Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time.
Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or months learning some bass patterns in your left hand. Maybe you learn a simple melody for the right hand. Then you put them together. Then you learn a few "riffs" for the right hand.
If you keep practicing consistently, at some point you develop your coordination in your left hand to the point that you've got a steady rhythm in the bass line. And you won't stop playing that bass line even if you mess up in the right hand.
No longer are you merely practicing the parts that go into playing the blues, you are practicing playing the blues by actually playing the blues. And each time you play a chorus, you have aural feedback you can use to decide whether the things you played in your right hand are worthwhile or undesirable. You can even play a thing which you did not intend that turns out to work, and use it later.
Essentially, you can now cycle through the blues form an arbitrary number of times. That's an epiphany, and it feels the same as the moment you learn to cycle an arbitrary number of times on a bicycle.
There are similar epiphanies when learning to construct a melody over a pentatonic scale, and an even stronger one when learning how to construct a melody over an octatonic scale. Those moments are so intense that a lot of musicians end up just stopping there because it's so much fun.
React devs probably have a moment when react suddenly makes sense.
In all four cases (bicycling, music, pointers, react) what makes the difference is dogged persistence. One day you'll wake up and things will seem simple -- and the next challenge impossible. Rise and repeat.
She mentioned the other day that she's a bit sad she can't find any aspect of React she doesn't know. But now she's been banging her head against react native for the past few months, so there's no shortage of challenges. She's the primary architect of a startup's frontend webapp (and now their mobile app). I keep trying to push her to write and post her stuff, but she still feels like she doesn't know anything. But that feeling seems like the main reason she knows so much now, several years later.
I would like to add as well, as a career move, total slam dunk.
It wasn't literally sudden, more so a realization over the course of an hour after the usual reading and re-reading of various tutorials and documentation that I had already been doing. I'd say a few hours into programmer flow was when it all came together.
I liken it to when I first grokked Lisp back in high school. A shedding of mental fog leading to a sort of "now I finally get how somebody could program a game in this without being some hack-the-planet-level computer whiz."
Strangely enough, I don't think I do. There was a spectrum where I didn't get pointers, I thought I sorta got pointers, I thought I got pointers, I thought I get nothing, and over time I got a bit better at understanding pointers thanks to C++ and Rust. Definitely more of a continuum.
I did have a lightbulb moment for understanding recursion, though, thanks to an assembly course.
For a month or so, I’d spend 10 minutes a day doing various throwing/catching exercises with 1, then 2, then 3 balls (went on YouTube for resources).
And then at some point - much like you described for playing the blues - all the separate motions all came together and I was juggling.
To use your example, this article is about people who had never played piano in their life, but suddenly sat in front of one and started flawlessly improvising the blues without all that time practicing the different parts of the blues...
Musical scales have a very sound physical basis. Two notes sound good together when their frequencies easily ring together. For instance, an octave (which is present in all music all over the world, but just called differently) is two notes where one note has double the frequency of the other. So one note will make a full period while the other makes two. This is pleasant, but a tad boring. You can make an octave of your octave, still pretty, still boring. It's a dead end.
The next pleasant sound is when one note makes 2 periods and the other 3. These are your forths and fifths in western music. These intervals give endless possibilities. A forth of the fifth gives back your base note, similar to a fifth of your forth. But! Fifth of fifth and forth of forth go endless. Each will result in a new note that sounds less pleasant but more interesting together with the base note.
(the forth is the inverse of the fifth: forth(fifth(base)) = base AND fifth(forth(base)) = base. I'll only talk about fifths hence forth)
A scale is an 'arbitrary' bunch of these notes together sorted by pitch. All scales used in the world can be constructed out of fifths. How many fifths to make a scale? We usually stop when the note is _almost_ equal to the base; that way there is an even representation of the frequency spectrum whilst having many notes that sound good together. For instance, western music, the 12th consecutive fifth almost sounds like the base (it's frequency is 1.3% off) The microtonal scales 53th consecutvit fifth is only 0.21% off. The pentatonic scale which uses only 5 notes, is 5.3% off.
