Are musicians better language learners?

Yes, there seems to be a massive obvious correlation here: people who are good at learning difficult skills over time (an instrument and musicianship) are good at learning difficult skills over time (a new language). I doubt there&#x27;s any real link&#x2F;cross-sharing between music and language here.<p>Some people enjoy investing time into something that they will be bad at for a very long time and then become good at, and some people hate it. If you went through that with music as a child, you&#x27;re probably more likely to have the confidence to want to go through it again as an adult with a language, because you know that it&#x27;s something you&#x27;ve done before successfully. Programming&#x27;s in the same category.

Both my parents are&#x2F;were (dad is retired now, mother still teaches) University German professors for over 40 years each. Both of them have claimed for years that they can spot the music majors in the first day of class just by noticing how much better at pronunciation they are than the other students. Neither of them have done anything serious with their observations beyond notice that their musician students are often far better in the language than the non-musicians. It&#x27;s anecdotal for sure. But it&#x27;s quite a lot of anecdotes, for whatever that&#x27;s worth.<p>It&#x27;s also worth pointing out that a better pronunciation from a set of students can skew the teacher&#x27;s view of the students&#x27; actual abilities in the language. That is, two students could have roughly identical mechanics, vocabulary, etc., but the student with better pronunciation will be perceived as having a better grasp of the language. You can argue that the way the words sound is a part of the language, so this isn&#x27;t really a skew. But you get my point. On paper, they are the same; in speech one comes across as better.

This is a specific case which is part of a broader fundamental principle. This principle might sound reduntant, and it&#x27;s basically that &quot;people who learn how to learn are better learners&quot;.<p>Learning how to play a musical instrument is something that never permeated our general culture as much as it should&#x27;ve had, which implies that doing so requires the acquisition of -in some level- unconventional skills.<p>This ability to acquire unconventional skills can be extrapolated to any other area of knowledge. For example in my case, the shift was from music to CS.<p>EDIT: BTW, I speak 3 languages.

Looking at my own history, it makes sense. As a kindergartner, I was playing a toy organ with play-by-number song books, and later in grade school I played clarinet. Big mistake: quitting in eight grade. As a side note, whenever I looked up words in the dictionary, I always paid attention to the etymology as well as the definition.<p>The only subject that I aced in college was Spanish, and the teacher was very good (and a native speaker), but not easy. We started Spanish 101 with 30 students, and ended Spanish 104 with just seven.<p>Now, 30+ years later, it&#x27;s a bit rusty, but I can still read it pretty well, and can sort-of understand written Portuguese as well. I can drive down Collins St. in Joliet and easily read the signs on the businesses.<p>But wait, there&#x27;s more! One Sunday, in 1993, I walked down to a neighborhood church that I had never visited before, and sat down, as it turned out, behind the music director. She heard me singing the hymns, and asked me immediately after the service if I&#x27;d be interested in joining the choir. Then, the next week, the handbell choir was playing, and I was hooked -- I ended up joining both.<p>More recently, I joined a community chorus that sings a wide range of pieces, and a great many of the old masterworks are not in English. I&#x27;ve found that I could pretty readily pick up pronunciation for a variety of languages, and even though I&#x27;ve never taken German lessons, I can almost figure out what&#x27;s being sung in Bach or Mozart works -- and when I read an English translation, the relationships between English and German almost jump off the page for me. I still wouldn&#x27;t be able to put together a coherent sentence in German, though.<p>If I had the time and money, I&#x27;d consider taking German, and maybe even Russian (I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet at one point, so the alphabet would be the least of my problems).

If you want a subjective, personal view as anecdotal evidence on this:<p>music IS another language.<p>There are regional variations (Western vs oriental) with their own phonetics (scales...) and grammars (rules of harmony, chord progressions). Not to mention that quite a few musicians describe it as a means to express themselves.<p>Reading sheet music is not much different from reading in a different alphabet, music theory is the equivalent of grammar study, and BTW playing by ear is pretty much like the natural language acquisition (the way kids pick up their mother tongue).<p>You&#x27;d be surprised how many parallels both in the nature and in the learning process you&#x27;ll find. Learning music is like learning another language [Source: I&#x27;m a multilingual who just started learning to play piano as an adult.]<p>EDIT: formatting

As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros) started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm: development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc.. The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from. Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart read&#x2F;eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though. The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))

This doesn&#x27;t match my personal experience. I learned music at five and have been an active musician all my life, but languages have always bee hard for me.<p>I believe that music is much more related to computer languages - just instructional notations as opposed to natural languages.

My experience tells me that there are no correlation between these variables: one of my best friends is a great musician (pianist) and is terrible with foreign languages despite having had several language courses.<p>IMHO, would make more sense to rephrase it as:<p><i>Are singers better language learners?</i>

From personal experience&#x2F;observation. I have zero musical talent, my wife gives me a hard time for not being able to hold a beat by simply tapping the table. However, I can pick-up foreign languages with relative ease. I have never become fluent any foreign language, but have been able to read&#x2F;conversant in Turkish, Russian, Italian, French and Spanish. I will admit East Asian languages are extremely difficult reference their tonal aspects; I have a hard time understanding&#x2F;speaking those types of languages.

Yes, if you are good at singing in various styles. Singing in various styles teach a few things about voice quality and tunes.<p>1. Every language has its voice quality. So, learning phonemes alone does not help us one to acquire a new accent or language. Voice qualities vary within a language itself: compare the southern accents, midwestern accents, New York accent, British accents. Yes, there are phonemic differences between accents within a language: but there is a change in the voice quality.<p>2. Academic research about the voice quality in languages have not reached beyond what John Laver had said (check his phonetic description of voice quality). And of coure, IPA has incorporated some symbols like &#x27;breathy voice&#x27;, etc, which you can see in the extended IPA. To me, voice quality should be the first thing one shud master before getting into phonemes, lexical stress, intonational stress, etc.<p>Academics are too busy with their instrumental (acoustic) phonetics. Even majority of phoneticians are just into instrumental phonetics. Ian Catford, a great phonetician, advised students of linguistics in general to master how to use their vocal apparatus.<p>3. Joe Estill, an opera singer turned a voice teacher, did a great research on how to train anyone to sing. Her focus is on how to acquire voice quality. She calls such steps as &#x27;figures&#x27;. They are like thin voice, thick voice, breathy voice; then adding other combinations to them: high larynx, low larynx, Aryepiglottic sphincter, etc. Such skills help a singer to sing in various styles. Even if you want to do pitch match properly, you should do it in a thin voice (not with the speaking voice, which is thick voice for Americans, kinda semi-thick(breathy) for Indians in the south Asia, etc.<p>4. There is another thing singers and instrument players are good at: how to remember tunes. Even though speech is not like a song, you can find possible tunes of a language. In linguistics, it is called &quot;intonational phrase&quot;. So, one does not need to master phonemes of a target language in order to imitate the tune units (tunits or intonational phrase) of any language. How many language training materials teach this?<p>Most, if not all, language training materials subordinate the voice quality and the tunits to phonemes and lexical stress&#x2F;lexical tone. Whereever they touch about tunits, they spend 4 pages on the intonation of the target language.

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