Why We Love Music

by Carl E. Seashore

The significance of such measurements depends upon the rigidity of the scientific technique and the selection of subjects for experiment. Reliable measurements have been made on a variety of groups and for different purposes more or less related to the problem of inheritance. Studies have been made upon musically precocious children to determine to what degree they were gifted in each of these capacities. All the available blood relatives of six of the foremost musical families in America and a number of such families in European countries have been investigated. These capacities have been measured in selected virtuosi in various fields of music. The measurements have been used for the determination of qualifications for musical organizations and for the analysis of admissions to music schools. Simplified forms of the measurements have been made upon very young children in musical families. Numerous cases of failure in musical education have been investigated and often explained on the basis of presence or absence of these basic capacities. Surveys have been made on groups representing highly-privileged or under-privileged children in the matter of musical facilities. Some of these measures are now a part of the standard tests and measures administered in the public schools so that comparisons can be made with blood relatives, and data are becoming cumulative for scientific comparison of successive generations. Numerous racial studies have been made on a large scale, comparing these capacities, for example, in different degrees of race mixture—as in the transition from pure blacks through mulattoes to whites in a large Negro community, or the comparison of racial groups in Hawaii, the school children in different European countries, Indians with whites, and distinctive races and primitive peoples in different parts of the world.

From this large array of facts certain findings seem to be significant, taking these measurements as a group. First, the sense of pitch, the sense of loudness, and the sense of time reveal no distinctly significant differences in racial groups, in culture-levels, or at age-levels, when adequately measured. In many cases this holds also for the sense of rhythm and tonal memory. This is probably indicative of the fact that the basic capacities for hearing in individuals now living and capable of being tested adequately are physiologically at the same level. This conclusion is in harmony with the observation that these capacities which function in music, function also in the vast varieties of orientation through sound at all levels of man now living. It is also analogous to what has been found in vision. Second, it develops that in each and every one of the groups studied there are enormous individual differences in each of these capacities and that the extent and distribution of these differences do not differ significantly from what we find in the public school children of the United States. Third, where comparisons of capacity and achievement have been made reliably, it has been found that those who have achieved distinction in music have these capacities in a significantly corresponding degree; but much larger numbers of those possessing superior capacity who have not been discovered as musical, either by themselves or in their environment, are revealed. This fact rules out many of the statistical studies of heredity in terms of musical achievement. Fourth, these capacities represent relatively independent factors in hearing. Fifth, marked superiority or inferiority in these capacities is of predictive value for musical achievement and guidance in education.

On the motor side but little progress has been made. Principally because the measurements are laborious, significant elements have not been identified, and moderate motor capacities in speed and action are adequate for most musical achievements. Daily observations reveal that children may be slow and accurate, slow and erratic, fast and accurate, or fast and erratic in various degrees and combinations. It would, however, be of musical significance to discover to what extent and in what manner these traits are inherited from generation to generation.

In view of these discoveries, it is evident that there is some material available for technically rigid genetic interpretation in terms of currently recognized principles of inheritance. All the records on the six foremost musical families of America are available in the confidential files of the Carnegie Institution, at Cold Spring Harbor. Highly reliable measurements on all the students in the Eastman School of Music for the last fifteen years are available. Various public schools have vast cumulative data, and elaborate collections are being worked upon in the Winderen Laboratory, at Oslo. But with the exception of the Carnegie Institution and the Oslo collections, adequate measurements of whole families are absent.

What is needed now is a thoroughly reliable series of measurements on entire musical families and the interpretation of these by a thoroughly competent geneticist in terms of established biological principles of inheritance. It is especially important that both parties shall be competent to take into account the numerous lessons which we have learned from the extensive efforts that have been made in the attempt to measure the inheritance of any mental trait, such as human intelligence. In the human situation we cannot breed successive generations rapidly, as in flies or mice, for experimental purposes. We must, therefore, economize time and effort by taking the most readily available material. For this purpose I have suggested three possible methods (Psychology of Music, McGraw-Hill, 1938). The first is that we start with the highest 10 per cent and the lowest 10 per cent in an adequate sampling of fifth-grade children in a school system and work back by making the same measurements on the available blood relatives of these two groups. In effective organization much time can be saved by making group measurements in a co-operating community, such as a city ward. A second procedure would be to secure an adequate sampling of musicians and measure forward and backward to cover three generations in which the matings of musical and unmusical parents could be traced. A third procedure would be a systematic collection of measurements on school children for a generation or more giving special attention to the showing of blood relatives. We cannot, however, stress too strongly the importance of having these measurements made throughout by an experimenter thoroughly competent in this field and the equally thorough biological treatment of data by scientists thoroughly competent in that specific field. If a biologist wants to start the ball rolling from his point of view, the records in the Eugenics Record office of the Carnegie Institution furnish a fair and reliable sampling.

In proposing this conservative approach through psychophysical measurements, I do not wish to belittle the insight, common knowledge and theories of inheritance which have been obtained by observation and statistics in terms of musicality as a whole—as in biography, autobiography and letters of great musicians or in the study of musical families. But we are confronted with the fact that these deal largely with unanalyzed situations so completely covered by factors of environment and training as to make them useless for strictly scientific purposes. Nor would I belittle the significance of general traits, such as musical intelligence, creative imagination and the artistic temperament, or facilities for specific skills, such as sight reading, and the memorizing of repertoires. We know a great deal about these and unquestionably have the right to assume that they have an hereditary basis. But scientific studies in heredity may be more properly approached through the simpler and more elementary capacities.

For scientific purposes, we cannot, of course, mix basic measurements and current ratings of musical achievement. There have been numerous approaches to this subject from the musical-achievement point of view, and these have furnished many suggestive leads and probably point to unquestioned facts about the inheritance of musical talent. But the science of genetics rightly rests upon and demands the isolation of specific factors which can be measured; and for that purpose the musical geneticist must, for the present, sacrifice many otherwise interesting approaches from the point of view of rated achievement and be willing to await the laying of foundations of rigidly conducted measurements which can be described, interpreted, and verified.

THOUGHT REVIEW

General Principles

(1) The question is not whether or not musical ability is inherited, but how it is inherited. (2) The musical heritage through each parent is transmitted through a single germ cell. (3) The mechanism of musical heredity lies in the organization of the genes in the twenty-four pairs of chromosomes found in this fertilized germ cell. (4) Scientific principles of musical inheritance can be established only through experiment and measurement of specific capacities; they cannot be derived from studies of musical achievement alone.