Thanks for thinking through this in more detail! I think I roughly agree with you for the cases where someone is already good at singing and/or playing an instrument; I do think musical skill generalizes fairly well. (And thanks for spelling out the scenario of “you can actually practice this hands-on intensively for weeks or months in a row as your primary activity”; my default felt sense of weeks/months necessary to do something does not by default involve total primary focus.)
I don’t think I expect non-musicians to be reliably able to skill up in 6 focused months, though! Some would, if they have a good ear and, say, facility in learning languages or similar (to get really used to sheet music). But some would not be able to pick up basic pitch manipulation fast enough, and some might get stuck on becoming fluent in sheet music, and some might have trouble with the kind of vertical listening needed to evaluate harmonies & pick up mistakes.
Though to be fair, the part of that I’m most confident of is that it’s very hard to get from “tone-deaf” to “proficient with sufficient ease to scaffold additional complexity”; I might be more willing to believe that if you already have that kind of proficiency you can often skill up significantly in 6 months if you focus fully on it.
I agree that I’ve met people who are tone deaf or seem rhythmically impaired, though I do think that there’s a notable difference between people who try to learn a language at school, and people who just move to a country where everyone learns it. Perfect pitch is learnable. I suspect that many people who are incompetent on these axis would learn it if they throw themselves at it and immerse themselves.
Like, my Dad does that thing where, when he sings, he is typically not quite singing the melody. He’s singing like a third above, or a fifth, or something else. He’s typically in the same key, and the rhythms are right, but otherwise he is reliably off by some interval, and if you poke him to get it right, he doesn’t really know how to. He’s 60+ years old and never got over that. I can imagine someone might hear him sing and say “lost cause” as a singer, but also, my Dad is a perfectly passable fingerpicking guitarist. Plays a few tunes nicely, great rhythm, clearly picking out and hearing the melodies, listens to tons of guitar music. I bet with some focused work for a few weeks, he’d start singing the right notes too, and I think he could get to being actually competent with months of focused work (barring deterioration in breathing from all his smoking).
Also we’re not talking all non-musicians, we’re discussing 120+ IQ people who have already learned something physical to an expert level, like if you’re a paid professional who does drywall or fencing or swimming, and also a paid professional in design such as public speaking or sculpture or fiction-writing. So I think a lot of ways that people would fail have been selected against.
(All that said I admit overall that physical/motor skills have more “randomly can’t do it” per person than others.)
Thanks for thinking through this in more detail! I think I roughly agree with you for the cases where someone is already good at singing and/or playing an instrument; I do think musical skill generalizes fairly well. (And thanks for spelling out the scenario of “you can actually practice this hands-on intensively for weeks or months in a row as your primary activity”; my default felt sense of weeks/months necessary to do something does not by default involve total primary focus.)
I don’t think I expect non-musicians to be reliably able to skill up in 6 focused months, though! Some would, if they have a good ear and, say, facility in learning languages or similar (to get really used to sheet music). But some would not be able to pick up basic pitch manipulation fast enough, and some might get stuck on becoming fluent in sheet music, and some might have trouble with the kind of vertical listening needed to evaluate harmonies & pick up mistakes.
Though to be fair, the part of that I’m most confident of is that it’s very hard to get from “tone-deaf” to “proficient with sufficient ease to scaffold additional complexity”; I might be more willing to believe that if you already have that kind of proficiency you can often skill up significantly in 6 months if you focus fully on it.
I agree that I’ve met people who are tone deaf or seem rhythmically impaired, though I do think that there’s a notable difference between people who try to learn a language at school, and people who just move to a country where everyone learns it. Perfect pitch is learnable. I suspect that many people who are incompetent on these axis would learn it if they throw themselves at it and immerse themselves.
Like, my Dad does that thing where, when he sings, he is typically not quite singing the melody. He’s singing like a third above, or a fifth, or something else. He’s typically in the same key, and the rhythms are right, but otherwise he is reliably off by some interval, and if you poke him to get it right, he doesn’t really know how to. He’s 60+ years old and never got over that. I can imagine someone might hear him sing and say “lost cause” as a singer, but also, my Dad is a perfectly passable fingerpicking guitarist. Plays a few tunes nicely, great rhythm, clearly picking out and hearing the melodies, listens to tons of guitar music. I bet with some focused work for a few weeks, he’d start singing the right notes too, and I think he could get to being actually competent with months of focused work (barring deterioration in breathing from all his smoking).
Also we’re not talking all non-musicians, we’re discussing 120+ IQ people who have already learned something physical to an expert level, like if you’re a paid professional who does drywall or fencing or swimming, and also a paid professional in design such as public speaking or sculpture or fiction-writing. So I think a lot of ways that people would fail have been selected against.
(All that said I admit overall that physical/motor skills have more “randomly can’t do it” per person than others.)