Intelligence and musical improvisation

Abstract

SYNOPSIS We investigated whether somebody with a severe mental impairment could not only remember and reproduce music, but was also able to generate it. Musical improvisation requires the ability to recognize constraints and also demands inventiveness.Musical improvisations on a traditional, tonal and also on a whole tone scale composition were produced by a mentally handicapped and by a normal control musician. It was found that not only the control but also the handicapped subject could improvise appropriately within structural constraints, although with the tonal music the idiot-savant showed some stylistic latitude. It is concluded that cognitive processes such as musical input analysis, decision making, and output monitoring are independent of general intellectual status.

Melody and Pitch Processing in Five Musical Savants with Congenital Blindness

“…Our results are consistent with Miller's (1989), Sloboda, et al's, (1985) and Hermelin et al's (1989) findings that musicians and musical savants both perform best with predictable stimuli or the type they are most familiar with and therefore our results support the idea that musical savants implicitly create a musical knowledge base from the musical stimuli to which they are exposed (Miller, 1989;Pring & Hermelin, 2002).…”

“…Moreover, as the savants' performance was not correlated with their verbal IQ, our study lends support to the hypothesis that savant musical ability is independent from general intelligence level and is similar to that found in musicians of normal intelligence Hermelin et al, 1989. In other words, the results are strong evidence in favour of a musical module as suggested by Fodor (1983), Peretz and Morais (1989) and .…”

“…Such creativity, generativity and improvisation has been observed in musical savants (e.g. Hermelin, O'Connor & Lee, 1987;Hermelin, O'Connor, Lee & Treffert, 1989), artistic savants (e.g. Pring, Hermelin & Ryder, 1999) and number ability (e.g.…”

“…It is also affected by musical experience. For example, studies have found that musical savants learn more accurately and improvise more creatively with music that conforms to their (mostly Western tonal) musical experience Hermelin, O'Connor & Lee 1987;Hermelin, O'Connor, Lee and Treffert, 1989). …”

A case study of a multiply talented savant with an autism spectrum disorder: neuropsychological functioning and brain morphometry

“…Although there have been reports of multiple skills possessed by a single individual (e.g. performance and memory skills for music; Hermelin et al 1989), there have been limited reports of multiple skills across unrelated domains (e.g. music and maths).…”