Oot and Aboot with Some Canadian Skeptic

The other day, I made a post about my first day as a professional music teacher. The first comment/question posed by one of my astroskepic-friends got me thinking a great deal about the topic of learning music, not from the perspective of a musician or from a teacher, but from a skeptic's perspective (who also happens to be a music teacher). So to the question: "Is it ever too late for someone to learn music?", I answer "no....unless you suffered an accident in shop class as a teenager, it's never too late to learn music".

Perhaps a better way to ask the same question would be "Is there an ideal age at which a person can learn to play an instrument?" The short answer is 'no'. The long answer follows:

Conventional wisdom teaches us that learning an instrument is best done at an early age, partly because music is just like a language and children have a natural knack for learning languages over adults.

This is semi-accurate.

Music does indeed follow similar rules to those of a language. Modern music notation stretches back to the 7th century, and the ancient Greeks, Arabs, Indians and Chinese had their own notation (or written language) for music even earlier. If I may be metaphorical here, music has its own set of rules for grammar, syntax and punctuation. The rules tend to change from culture-to-culture (i.e. the diatonic scale has seven notes, whereas its Chinese equivalent, the Huang Zhong scale, uses five notes, while some Arab and Indian scales use 22 and 24 notes, respectively), just as dialogues dialects may change. There is indeed a "language" of music....though the languages themselves change, music is understood partly in language-like terms.

Music is also highly mathematical. The mathematical system to build a scale was the same used by Pythagoras was the same used by the ancient Chinese, and has not changed: sound frequencies and harmonies all obey the same physical laws today in Canada as they did in ancient Greece. The way a piano player builds a chord is not just because it simply sounds good: The reason they sound good is because the frequencies of the sound waves match up in a particular way as to cause no dissonance to our ears. This is not a socially-constructed truism about music: a poorly-tuned guitar really does hurt our ears! Competing sound waves crash into the micro-hairs in our ears faster than our brain can compensate, and the resultant sound makes our eardrums rattle, our spines tighten, and our faces clench up in a very real pain (the reason people do this when Nickleback plays has another explanation). Any producer that uses an auto-tuner understands this: The sound is off-tune, the producer injects some science into the recording, and the sound that comes out the other end has sound waves that work in both audible and mathematical harmony. The math works, and so the music works...not the other way around.

I don't wish to sound reductionist here, because there is of course, a tremendous artistic/cultural aspect to music. Even though the musical grammar and math rules haven't changed much, tastes certainly have: Today, we teach the diatonic scale, but 400 years ago we taught the pentatonic scale. You know the pentatonic scale, it's this one:


You also know the diatonic scale. It's this one:



Over historical time, geographical distances and cultural boundaries, the foundations of what we learn when we learn music changes quite a bit. You may think that a difference of just 2 notes in a scale is no big deal, but try to play the 4th chord of Let it Be when that 4th chord doesn't even exist!

Music is part language, part math, and part art.

Language is all language.

The reason that children are so adept at learning languages is because we have evolved as a species to do so....it is a trait that is selected-for. A child needs to learn to communicate with his group at an early age if they're going to learn what berries not to eat, where the fish are, or who the tribe elder is.

The older a person gets, the less need they have to learn a new language. So, our brain, perfectly content with forming the language pathways for 15 years, tends to drop off that skill. Adults have difficulty learning a new language not just because they're old and curmudgeonly (see the photo above), but because their brains are actually abandoning that particular ability.

Music, however, is not selected for: It is an epiphenomenon that just sort of happened because we were good at figuring out other things. If music were selected for from the time that the first languages were developing, it's highly likely that every person would play some instrument, and we would all have 12 fingers by now. Music does not depend on a single part of the brain's functioning in its favor, but it needs a wide array of tools from the brain, nervous and musculature system:

Language,
Math,
Abstract thinking,
Memory,
Pattern-recognition,
Fine-muscle-control,
Fine-motor-control,
Rhythm,
Creativity,
Improvisation,

And a whole-host of other tools needed from your body (not just your brain).

I've been teaching music for over a decade now (though this particular job is new), and speaking from anecdote (if I may be allowed), adults generally are better students than children. Adults are better at pattern recognition, they have better fine-motor/muscle control, and they're generally more patient with their failures than children are. These are learned behaviors/skills, so it's only natural that someone with more tree-rings would be a little more adept at learning the piano than a sapling.

However, there are somethings that know-no age limits. Rhythm and creativity come to mind. Just as a person's age would give them an advantage when it comes to pattern-recognition, it also works to their disadvantage if they have no sense of rhythm. I also teach drums, and my youngest student (6 years old) figured out how to keep a beat better than a 16-year old I taught a few years back. The 16 year old had never understood that it's important to have a sense of rhythm, so he never tired (and never had someone correct him), and he stayed in his lazy behavior until I beat it out of him (get it? 'cause he's a drummer. I'm very clever, you see). The inherent advantages of being an adult music student are just as likely to be a disadvantage.

There is an another point that I have yet to address. Learning music at an early age would indeed give you a jump-start. So by the time you're in your 20's, you'll be super-awesome at it. That's the only definite advantage, but as you can surmise: there's no reason that a 10-year old will learn music faster than a 30-year old.

So if you're over the age of 20, and think that it's too late to learn how to play the guitar, you're wrong. You've got just as good a chance at learning how to play Smoke on the Water as your 9-year old niece.

However, if you're 35 and you want to learn a 2nd language, take comfort that you've got a snowball's chance in hell at succeeding.

How does that taste? Get used to it.

Enjoy.



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