21/9/2014 5 Musical Myths Debunked | The Essential Secrets of Songwriting Blog

5 Musical Myths Debunked

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You could write an entire book about why,

given a discrepancy between scientific facts
and anecdote-based folklore, humans are
more likely to believe the folklore than the
science.

Depending on where in the world you live,

you’ll be told that two crows sitting together
is a sign something joyful is about to happen
to you (no, they’re lonely), that a full moon
makes the weather colder (no, it doesn’t), or
that coffee will speed up the dissipation of alcohol from your body (no). And on it goes.

Music is not immune from mythology either. The following are five myths that abound in the
musical world:

1. Perfect pitch is desirable and necessary to be a complete

musician.
FALSE.

Perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch, is the ability to recognize musical notes with no reference
to any other note. Someone walks up to a piano, plays a G#, and you know it’s a G# just because it
sounds like it. It’s a rare ability held by a small percentage of musicians.

The far-more-vital skill of relative pitch – the ability to identify a pitch based on one other known
pitch, is a better skill to develop and hone. With perfect pitch, it’s possible to miss out on more
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important abilities such as being able to craft a creative chord progression, imagine a beautiful
melody, or to hear the relationship between what the various instruments in the band are playing.
Those are abilities that come with relative, not perfect, pitch.

2. Learning music theory will stunt your creativity.

FALSE.

Just think about it: has your ability to read books and communicate to others the ideas you’ve
read in those books stunted your ability to be creative with words? The notion would be ludicrous.
So why the thought that learning music theory would put your creative abilities in a straitjacket is
just bizarre.

It’s likely that the myth surrounding the negative effects of music theory came from songwriters
looking to defend their lack of theoretical knowledge. And since it is actually quite possible to
write music based on one’s own instincts, some make the erroneous assumption that the opposite
must also be true: that applying theoretical understanding to the creation of music results in
uncreative music. I guess that’s why Beethoven failed so massively as a creative composer.

3. Listening to Mozart makes you more intelligent (The

“Mozart Effect”.)
FALSE.

Back in the 1990s, the results of a new musical study were published in Nature magazine. That
study claimed that people who listened to Mozart were more likely to score higher in spatial tasks.
Those results were quickly disproven in other experiments, but the public’s fascination with the
original supposition quickly grew and expanded to claims that Mozart’s music was likely to make
you more intelligent in general. People bought Mozart recordings to play for their children, and
hoped for the next Einstein. But any special benefits that might come from Mozart, or any other
composer or genre, have been well and truly debunked.

4. Today’s pop music is worse than at any other time in

history.
(Depending on what you mean by “worse”, but) MAINLY FALSE.

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Granted, it sure seems that way. Spend any time looking at the Billboard Hot 100 from the 1960s
or ’70s, and then a few minutes looking at today’s top-of-the-charts offerings, and you’re left
shaking your head and wondering what the heck has happened to music.

A recent article from Smithsonian proclaimed “Science Proves: Pop Music Has Actually
Gotten Worse“, but that headline was incorrect, likely written to grab attention. In fact, the
Spanish study they quote merely showed that songs being recorded today are becoming more and
more similar — not exactly the same thing as saying that it’s worse.

How a song makes it to the Billboard Hot 100 is calculated in a different way than it was a few
years ago. Now, YouTube and other streaming services are taken into consideration, not just radio
airplay and sales. But that’s all a side issue. Is music actually worse?

Probably not. It may seem worse to you because it’s easier now for you to hear music you’d
otherwise not be listening to. Even just a couple of decades ago (but you don’t have to go back that
far), the only music you were likely to hear was polished music created in a professional studio by
people who could sing without auto-tuning. It may not have been great music, but it
sounded more consistently better.

Today, you hear it all through the magic of the internet. You could make the claim that you are
hearing more bad music today. But there’s probably always been lots of bad music. You just
weren’t subjected to it. (Side note: Don’t judge the quality of music by whether or not it makes it
to the Billboard Hot 100).

5. Heavy metal music has negative effects on listeners,

causing suicides, mass murders, etc.
PROBABLY FALSE.

The opinions on this one go back in forth. For example, a 1999 study by researchers Scheel and
Westefeld (“Heavy metal music and adolescent suicidality: an empirical
investigation.”) said fans of heavy metal music “…had less strong reasons for living (especially
male fans) and had more thoughts of suicide (especially female fans).”

A later study showed, however, that listening to music with a suicidal message, while making the
listeners think more about suicide, actually had no negative effect on rates of suicide. Probably

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similar to the effect you might expect on a group of people watching a video about sea turtles: it’s
likely to make them think about sea turtles. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll suddenly
join a “Save the Sea Turtles” group.

Please feel free to share your thoughts below.

______________

Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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