5 notes: 5.3% error
7 notes: 6.8% error
12 notes: 1.3% error
41 notes: 1.1% error
53 notes: .21% error
Another remark: western classical music uses the 12 note scale, but pop music often limits itself to only seven of those.
Here is some psuedo code to play with it yourself:
BASE_NOTE_A = 880
def note(n):
f = BASE_NOTE_A * (3/2)**n
while f > BASE_NOTE_A:
a = a/2
return a
> Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero."
> At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music. Arbie Orenstein tells us what happened to Ravel after he wrote "Bolero," and neurologist Bruce Miller helps us understand how, for both Anne and Ravel, "Bolero" might have been the first symptom of a deadly disease.
I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an instrument much less learn to read music and understand theory.
Nonetheless, he spent the time you'd think would be required on a daily basis to gain such competency, plus starting the music track classes. At the end of a year if I didn't already know his initial skill level and his general obsessive dedication to all endeavors, I'd have assumed he was a savant.
Put another way-- most amateur musicians I know spend less than 30 minutes a week doing anything resembling practice. I often hear people drilling a mistake in that scant time. Given that, I'm amazed most people can play anything at all.
But every account I've ever read of a pro golfer's childhood (and I've probably read at least a dozen), indicates that almost without exception, they got obsessed with golf at a young age and every day they didn't have school, would get dropped off at the course in the morning when their parents went to work and practice until their parents picked them up on their way home from work. They got in a staggering amount of practice by the time they were teenagers, but because it happened utterly out of the limelight and was mostly unstructured, people chalk up their teenage virtuosity to "natural talent."
Outside of super-rare outliers, I don’t personally believe that anyone is born with natural talent for anything. When someone is highly skilled at something, I will assume that they spent tons of obsessive time learning and practicing rather than that they tried it one day and found they were magically good at it.
I think most of that "natural" ability is still down to practice. Tiny innate differences and advantages push people in certain directions, which means they practice those more (through play, to start with), and pretty quickly there are big apparent differences.
If genetics didn't play a meaningful role in athleticism, we wouldn't have evolved it. But even if that was true at some point in history, that would only be temporary, because without selective pressure, genetic drift would move the population to some point where there was selective pressure.
Obviously environment plays a role, with climate giving kids in California more practice time, or the annual cut-off date in team sports affecting who's in what age group.
On the other hand I am much better at software development than a lot of other people with the same background. It was always easy for me to comprehend things and then I also put in a lot of work.
Pro sports is full of natural talents and the top guys are the ones who also work hard in addition to their natural abilities.
I can run a 10.5 after a lot of training, so maybe it's my ego talking here, but I refuse to believe this! I think you must just not have been aware of the training this person did. If they could really run a 10.5 in high school with no training, then with minimal effort they could bring their time down enough to qualify for most any country's Olympic team. A 10.5 100m is good enough to win the high school state tournament in an average US state.
> From time to time we would have some new guy come who clearly didn't know anything about boxing or fighting. But within weeks he would learn and get better than almost anyone else in the gym. He would be faster and punch harder.
These people must have had prior training in other sports. Once you've done strength, agility and speed training and have good coordination, it's easy to pick up another sport.
This is not to say that practice isn't the most reliable way to achieve gains (it is!), but some 'just get it' and have ability (either musical or dextrous) on the instrument that most take a lot longer to achieve.
The article suggests something different than a compulsion, something like a sudden awareness of music (or art or whatever) that the person didn't have before.
For example, I have a kind of involuntary hobby of cataloging 3rd inversion seventh chords in music. Tchaikovsky likes to use them in descending chromatic sequences. Brian Wilson has a funny one in "God Only Knows" where the bass idiosyncratically resolves up. Etc.
I didn't have an obsession to learn about harmony and then catalog what I learned in the music I hear. I had an awareness of harmony before I took music lessons, then I learned the notation and went, "Oh, that's what it's called."
