There is a long-standing debate about whether musical talent can be learnt, or if it’s innate to a chosen few. Read on to hear both sides of the discussion and to have your say…

Defining Nature Vs Nurture

Whether it’s music, sport, science, or art, each discipline has its own experts in their chosen field. What draws people towards their calling is one question, but another is what makes some people excel at what they do while others have to work hard to get great results. Certainly, most will have experienced those times where the best option is to try doing something else instead…

The lexicon used for those who excel in what they do often gravitates around notions of nature or innate ability. These are easy to understand, and most will know the person who can achieve things easily with seemingly little effort from themself.

Nurture is slightly harder to pin down in the context of ability to do something well. The noun ‘nuture’ is defined as “the way in which children are treated as they are growing, especially as compared with the characteristics they are born with” or “care, encouragement, and support given to someone or something while they are growing”. In the context of learning a skill, this could reasonably be taken as environmental factors combined with the quality or amount of learning undertaken to get to a certain level.

Practice Makes Perfect?

Many would agree that whether innate ability exists or not, practicing a skill will improve someone’s ability to do it. One concept around this was first mentioned by psychologist Anders Ericsson, and later reinterpreted and popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. This involved a ‘10,000 hour rule’ as the way to perfection by way of sheer commitment and repetition. A conflicting study, however, looked into the abilities of those reaching the highest levels of performance in chess playing and piano playing. It concluded that only around one-third of these high performers derived their ability from practice. While this latter study seems to suggest that those who excel are blessed with greater intrinsic skill, it seems that the jury is still out on how big that contribution is.

Does Talent Conquer All?

While it might be true to say that those with innate musical sensibilities will have an easier time playing an instrument, or ‘hearing’ chords and intervals, this in-built ability, like any, benefits hugely from practice. No better illustration of this is the sports team. With many essentially being multinational corporations, they can afford to buy talent. But this is of course only the start. The training that comes later is not only part of the job, but indeed the biggest part of it. At the other end of the ‘talent’ scale, people still practice to improve what skill they do have. Anthropological factors aside, the question of whether the ability to recognise pitch is an intrinsic part of being human can perhaps be best answered by Bobby McFerrin in this incredible video:

Expanding Your Musical Sense

While some may put it down to innate ability, Use Your Ear believes that having good pitch awareness is something that can be improved upon. Offering both a paid video workshop course, as well as free introductory ‘taster’, the company contends that musical pitch is both useful to, and learnable by all. They describe their Relative Pitch Video-Course as:

An innovative and extremely effective ear training method, a totally new way of practicing and approaching music. This is the complete video-course, containing all the lessons, concepts and exercises presented in a step by step guide that will allow you to build a strong, natural and instinctive relative pitch; also for beginners.

The free 3-hour long workshop features:

• Discover a science-based model that reveals the secrets great musicians use, without even knowing it, to recognize music on the fly ... secrets that anyone can harness to quickly develop a pro-caliber musical ear.

• Preview our step-by-step method to develop relative pitch faster and easier than you ever imagined. See first-hand how our students get results quickly, experiencing music on a much deeper level in a matter of weeks — no more tedious mental math on intervals.

• Practice multiple exercises during the workshop. You’ll discover the right way to recognize melodies and chords, so you walk away with practical direction based on your own skill level and sticking points. You will know how to improve, instead of just guessing.

• Learn which exercises to avoid at all costs — ineffective exercises, prescribed by generations of well-meaning music teachers, that doom 99.9% of promising musicians to failure — so you can avoid years of frustration and lack of progress.

• Get TWO GIFTS, available nowhere else, to help you build on the concepts and exercises you learn during the workshop.

We will update this article to reveal the results soon.