Also, there is a huge difference in how you practice, how efficient it is etc.
To be fair I didn’t fully understand the statistical stuff, but all in all this fells like a somewhat blunt study especially considering the provocative title.
The title is quite misleading: the notions "practice" and "ability" here refer to different things: "practice" is taken to mean practicing the creation of music with an instrument, while "ability" is taken to discriminate between auditory aspects of music one is listening to. I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination.
It's rather unfortunate that the title is so poor, as the paper itself is good aside from that; the study they mention a few times (Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013) found that "more music practice is significantly associated with better music ability" and I'm glad people are going through the effort of checking results like these for causation vs mere correlation.
>I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination.
Yes, and real musicianship is more complicated still since hearing and playing abilities co-evolve as one cycles round and round a new piece. For example, notes previously played too quietly can be played louder merely by hearing them as louder. At least that's the way I experience it. If true it adds a whole new meaning to 'active listening' since motor activity may be included in the loop.
Before anyone gets too excited about the headline, the "music ability" test they apply is strictly listening (no playing). It's disappointing that they don't appear to measure/estimate how much of subjects' practice time was spent specifically on ear training.
Frankly, I'm completely mystified by this paper. It appears to be built on a circular and self-contradictory logic.
The paper compares hours of music practice to scores in the Swedish Musical Listening Test (SMLT). It finds no significant correlation, concluding that there is no causal relationship between musical practice and musical skill. The SMLT does not directly measure practical musical skills, but is treated by the authors as a valid proxy measure because it correlates with hours of musical practice (Ullén et al, 2014).
Practice does not improve musical ability because hours of practice are not correlated with scores in the SMLT. The SMLT is a valid proxy measure of musical ability because scores correlate with hours of practice. See the problem?
Ullén, F., Mosing, M. A., Holm, L., Eriksson, H., & Madison, G. (2014). Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 87–93. (10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.057)
I've been playing music since 4 yrs old, and I've become quite a good musician. I really struggled with rigorous practice routines. I had a teacher once validate that my active listening to music was just as good practice as sitting down at the piano. That was a really important affirmation for me, since a lot of parents and teachers force practicing to a punitive degree, to the point where its possible to develop shame and negative self image around "not practicing enough".
Very interesting article!
Here's an analogy: say you get a discount on your health insurance if you visit a fitness center regularly. Except that going to fitness centers got you excited. You don't get anything out of them. But you do like biking, going on long hikes and you do a lot of physical activity in your work. So just because you don't go to the gym, should you give up on your fitness? Heck no! Lean into what energizes you to stay healthy.
"A common operationalization of music ability is
sensory discrimination of auditory musical stimuli of vari-
ous types". Music ability is defined as "rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination". So it´s not about being able to play music, but hearing and classification ability.
So it translatates in non-fancy-wording. Being able to differenciate rhythms and melodies depends on your genetics and can not be practiced for improvement. But it says nothing about the effect of practicing on being a better music performer.
This article defines 'musical ability' very very narrowly. In discriminatory tasks related to rhythm, melody, and pitch there was a strong heritable component. Keep practicing.
The claim I'm familiar with is that a performer who practices decreases the probability of a catastrophic mistake in the performance and increases the probability that their musical ideas will be conveyed clearly during the performance. So given two performers or roughly equal ability, hire the one who practices.
Ah it took me a minute to parse out that they were distinguishing general music ability from proficiency with an instrument -- yes, this is believable, the weak effects of learning transfer are pretty well-documented in general education and athletics, which Bryan Caplan has been writing about lately http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/learning_transf.....
On the one hand, I think playing in an ensemble is crucial for learning rhythm discrimination and that there probably would be transfer there. On the other, perfect pitch is all but unlearnable and that presents a huge, entirely genetic advantage for some folks on pitch discrimination tasks.
> Music ability was measured using the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test (SMDT)
> The SMDT consists of three
subtests — pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination
The test is of fundamental primitives - not about the ability to play a tune. The study doesn't show that practice does not make better music. For example a deaf person who scores 0 on all the tests, can still visually memorize and practice timings and strokes to produce nice songs.
