New study suggests musical aptitude is multifaceted, not general

A study of healthy older adults in Switzerland and Germany found that they were able to acquire various musical skills over the course of one year of practice. This finding suggests that musical ability comprises a broad spectrum of distinct competencies, rather than a single, general musical aptitude. The study was published in BMC Geriatrics.

Musical skills encompass a range of abilities required to perform, comprehend, and create music, including pitch recognition, rhythmic timing, instrumental technique, musical expression, and the ability to read and interpret musical notation. Musical proficiency is thus a complex combination of diverse skills and capacities.

These skills include both technical aspects—such as finger dexterity for playing an instrument—and interpretive elements, such as emotional expression and stylistic phrasing. They require development through both formal training and personal practice, indicating that exposure, education, and environment play significant roles in musical development.

Study author Hannah Losch and her colleagues set out to examine the acquisition of musical skills in musically naïve older adults over the span of one year. They assessed changes in musical skills in two groups: one engaged in piano practice, and another participating in music sensitization activities. The latter included analytical listening and learning theoretical information about music, such as musical styles and structure. The researchers were particularly interested in whether musical abilities develop as a single general skill or as a set of independent abilities.

The data came from the “Train the Brain with Music” project, which involved 156 healthy retirees aged 64–76 from Hannover and Geneva. All participants were native German or French speakers. To qualify for the study, they had to be musically naïve—that is, they could not have had more than six months of musical practice in their lives.

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Participants were randomly assigned to either the piano practice group or the musical culture group. The piano group attended weekly 60-minute piano lessons in pairs with an instructor. The music culture group participated in weekly 60-minute seminars in groups of three to six students, where they learned about music, listened to musical pieces, and discussed them. Both interventions lasted for one year.

The researchers assessed participants’ musical and cognitive abilities at four time points: at the beginning of the study, at the six-month mark, at the end of the interventions (12 months), and six months after the interventions ended (follow-up). Participants completed the Cognitive Reserve Index Questionnaire and several musical ability assessments, including the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, the Beat Alignment Test, the Melodic Discrimination Test, and the MIDI Scale Analysis. They also took music quizzes, and the researchers evaluated recordings of their piano performances.

Twenty-one participants dropped out before the end of the study, and 35 additional participants did not take part in the six-month follow-up.

The results showed that each group improved in the areas they had practiced. The piano group showed moderate improvements in piano articulation and dynamics, while the musical culture group achieved higher scores on the music quiz. Participants with better cognitive functioning and greater musical sophistication performed better on the melody discrimination test. Changes in different musical aptitude scores were not correlated, indicating that these were independent abilities rather than expressions of a single general musical aptitude.

“Musically naïve older adults can acquire diverse musical abilities, which progress independently, suggesting a broad spectrum of musical abilities rather than a single general musical aptitude,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the nature of music abilities. However, it should be noted that the musical abilities tested in this study represent only a subset of the full range of musical abilities that can be measured.

The paper, “Acquisition of musical skills and abilities in older adults—results of 12 months of music training,” was authored by Hannah Losch, Eckart Altenmüller, Damien Marie, Edoardo Passarotto, Clara R. Kretschmer, Daniel S. Scholz, Matthias Kliegel, Tillmann H. C. Krüger, Christopher Sinke, Kristin Jünemann, Clara E. James, and Florian Worschech.