I think that's one of the most frustrating parts of learning something that's really new to you. Suppose I had no initial awareness of harmony and tried to learn to identify those 3rd inversion seventh chords by obsessively cataloging them. Perhaps I do some work studying pop and classical music, and after lots of effort I come up with the Tchaikovsky and Beach Boys examples. Then some musician with an awareness of harmony walks in and starts effortlessly adding more: there's one arpeggiated when Link falls in a hole in Ocarina of Time, in the theme to Back to the Future, a famous one in the transition of the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth, a string of them in a chromatic sequence in the Shepherd's Tune from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, etc. "Oh, and isn't the verse of Tom Petty's 'Here Come's My Girl' just a famous alternation between a triad and a 3rd inversion seventh chord built on the first scale degree of a Lydian scale?" In that case I would start to wonder whether I really want to continue with my project.
Of course one can actually learn and improve that awareness with enough practice. But it requires perseverance to keep at it in the face of people who naturally have those same abilities (and often don't seem to value them).
I think what defines great teachers is their ability to illustrate new concepts through familiar and relatable examples.
I mention this only because if you take up painting then I recommend studying up on the materials and processes first (how to mix paints on the palette and also on the canvas).
Truer words have never been spoken, across all kinds of domains. When I was a fat desk nerd and decided to become a Marine, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to transform my body and gain the required physical skills - once I found the motivation and discipline. Ditto for language study, programming, etc.
I lost 25# over about 3-4 months while also being more muscular than I'd ever been. Ended up submitting my application with a 290 PFT score out of 300 (20 pull-ups, 100 crunches in 2 minutes, 19:32 3-mile runtime).
Granted, he hadn't touched the ball since our last set of matches but I'm not letting that take the wind put of my sails.
Obsession is the name of the game. Balance is for chumps. Nobody ever got great at anything by spending a reasonable and well adjusted amount of time working on it.
You had a good point but this seems completely unnecessary. You're not making it into the NBA here, so "great" seems like a very strong word. For most people, basketball and such is not the main purpose, but a side event, a hobby, etc., so it's pretty strange for them to choose to obsess over it.
Of course focusing on one thing and only just that one thing will make you relatively good at it. Everyone already knew that. The issue is just that people have jobs, relatives, other hobbies, etc., so balance becomes more relevant. It's more interesting when someone gets good at something without being able to allot huge amounts of time to it.
Specifically, that person knew how to play a bunch of songs on the piano - it just didn't click for him until a certain point in life.
If anything, that seems like something was missing from his picture that should have already been there. As in - not seeing the forest behind the tree for a while. It's not a sudden development, it's the opposite.
Of course someone who can play popular music has some form of understanding of basic music theory (chords, harmony, voicing, structure - etc). Just like someone who has been coding for a while has some form of understanding of things like data structures, loop invariants, computational complexity, etc. even if they haven't formally learned them first.
"Whereas he could play simple popular songs from rote memory before", the article says - well, at that point he already was a musician, even if he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
But that's how anybody learns - you do some activity quite a few times, then you start seeing the patterns, then it clicks and becomes your nature. That's why you have exercises - in music, math, science, dance, sport, languag - anything that people learn.
The surprising part is not how sudden the epiphany of seeing the structure came, but rather how awfully long it took and how far he got without seeing the structure.
It's like being able to write down the first 50 terms of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, ...) from sheer memorization only, and only seeing the pattern that makes everything simple after doing it for years for fun.
Must've been awfully difficult.
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TL;DR: the K.A. example doesn't seem unusual or "sudden" - more like connecting the dots one day.
You can learn to play songs purely through muscle memory as long as you have a basic sense of rhythm. That doesn't mean you understand anything about musical composition, scales, chords, modes or anything else that underlies what you're playing.
The epiphany described in this case seems like it's suddenly and intuitively understanding all of that, in addition to the layout of the piano (why it takes the form that it does) along with the ability to actually play the thing competently.
I've been playing music for years. I understand a good chunk of theory. I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any stretch, but I understand the layout of the piano. I can't play the damn thing. Waking up one morning and having that ability would certainly be surprising.