The paper seems to be talking about deliberate practice of an instrument, but then measuring what jazz musicians call 'ear training'. When I was preparing for conservatory auditions, I did quite a bit of ear training, things like recognizing intervals between notes, cadences/chord progressions, etc after having them played to you.
Before I started any sort of training/practice regimen, I'm quite sure I could never identify a tritone or minor third being payed on a piano. After a lot of deliberate ear training, I certainly could. And I suspect most people could as well, but not by just sitting there listening to things you don't understand, but rather by 'deliberate practice' and learning. A major 5th is easily recognized as the interval between the first notes in a popular star wars theme, a minor 3rd is the interval between the first two notes in greensleeves. These sorts of associations were how I taught myself.
> Participants were first asked whether
they play an instrument (or actively sing). Those who
responded positively were questioned about the number
of years they practiced during four age intervals (ages
0–5 years, 6–11 years, 12–17 years, and 18 years until the
time of measurement) and how many hours a week during
each of those intervals they practiced. From these
estimates, a sum-score estimate of the total hours played
during their lifetime was calculated, with nonplayers
receiving a score of zero.
I'm a lapsed clarinetist. It's been a few years. I wonder if I would have answered "no" to the first question, and been scored as someone with zero hours of practice. Yet I have a couple of thousand lifetime hours of practice.
(But no, most of that practice time did not really drill the skills measured by the SMDT.)
And yet, any professional musician will claim that practice is an essential part of the craft, required for learning difficult sections and tightening up loose licks. I wonder why these two viewpoints come to such opposite conclusions.
> And yet, any professional musician will claim that practice is an essential part of the craft, required for learning difficult sections and tightening up loose licks.
It absolutely is. Practice is necessary but not sufficient for high-level musical performance. The study talks about musical ability in terms of rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination -- mental skills around music -- and finds that these are not changed with practice. These two statements are not in conflict.
They're not at all conflicting unless you choose to interpret them in that way. I think the premise here is very well understood, and it's whether or not any amount of practice can make up for what some would argue is an innate lack of musical talent. The benefits of practice thereafter are incontrovertible.
They aren't opposite. You need the practice to learn the music, but it doesn't help (apparently) you determine pitch , or pick out rhythmical differences (which is what it actually tested). It doesn't necessarily mean you play, but it will probably affect your ability to self regulate and learn by ear.
? "music ability" eq "rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination" (I'll be honest this bothered me that much i didn't read very much further)
Did they design a test specifically to make them feel special? rhythm is subjective within music (think jazz). A 'good' melody is only subjectively different from a bad one. Maybe pitch discrimination could be genetic; partial deafness.
They may not be technically wrong, but their definition of practice and perfect seem twisted to click bait.
I also think this is flawed. Wind and orchestral string players (violin, cello etc) must develop a fine ear for pitch/intonation, pianists usually aren't given any choice as to tuning/voicing/regulation of the instruments they have to perform on and I think over time, many lose sensitivity to non Pythagorean intervals and ET deviations from just intonation.
So everybody's lumped together, those that play one instrument vs those than are proficient on 3 or more
Take something really complex, dumb it down to 3 variables, draw conclusions... profit?
Is the difference between Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix measurable by "rhythm, melody, pitch discrimination" and whatever methodology they used to quantify these variables?
It's like measuring computer scientists ability by how quickly they can implement binary search.
EDIT: it is interesting that musical practice doesn't change those abilities. But I think the title of the article is misleading and grasping.
[+] [-] trevyn|8 years ago|reply
The "10,000 hours to expert performance" notion originated in Ericsson 1993 (http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...) , which defines a very specific term, "deliberate practice" -- "In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable." Ericsson adds more detail in the full paper.
It's not just "are you playing piano for X hours per day".
The paper in this post mentions deliberate practice in its review of the literature, but then all of a sudden and without explanation reverts to the more generic term "practice" for all of its contributions, which appears to be defined as "how many hours did you play your instrument".
Note that "play" and "practice" are explicitly disambiguated in Ericsson.
I have a hard time believing that the authors are unaware of this distinction, especially considering that they heavily reference Ericsson.
