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Do you need high IQ to play piano?

People who can learn a tune more easily have higher intelligence, research suggests. People with higher IQs were able to learn to play “Happy Birthday” on the piano more accurately in the study.

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A Simple Musical Sign Of High IQ

People with higher intelligence tend to have this musical ability.

People who can learn a tune more easily have higher intelligence, research suggests. People with higher IQs were able to learn to play “Happy Birthday” on the piano more accurately in the study. Whether or not people believed they could improve did not seem to matter.

Instead, pure intelligence predicted how well they did, not a ‘growth mindset’.

A growth mindset is a belief that basic abilities can be improved through hard work. Musical aptitude was the only other factor that mattered, said Mr Alexander Burgoyne, the study’s first author: “The strongest predictor of skill acquisition was intelligence, followed by music aptitude. By contrast, the correlation between growth mindset and piano performance was about as close to zero as possible.” The study included 171 people who had little or no experience playing the piano.

All were given tests of their mindset and their intelligence.

They followed a video guide that taught them to play “Happy Birthday”, which contained 25 notes.

Afterwards they were rated on their performance of the simple song.

The results showed that IQ mattered most in predicting who did well.

When IQ was taken into account, even musical aptitude paled into insignificance.

Mr Burgoyne said:

“The results were surprising, because people have claimed that mindset plays an important role when students are confronted with challenges, like trying to learn a new musical instrument. And yet, it didn’t predict skill acquisition.”

There were also some interesting patterns in the results:

Some learned quickly within six minutes.

Some were poor at first, but soon improved.

Some faded away as they lost motivation.

The rest could not work it out at all.

Mr Burgoyne said:

“Our study examined one of the earliest stages of skill acquisition. Early experiences can be formative, but I would caution against drawing conclusions about skilled musicians based on our study of beginners.”

The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Burgoyne et al., 2019).

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What are 3 famous jazz songs?

The Top Ten Dave Brubeck, "Take Five" Miles Davis, "So What" Duke Ellington, "Take The A Train" Thelonious Monk, "Round Midnight" John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things" John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme (Acknowledgment)" Miles Davis, "All Blues" Weather Report, "Birdland" More items... •

The Mix: 100 Quintessential Jazz Songs

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The Top Ten Dave Brubeck, "Take Five" Miles Davis, "So What" Duke Ellington, "Take The A Train" Thelonious Monk, "Round Midnight" John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things" John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme (Acknowledgment)" Miles Davis, "All Blues" Weather Report, "Birdland" Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto, "The Girl From Ipanema" Benny Goodman, "Sing, Sing, Sing" The Jazz 100 is a crowdsourced list of the most quintessential jazz songs of all time, determined by the listeners of Jazz24.org and NPR Music. If there was one theme we noticed while sorting through the 1,500 nominations, it was that time does not take its toll on great music. "Take Five," which was the first jazz single to sell 1 million copies, was the undisputed top choice, while Miles Davis' "So What" (which was coincidentally recorded in the same year, 1959) was the clear No. 2. With a few exceptions, it appeared that when listeners looked to jazz vocalists, they preferred female artists that tugged at the heartstrings, while in most cases those who preferred instrumentalists enjoyed swinging, memorable mid- to up-tempo hits. In large part, voters also seemed to focus on songs from the one or two most popular albums of a particular artist. That is, with the exception of John Coltrane. Coltrane fans still seem very divided on what qualifies as his best work, and the diversity of his catalog is evident in this list. See the rest of the list, argue about the best and take part in the discussion at Jazz24.org.

This story originally ran on February 7, 2011.

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