Some Problems in Psychology of Musical Ability

How FAR ANY ABILIN shown by an individual is innate and how far it is acquired from the environment is difficult to decide. Yet the question is not a purely academic one. It underlies the difference between what Ralph Smith (10) called the "aristocratic" and the "democratic" attitudes to music education. Even the democrat who believes that every child can profit from instruction in music has to admit that pupils vary markedly in motivation and capacity to learn. If musical aptitude is largely innate, ought the schools to spend too much time on the unmusical? So long as the supply of good music teachers remains inadequate, shouldn't their efforts be mainly directed toward discovering and fostering the talents of the gifted? Most earlier studies of the heritability of musical talent have been based on the family trees of musicians or on the assessment of musical ability from questionnaire data. These include the interesting inquiry by Scheinfeld (7) into the incidence of musical talent among the relatives of professional musicians and music students. Some use has also been made of the Seashore and Kwalwasser-Dykema tests in genetic studies, but the results obtained by different investigators have been inconsistent and difficult to interpret. For an investigation of hereditary and environmental factors in musical ability I compared identical with fraternal twins and parents with their children. Of the standardized tests available in 1956, the Wing battery appeared to be the most comprehensive and best validated. Though my subjects took all seven tests, in the case of the twins brought up together many were so unmusical that it seemed advisable to use the scores from the first three tests only. The age range of the 50 pairs of child twins who were tested was from 9 to 16. I classified them as identical or fraternal by general impression and careful inspection. Scores from 11 adult pairs were also obtained. Intrapair correlations (8) are shown in Table 1. These figures give a "heritability index" for the child pairs showing that heredity contributed 42 percent to their musical ability. The extent of the contrast between the two types of twins was less than that reported in the literature on intelligence perhaps partly due to the low ability level of most of the twins. In the case of the boys considered separately, 62 percent of their ability was attributable to heredity. This sex difference did not seem tc be related to differences in ability level, interest in music, or oppor-