[+] [-] haberman|8 years ago|reply
Ericsson's original paper says: "In this article we propose a theoretical framework that explains expert performance in terms of acquired characteristics resulting from extended deliberate practice and that limits the role of innate (inherited) characteristics to general levels of activity and emotionality." They want to claim that the only innate talent that matters is that you are active and emotional, and not that you have any innate talent for music. This paper shows that the amount of time spent practicing appears to have no effect at all on some of these basic musical skills. It shows the presence of innate musical talent, something Ericsson wants to deny.
Some people really like to believe the 10,000 hour rule. I have no desire to talk someone out of believing it if they find it motivational. But as a musician, it's obvious to me that inborn talent is absolutely necessary for high-level performance. The idea that anybody can be Joshua Bell if they just put in the time is a wishful fantasy, not reality.
This kind of "blank slatism" is popular because it satisfies our desire for the world to be fair and just. We want to believe that we can create a perfectly fair playing field where success comes from effort alone. This is a noble idea, but the danger is when we discount evidence to the contrary -- evidence that sometimes people really are different, possibly having different talents or desires. Because then we look for who to blame when things don't end up the way we thought they should.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|8 years ago|reply
No one with a musical background will be surprised that ear training (i.e the ability to hear musical details) is only distantly related to finger training, especially if the finger training happens on an instrument with discrete pitches, like a piano.
Ear training is a separate process, and has to be practiced separately. Playing will improve it a little, but won't fully develop it.
In fact amateur keyboard players are notorious for poor pitch discrimination. Keyboards are just switches. You don't have to find the pitch while listening for intonation, as you do on instruments that don't have frets and require very precise finger or mouth control, as well as the ability to listen to the rest of an ensemble.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|8 years ago|reply
http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation....
David Marchese: You’re talking about business not music, but, and I mean this respectfully, don’t some of your thoughts about music fall under the category of “back in my day”?
Quincy Jones: Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?
[+] [-] wickawic|8 years ago|reply
Edit: here he expresses some of the same sentiment https://youtu.be/OG__SwkV3wg
[+] [-] watertom|8 years ago|reply
My wife is a very good piano player, but she doesn’t have “it”, she sounds like a robot playing, it’s painful to hear, but she plays in time, all the right notes, but it’s just not there.
In drawing it’s most evident, some people can draw and others can’t, no amount of practice will help me. The emotion side of things kicks in more so with drawing.
[+] [-] danieka|8 years ago|reply
What the study refers to as musical ability is in fact the skill to discern different pitches and rhythms.
Obviously there is an enormous amount af practice required to master an instrument. But I still find it hard to “agree” with the paper, I’ve noticed large differences in how attuned I am to pitch and rhythm depending on how much I’ve practiced. Hearing pitch, at least for me, is a skill that can be both trained and lost. Which makes me think that maybe it is not the total amount of hours practiced that is important but also how recent that practice was. I can find no mention in the paper of how “fresh” the participants skills were. Also, there is a huge difference in how you practice, how efficient it is etc.
To be fair I didn’t fully understand the statistical stuff, but all in all this fells like a somewhat blunt study especially considering the provocative title.
Edit: spelling
[+] [-] dooglius|8 years ago|reply
It's rather unfortunate that the title is so poor, as the paper itself is good aside from that; the study they mention a few times (Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013) found that "more music practice is significantly associated with better music ability" and I'm glad people are going through the effort of checking results like these for causation vs mere correlation.
[+] [-] tremendulo|8 years ago|reply
Yes, and real musicianship is more complicated still since hearing and playing abilities co-evolve as one cycles round and round a new piece. For example, notes previously played too quietly can be played louder merely by hearing them as louder. At least that's the way I experience it. If true it adds a whole new meaning to 'active listening' since motor activity may be included in the loop.
[+] [-] kd0amg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|8 years ago|reply
The paper compares hours of music practice to scores in the Swedish Musical Listening Test (SMLT). It finds no significant correlation, concluding that there is no causal relationship between musical practice and musical skill. The SMLT does not directly measure practical musical skills, but is treated by the authors as a valid proxy measure because it correlates with hours of musical practice (Ullén et al, 2014).