Or do you? Here's the level he gained:
"I suddenly realized what the major scale and minor scale were, what their chords were and where to put my fingers in order to play certain parts of the scale. I was instantly able to recognize harmonies of the scales in songs I knew as well as the ability to play melody by interval recognition.”
Are the italicized concepts unfamiliar to you, after that some time (how long was it?) of playing? And note that KA might have played for longer than you have before getting there - the article doesn't specify.
>Most of us have to sit in classrooms for months or read and study to understand the intricacies of music theory. None of that is necessary to learning a few pop songs on a guitar or piano.
That is not necessary, but once you play enough music, you learn the theory in practice. Or have enough data in your head to make that realization.
I challenge you to play 100 pop songs on an instrument - any pop songs, any instrument - and not at least know things like major/minor chords, basic chord progressions (like the endemic I - V - vi - IV, aka "four chords").
>The epiphany described ... suddenly ... the ability to actually play the thing competently.
>I've been playing music for years [...] Waking up one morning and having that ability [to play piano] would certainly be surprising.
It would be surprising indeed! It also never happened. Not in the article, at least.
Specifically, the article says: he could play simple popular songs from rote memory before
Once you can play simple pop songs, you can play them all. Kathy Perry's songs have as much harmony as the top hits from Beatles or Bob Dylan.
No, you really don't. You literally don't even need to know a single note name to be able to play a song from memory. You just need to know which keys to push or strings to pluck and frets to press in what order.
>I challenge you to play 100 pop songs on an instrument - any pop songs, any instrument - and not at least know things like major/minor chords, basic chord progressions (like the endemic I - V - vi - IV, aka "four chords").
Just because you're playing these progressions doesn't mean you have the slightest fucking idea what they are, or why they're numbered that way.
When I was about 6 years old I started learning piano. My parents took me to a teacher who used the Suzuki method. For those unfamiliar, it's a method of musical training that focuses solely on learning by ear with no discussion of theory or sheet music. I did this for years, and I absolutely hated playing the piano for reasons that had nothing to do with the piano itself.
Early in high school I picked up the electric bass, and did what you mentioned above, i.e. I learned a whole pile of pop and rock songs. I also played a bit of guitar around and between all this as well.
This constituted years of experience playing music. And yet, I did not suddenly and independently discover and understand the circle of 5ths. I couldn't tell you why a 7th chord was called a 7th chord. I didn't wake up with an intuitive understanding of time signatures.
I wasn't exposed to any of this stuff until I took a music theory class in college. It was at that point that the 'why' of what I had been doing to make noise on these instruments started to make sense.
And once I did start learning these things, there was still no intuitive sense of where to put my hands on the instrument to play the notes I wanted. I had to fumble around with it to figure out where the notes were.
And now, having spent years after high school playing in live bands in front of paying audiences, I still don't think I'm anywhere near what someone might call a 'great' musician, and my understanding of music theory is really far from complete. I still play all the time and can't sight-read, for example. I have to sit and puzzle out a piece of sheet music.
Additionally, I've read about this particular guy before in greater depth than is discussed in the linked article. Something unusual really did happen in his brain. He somehow gained knowledge and ability far beyond what we would consider normal.
If you can find the more detailed article about the K.A. from the article, please post it!
Are there any provable cases?
https://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/professional/savant-...
Under the name Daniel Corney he even advertised PSYCHIC services. Definitely his abilities are incredible, but he also spent hours and years practicing them.
It's a fascinating story.
Dr. Tony Cicoria. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-bolt-from-th...
The sudden part was gaining interest and passion in music - and it can be linked to him being struck by lightning.
As for the musical process - hearing music in his head, desire to listen and play, hearing his own music when starting to play other pieces - that's not at all unique. I can't vouch for everyone, but as a musicmaker, I can say that this is how a lot of people make music.
I think it's not that much unlike the flow state in coding, where one wakes up with the problem already loaded in mind, has ideas about structures and algorithms in the shower, and then figures out how to code it all during the day. Writing down the notes is - literally - coding music.
