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 20 were searched. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened.
The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy.
The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. All completed a Wechsler IQ test, the Big Five Inventory, the Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies (aged 12–34) were compared to 35 musicians (aged 14–37) with either an early (mean age 6) or late (mean age 10) start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians (aged 14–34). Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. © 2017 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Furthermore, the rate at which prodigies progressed in their playing appears higher than for regular students, suggesting that rate of progress might be used as an additional criterion for defining music prodigy.
Yet older prodigies (11 to 14) were harder to distinguish from professionals thanyoungerprodigies(under10), suggestingaprotracted developmental trajectory for prodigy performance. Their low performance implies that prodigies perform well enoughto be judged in terms of the most demanding criteria of performance in the field. Listeners performed above chance in both tasks but by a very modest margin, and musicians performed better than nonmusicians. We tested this definition by asking musicians and nonmusicians to (1) judge whether audio clips were played by a prodigy or a professional, and (2) identify which of two clips of the same piece was played by a prodigy.
MUSIC PRODIGY FACTS PROFESSIONAL
The most widespread definition characterizes a prodigy as a child who, at a very young age (typically before 10) performs at an adult professional level (Feldman & Goldsmith, 1986). LITTLE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH HAS BEEN CONDUCTED on prodigies, in no small part due to the fact that there exists no agreed-upon definition with which to identify them.