Practice does not improve musical ability because hours of practice are not correlated with scores in the SMLT. The SMLT is a valid proxy measure of musical ability because scores correlate with hours of practice. See the problem?
Ullén, F., Mosing, M. A., Holm, L., Eriksson, H., & Madison, G. (2014). Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 87–93. (10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.057)
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|8 years ago|reply
Very interesting article!
Here's an analogy: say you get a discount on your health insurance if you visit a fitness center regularly. Except that going to fitness centers got you excited. You don't get anything out of them. But you do like biking, going on long hikes and you do a lot of physical activity in your work. So just because you don't go to the gym, should you give up on your fitness? Heck no! Lean into what energizes you to stay healthy.
[+] [-] hosh|8 years ago|reply
A punitive practice will not force someone's awareness on the practice. Though someone might be bored and put their attention on the practice.
That has been my experience with music growing up and martial arts later. And software programming.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kartan|8 years ago|reply
So it translatates in non-fancy-wording. Being able to differenciate rhythms and melodies depends on your genetics and can not be practiced for improvement. But it says nothing about the effect of practicing on being a better music performer.
[+] [-] iandanforth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
The claim I'm familiar with is that a performer who practices decreases the probability of a catastrophic mistake in the performance and increases the probability that their musical ideas will be conveyed clearly during the performance. So given two performers or roughly equal ability, hire the one who practices.
[+] [-] setgree|8 years ago|reply
On the one hand, I think playing in an ensemble is crucial for learning rhythm discrimination and that there probably would be transfer there. On the other, perfect pitch is all but unlearnable and that presents a huge, entirely genetic advantage for some folks on pitch discrimination tasks.
[+] [-] abalone|8 years ago|reply
Woah.
TIL about the Swedish Twin Registry: https://ki.se/en/research/the-swedish-twin-registry
[+] [-] thinkloop|8 years ago|reply
> The SMDT consists of three subtests — pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination
The test is of fundamental primitives - not about the ability to play a tune. The study doesn't show that practice does not make better music. For example a deaf person who scores 0 on all the tests, can still visually memorize and practice timings and strokes to produce nice songs.
[+] [-] melq|8 years ago|reply
Before I started any sort of training/practice regimen, I'm quite sure I could never identify a tritone or minor third being payed on a piano. After a lot of deliberate ear training, I certainly could. And I suspect most people could as well, but not by just sitting there listening to things you don't understand, but rather by 'deliberate practice' and learning. A major 5th is easily recognized as the interval between the first notes in a popular star wars theme, a minor 3rd is the interval between the first two notes in greensleeves. These sorts of associations were how I taught myself.
This study is baffling...
[+] [-] Agathos|8 years ago|reply
I'm a lapsed clarinetist. It's been a few years. I wonder if I would have answered "no" to the first question, and been scored as someone with zero hours of practice. Yet I have a couple of thousand lifetime hours of practice.
(But no, most of that practice time did not really drill the skills measured by the SMDT.)
[+] [-] EtDybNuvCu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|8 years ago|reply
It absolutely is. Practice is necessary but not sufficient for high-level musical performance. The study talks about musical ability in terms of rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination -- mental skills around music -- and finds that these are not changed with practice. These two statements are not in conflict.
[+] [-] shacharz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yasth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cortic|8 years ago|reply
Did they design a test specifically to make them feel special? rhythm is subjective within music (think jazz). A 'good' melody is only subjectively different from a bad one. Maybe pitch discrimination could be genetic; partial deafness.
They may not be technically wrong, but their definition of practice and perfect seem twisted to click bait.
[+] [-] gtani|8 years ago|reply
So everybody's lumped together, those that play one instrument vs those than are proficient on 3 or more
[+] [-] stanfordkid|8 years ago|reply
Is the difference between Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix measurable by "rhythm, melody, pitch discrimination" and whatever methodology they used to quantify these variables?
It's like measuring computer scientists ability by how quickly they can implement binary search.
EDIT: it is interesting that musical practice doesn't change those abilities. But I think the title of the article is misleading and grasping.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]