The definition of a musician in music psychology: A literature review and the six-year rule

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to investigate if a general consensus could be established for the term “musician.” Research papers ( N = 730) published between 2011 and 2017 were searched. Of these, 95 papers were identified as investigating relationships of any sort connected with a musician-like category ( e.g., comparison of musically trained vs. non-musically trained people), of which 39 papers detailing comparative studies exclusively between musicians and non-musicians were analyzed. Within this literature, a variety of musical expertise criteria were used to define musicians, with years of music training (51% of papers) and years of music lessons (13% of papers) being the most commonly used criteria. Findings confirm a general consensus in the literature, namely, that a musician, whether or not selected a priori, has at least six years of musical expertise (IQR = 4.0–10.0 years). Other factors such as practice time and recruiting location of musicians were also analyzed, as well as the implications of how this definition fits in relation to the complexities surrounding the construct of the musician. The “six-year rule,” however, was robust overall.

Perception of affect in unfamiliar musical chords

“…Stolzenburg’s periodicity measure [69] was tested as an alternative to harmonicity and was found–using leave-one-out cross-validation–to perform slightly worse at predicting out-of-sample data. All predictors and the ratings were standardized and scaled to their means except for Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (GMSI), which was centred to the previously determined population mean from Müllensiefen et al [57] (see Section Musical Sophistication ). The 700 discrete values obtained from the slider ratings were modelled as being normally distributed, an assumption borne out by the posterior predictive checks shown in the supplementary materials.…”

“…Music perception studies often have a clear separation between two participant groups: musicians and non-musicians. However, it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly defines a musician as there is no clear consensus on the requirements of a musician [57]. This experiment will not separate the analysis between two groups (musicians and non-musicians) but rather employ musical sophistication as a continuum and it will therefore be treated as a continuous covariate.…”

Enhanced recognition of vocal emotions in individuals with naturally good musical abilities.

“…We considered duration of training as an ordinal variable in most analyses, but we also undertook group comparisons between highly trained participants and those with no training, which is the norm in this line of research (for a review, Schellenberg, 2019). Participants with 6 or more years of instrumental training were considered as highly trained (n = 30), consistent with the typically used criterion for the definition of a 'musician' in the literature (Zhang, Susino, McPherson, & Schubert, 2018).…”

Musical emotions in the absence of music: A cross-cultural investigation of emotion communication in music by extra-musical cues

“…Two, 20 to 30 seconds long exemplars were used for each genre. These stimuli were recommended as prototypical by two expert musicians (for a definition of musician, see [36]) in their respective genre, each with over 20 years of professional experience and/or represented in an official Billboard music chart specific to this genre. Noticeably, the two stimuli for each genre were melodically, harmonically and rhythmically different of each other, to invoke as much as possible realistic differences in a single genre.…”