1
MUSICAL PREDISPOSITIONS
IN INFANCY: AN UPDATE
.
For contributors to this volume on the cognitive neuroscience of music, the consideration
of musical predispositions seems reasonable. By contrast, the larger scientific community
is highly skeptical about links between music and biology. For example, Pinker,^1 who pop-
ularized the notion of a language instinct, dismisses music as ‘auditory cheesecake’—a
pleasant but superfluous confection. ‘As far as biological cause and effect are concerned,
music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grand-
children, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language,
vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and
the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged’ (p. 528).^2
Pinker’s^2 thinking in this regard is flawed. He makes no distinction between musical
competenceand performance, or between underlying knowledge and demonstrable skill, as
he does for language. He notes that while allnormal children speak and comprehend lan-
guage without explicit instruction, many adults are unmusical, as evidenced by their inabil-
ity to sing in tune. Although developmental disorders of language occur in the absence of
other disabilities,^3 developmental disorders of music are rare^4 even though music percep-
tion requires finer pitch resolution than does speech perception.
Pinker^2 emphasizes the training and practice required for mastering a musical instrument
while de-emphasizing the daily language (speaking and listening) practice that all children
experience. Caregivers, peers, and others function as language mentors, modelling target
behaviours in age-appropriate ways. Similarly, informal musical mentoring is much more
common than formal musical training in much of the world. Admittedly, individuals
without certain kinds of mentoring or training may be limited in their explicit musical
knowledge, but their implicit knowledge is similar, in many respects, to that of trained indi-
viduals.^5 Pinker also contrasts the wide variations in musical ability (i.e. tuneless singing to
expert performance) with the presumed uniformity in language ability (i.e. the basic ability
to speak and listen). In so doing, he applies a magnifying lens to music, which exaggerates
individual differences, and a minifying lens to language, which reduces or eliminates
individual differences. There is no evidence, however, of anything other than a normal
distribution of language and musical abilities. Finally, Pinker’s vision of life without music
betrays considerable ethnocentrism—music as material for concerts, dance halls, and movie
soundtracks rather than something entwined in the fabric of life. It ignores the historical
and cross-cultural importance of music in ritual ceremonies,6–9work,10,11and child care^12
as well as the inextricable links between music and movement.^13