Chapter 24

Musical Expertise

John A. Sloboda

This chapter treats six connected issues having to do with musical expertise.
Section 24.1 examines the difficulties associated with characterizing expertise in
a way that offers a genuine foothold for cognitive psychology, and I suggest
that expertise ma ynot, in fact, be ‘‘special’’ in an ycognitivel yinteresting sense.
Section 24.2 goes on to review some experimental studies of music, which sug-
gest that most members of a culture possess tacit musical expertise, expressed
in their abilit yto use high-level structural information in carr ying out a variet y
of perceptual tasks. This expertise seems to be acquired through casual expo-
sure to the musical forms and activities of the culture. Section 24.3 provides
two detailed examples of exceptional musical expertise (a musical savant and a
jazz musician) that apparentl ydeveloped in the absence of formal instruction,
suggesting that normal and ‘‘exceptional’’ expertise ma ybe parts of a single
continuum. The evidence presented in section 24.4 suggests that a major dif-
ference between musical expertise and man yother forms of expertise is that
musical expertise requires an apprehension of a structure–emotion mapping.
Without this, the abilit yto perform with ‘‘expression’’ cannot be acquired. Sec-
tion 24.5 outlines some evidence to suggest that these structure–emotion links
become firml yestablished during middle childhood, under certain conditions,
and that these conditions are predictive of future development of musical ex-
pertise. Finally, section 24.6 reviews some research efforts that are attempts to
clarif ythe precise nature of the structure–emotion link and are showing that
definite types of structures seem to mediate distinct emotions.

24.1 What Is Expertise?

In beginning to think about how a psychologist who deals with music could
contribute in a specific wa yto a volume on expertise, it became clear to me that
most of the recentl ypublished work on musical competence has made little
attempt to define or characterize musical expertise. What we have, instead, is
a varied collection of empirical studies on single aspects of what some musi-
cians do. The topics of such studies range from pitch memor y(Ward & Burns,
1982), through synchronization in performance (Rasch, 1988), to planning a
composition (Davidson & Welsh, 1988), and it is not immediatel yclear that
such accomplishments have anything in common other than the fact that they

From chapter 6 inToward A General Theory of Expertise, ed. K. A. Ericsson and J. Smith (New York:
Cambridge Universit yPress, 1991), 153–171. Reprinted with permission.