Study Shows Humans Can Learn Music Simply by Listening to It
"More and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills," Henkjan Honing (UvA) explains. "It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops."
(Amsterdam)—Researchers at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) say the human brain can learn simply through active exposure to many different kinds of music.
"More and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills," Henkjan Honing (UvA) explains. "It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops."
According to a report in ScienceDaily, the common view among music scientists is that musical abilities are shaped mostly by intense musical training, and that they remain rather rough in untrained listeners, the so-called Expertise hypothesis.
However, the UvA-study shows that listeners without formal musical training, but with sufficient exposure to a certain musical idiom (the Exposure hypothesis), perform similarly in a musical task when compared to formally trained listeners.
