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Originally Posted by A-Rod's Cousin
Your first sentence is debatable and I probably shouldn't have read further. But let's say "most people" in the world have tried to play the piano. That's still not the same as "everybody", which is probably true of singing.
I would just reiterate that I think this point is very interesting, 100% true and that I've never seen it made before anywhere. Sure, probably a lot of people have banged on a keyboard at some point but I think its probably safe to say that if we were to measure seriousness of effort in some objective way, call it "song hours" or whatever where we're talking about the amount of time invested in concerted effort at acquiring the feel or tone of a particular song, I think total vocal hours spent would so far dwarf serious time spent on the piano in the general population that it would render the latter totally insignificant.
A couple of distinctions there: someone who is banging on a keyboard is probably not actually trying to recreate a song, they're probably just f***ing around in the vast majority of cases due to the complexity and esoterics of the keyboard. For example how many of your friends could just haphazardly figure out Mary Had a Little Lamb in the key of F#? How long would it take them and was that the kind of inquiry they were attempting the last time they touched a keyboard? Contrast that with almost
everybody having made a serious attempt to imitate their favorite song. Those are qualitatively and I would venture to say quantitatively different endeavours. I think A-rod's original point is completely valid.
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there's a reason that musicians children often end up with pretty good voices- it has nothing to do with their parents superior genetics, it has to do with being raised in an environment that fosters the intellectual and physical development of musical imagination / auditory inner hearing, and physical adaptations that are related to this. your brain physically changes as you learn music, as does the vocal tract / vocal folds when you sing a lot, and the coordination between your muscles and your mind increases also.
There's a lot to this if we're talking about relatively low level skill in the general population and I don't doubt you could show correlations in children's skill based on parents musical aptitude. One thing this argument ironically overlooks is that it's relying on first degree genetic relations to prove the dominance of the "nuture" side of the nature/nuture coin.
Overall I would expect that thesis to hold if we're talking about the lead singer in the church choir. It's also true that a lot of world class musicians come from musical families. But many more don't. Childhood environment alone imo does not account for exceptional talent, the people for example that a jazz critic might name if you asked "who should I listen to". I don't have a whole lot more to add on that but I strongly suspect that musical talent is determined by something like a 90/10 distribution of nature/nuture. I also think that talent like diseases and every other inhereted trait will not be phenotypically evident 100% of the time or even 50% of the time, will skip generations etc. Art Tatum's brother, nearly the same age as him, didn't play anything afaik.
Oh edit: I don't think the derail is silly at all in fact it might be a relatively pure point of study for phenotype/genotype dynamics.
Last edited by JudgeHoldem1848; 10-26-2013 at 02:58 PM.