I think that if you can get a song stuck in your head, you also have this potential to hear new music in your head, and thus to make it. It just can get easily drown in all the other noise that life generates. Some people just need a shake to turn the other noise down.
To be clear, I am in no way, shape or form a savant at anything. Comparing me to these people mentioned would be folly. In my late teens and early twenties, I tried quite a bit to play the guitar and was never very good and I definitely could never sing and strum at the same time. I never touched a guitar again for nearly 20 years until my wife signed me up for a local folk music class. At the very first lesson, I sang and strummed as if it was naturally easy for me, until my fingers were so sore I couldn't make chords anymore. Certainly nobody is going to be paying money to hear me play, but I've received quite a few compliments about how well I do.
I think what i am trying to say is that such memes have been around for years, and appeal to our "something for nothing" part of our lizard brain.
It's why we all liked the "I know Kung-Fu" line in the matrix.
It was one of the most soul-crushing things to witness that. She once drew some animals in my notebook and at school the teachers grabbed it out of my hand and wanted to move me to an art academy. When I told them who actually drew it, and how, they were utterly speechless.
Imagine someone drawing monochrome photorealism as casually as scribbling some stick figures. She couldn't draw anything that she didn't see, but she didn't show any understanding of how incredible that ability is either. And she's now an accountant...
Unfortunately this was 15 years ago or I'd add one of the drawings. But here is something similar (even the detail on the hair):
http://www.remrovsartwork.com/uploads/7/9/8/3/7983811/380163...
All is well! ^_^
Looks like this escaped their copyediting system. Oops.
But this article is also written by someone promoting their website. I'd like to see some sources for where this information has come from.
Humans typically learn art like GANs learn. We start as children making things and the adults, teachers, etc start grading and encouraging/discouraging us, providing the feedback we learn from.
As we grow up, we all to some degree learn what art we like, and what good art is. But some people learn this better than others, and some people learn more finely tuned discrimination than others. One doesn't need to be an artist to have good taste.
It seems like if you are a non-artistic adult who learned exceptional taste, then you are held back by only technique and creativity. If you are creative and/or lucky when you first decide to try to make something, even without technique you'll make much more progress than the average person. Then, so encouraged by the progress, you'll focus obsessively on technique and improvement.
Once it starts, this learning process can proceed much more quickly than the typical child learning process, because it doesn't have to wait for others to provide the feedback.
Et voila, adult sudden savant.
Many musicians have related how they learned how to 'channel' ... open themselves to write-down or perform 'incoming transmissions' as it were.
Shouldn't surprise us too much. How often do we start talking about something - at length - without prior deliberation ... as if we just opened a valve?
It's as if, once the engine has 'figured out' the patterns, we just ... turn it on.
Because only officially recognized and/or terribly expensive training is the only way to become high-skilled in anything. /s
It has potential corrections and such just sitting there
There are some links in the article to be followed. This one has links to additional info:
https://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/professional/savant-...
Aside from code, I draw and paint well (art school) and have built my own furniture. I know I am far from an expert.
However to people who's last artistic endeavour was finger painting as a kid, my skills appear expert. I don't think they could tell apart the skill of a real practicing artist vs me, they have no foundation to judge from.
One day I want to take off 3 months, and lose myself in learning to play the piano, 4+ hours a day. I suspect I will be pretty good at the end, but judged as far better a player than I really am!
Now, if you played back the intro to Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, would the savant give the full duration to that tied dotted sixteenth note from the first chord? Could they play back the first page of Ligeti's tempo fugue etude? I'm not sure, but what they do is already well beyond what even trained professional musicians can achieve.
Digression-- our idea of what constitutes "advanced" can get a little out of hand with myths that have been handed down over the years. Even Mozart "cheated" every now and then. One contemporaneous composer noted that when he requested that (child) Mozart sight read a difficult piano sonata, Mozart improvised the development section because it was too difficult to sight read it.
No leading indicators this would have been the outcome.