0

Is there any evidence that musicians are faster than non-musicians at learning the skill of echo-location, i.e. the technique of navigating a physical environment by making tongue clicks and listening to the sound reflected from objects in the immediate vicinity?

Prompted by this BBC Radio 4 programme: In Touch

Brian THOMAS
  • 11,543
  • 1
  • 36
  • 79
  • 1
    I’m voting to close this question because It doesn't really bear on music performance or theory (unless maybe there's some avant garde piece that requires echolocation. That would be kind of cool....) – Aaron Jun 25 '21 at 20:44

2 Answers2

1

I'm just hazarding a guess, since I don't know of any literature about this. But I'm going to say that certain TYPES of musician are definitely going to come out on top.

#1: A producer with a good ear. If you can talk a Rick Beato into spending time doing this, I 100% GUARANTEE-- absoluteley guarantee-- that he's going to be a strong performer. I would bet good money on it.

#2: A drummer. I think drummers will do well because they have so many different sounds to process, and their superior sense of timing (if they're any good) is going to contribute to a better spatial sense for echolocation.

Bennyboy1973
  • 3,943
  • 1
  • 7
  • 18
0

Musicians are better than non-musicians at learning ANYTHING!

Seriously, I can't categorically state that there's never been a study of how quickly musicians versus non-musicians learn echo-location. But I can't find one.

Echo-location is a skill of particular use to blind people. I wonder if they learn it more easily than a sighted person?

As you're interested in the subject, I expect you've already found this article.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0252330

Laurence
  • 92,867
  • 5
  • 62
  • 200
  • Your article was the subject of a recent BBC Radio 4 article that reported (surprisingly) that blind people weren't any better at echo-location than sighted people. But it didn't compare musicians vs non-musicians... – Brian THOMAS Jun 25 '21 at 13:30
  • Blind people probably do learn it more easily - it's of far more importance to them. In a way, this is related to 'do blind people make better piano tuners?' – Tim Jun 25 '21 at 13:46
  • Did you read the article? There's actually slight evidence of the opposite! I considered extending the topic to blind piano tuners - my personal anecdotal evidence is that although blind people used to be encouraged into piano tuning as a suitable profession, they weren't always very good at it. But then I considered the possible backlash... :-) – Laurence Jun 25 '21 at 13:46
  • I haven't read the article yet but I'd assumed the BBC had. But the Radio 4 feature said that blind participants weren't automatically better than their sighted counterparts. – Brian THOMAS Jun 25 '21 at 15:31
  • When a source is available, better to quote the source rather than a report about the source! – Laurence Jun 25 '21 at 15:48
  • LOL @LaurencePayne I stopped myself from leaving an off-topic rant on an off-topic question... But since you brought it up :) ... I'm deeply skeptical about any "musicians are better at" line of rhetoric. After a couple of decades as a professional musician I made a career shift into software engineering, and now I can't count the number of times I'm asked "Do musicians make better software engineers?" If it's a job interview, the answer is "Oh yes, absolutely." But in honesty, I don't know that the kind of musical training that distinguishes the professional musician from the amateur, -> – Andy Bonner Jun 28 '21 at 13:07
  • @Andy Bonner it isn't about transferability of musical skills. Just that musicians are highly superior beings in every respect! :-) Funny how a software engineer makes twice the money, isn't it? – Laurence Jun 28 '21 at 13:17
  • -> , training mostly received after adolescence, rewires our neurology that much. (I would believe more impact from general music curricula from birth through elementary school!) [Disclaimer, I'm not a neurologist, nor have I even read enough of the bountiful literature on the intersection of music and neurology.] At the same time, as a former music teacher, I know that I'm supposed to fight for funding by arguing that participating in music improves performance in all academic areas. The legitimate truth of it is: It's not all about neurology. Maybe as a society we're so fascinated by -> – Andy Bonner Jun 28 '21 at 14:00
  • -> the magical work of Oliver Sacks (and all the legacy of good and bad research that came before, like "the Mozart effect") that we look to music much like Plato at alia, as a magic mind-altering therapy to transform us into different beings. But I have a suspicion that the real benefits are simply life lessons and self-selection imposed by the process of becoming a musician. Do musicians make better [coders/authors/mathematicians/surgeons]? Yes, in the sense that they're used to spending long frustrating hours alone honing a skill, that they're willing to be meticulous about small details, – Andy Bonner Jun 28 '21 at 14:46
  • -> ... and that they still have to keep sight of the "big picture." I'm not sure that you wouldn't get some of the same benefits from, say, decades of studying woodcarving, or tapestry weaving, or Tai Chi. – Andy Bonner Jun 28 '21 at 14:49
  • And @LaurencePayne Don't get me started about the kind of "survivor's guilt" I feel about my new income and employability. I got a DMA and spent 5 years applying to the dozen or so violin professorships that would come open across the USA, per year, fruitlessly. Then I did a 6-month "coding bootcamp," 6 months of applying to dozens of coding jobs per day, and three years later, yeah, I am making pretty much twice as much as I ever did cobbling together three adjunct positions. It ain't right. (But I ain't complaining!) – Andy Bonner Jun 28 '21 at 14:57
  • Music doesn't make you clever. But clever people do music. – Laurence Jun 28 '21 at 18:41