Abstract
This article presents an effort toward a theory of musical intelligence through a somewhat novel combination of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences with Robert J. Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence. In particular, musical intelligence involves creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based aspects. These components apply to both musical composition and performance and can apply as well to musical understanding and scholarship. In performance, for example, performers devise creative interpretations of composers’ music, analyze their interpretations to ensure they are historically and musically defensible, perform the music in a way that is practical in reaching their audience, and do good in providing their listeners with enjoyment and sometimes new ways of thinking about the world.
Keywords
Musical intelligence encompasses the set of skills involved in musical composition, performance, and appreciation, among other aspects of music; it includes within its purview those skills involved in processing pitches, patterns, and rhythms (Gardner, 1983, 2011b).
Broad definitions of music move musical intelligence beyond this definition.
Contemporary definitions of music extend the notion of music beyond traditional conceptions. For example, Blacking (1973) defined music as encompassing humanly organized sound, although today, much music is produced by computational devices. DeNora (1986) has sought to understand how musical meaning even is possible in the interaction between people. She sees it, in the title of her article, as “as a place and space for ‘work.’” Small (1998) introduced the term “musicking,” which refers to not only the formal music being played, but also to the people in interaction who are taking part in the music in any form, as by listening, practicing, rehearsing, or dancing. In his 1952 composition, 4’33”, John Cage expanded our notion of music by having musicians present for the entire duration of the piece without actually playing music. The music is in the sounds in the playing space that occur during the time within which the piece is executed.
Musical intelligence was proposed by Howard Gardner as part of a broader theory of “multiple intelligences” (MI) which, according to Gardner, encompasses eight distinct and largely independent domains of human inquiry, each with its own symbol system: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, naturalist, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and musical (see also Kornhaber, 2020).
Gardner’s (2011b) theory of MI is one of a broader class of theories that might be regarded as “systems theories of intelligence” (Sternberg, 2020a). Such theories attempt to characterize human intelligence, not in terms of a series of static psychometric factors (e.g., verbal-comprehension abilities or memory abilities), but rather as a complex system of mental representations, structures, and processes interacting to produce intelligent behavior.
In general, for Gardner to posit an intelligence, that intelligence had to show the presence of a set of core operations, a distinctive symbol system to represent it, a distinct developmental progression over the lifespan and especially in childhood, the potential for isolation of that intelligence through brain damage, an evolutionary history, the existence of prodigies/savants, support from experimental psychology, and support from psychometric analysis.
Another such theory is Sternberg’s (1997, 2020b) theory of successful intelligence, according to which intelligence comprises creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based skills. Creative skills are used to generate novel ideas; analytical skills are used to ensure that the ideas are logically, conceptually, or otherwise analytically sound; practical skills are used to implement the ideas and to persuade others of the value of the ideas; and wisdom-based skills are used to ensure that the ideas help to attain a common good, over the long term as well as the short term, by balancing one’s own (intrapersonal) with others’ (interpersonal) and larger (extrapersonal) interests.
Gardner’s and Sternberg’s theories, historically, have been viewed as being in competition with each other (see discussion in Sternberg, 2020a). But, in fact, they are, in many respects, compatible (Sternberg, 2014), and even have been combined in a program teaching practical intelligence in a scholastic context (Williams et al., 1996, 2002) They are even compatible, at some level, with psychometric theories, in that it is clear that the psychometric general factor (so-called g) is largely a combination of linguistic, logical-mathematical, and spatial intelligences in Gardner’s theory and of analytical processes in Sternberg’s theory (Gardner, 2011b; Sternberg, 2020b). A way of combining the theories is shown in Table 1.
An integration of the theory of multiple intelligences with the theory of successful intelligence with application to musical intelligence.
The basic idea is that creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based processes can be applied in each of the domains of which Gardner writes. This article considers how creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based processes apply in the domain of musical intelligence. But first, what characteristics should a theory of musical intelligence even have?
Characteristics of a theory of musical intelligence
A theory of musical intelligence, first, should have explanatory, or at the very least, descriptive power. The account here of musical intelligence is that it combines creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based skills (Sternberg, 1997, 2003) that are used, among other things, for purposes of processing pitches, patterns, and rhythms and how they combine musically. The skills also are used for conceptual understanding and valuing of music and for understanding silences in between moments of music, among other things.
Second, a theory should make empirically testable propositions. For the theory here, the three main propositions are as follows:
Musical intelligence is psychometrically and otherwise separable from (although not entirely orthogonal to) other intelligences (see Gardner, 2011b).
Creative, analytical, and practical skills are psychometrically and otherwise distinct (Sternberg, 1985, 2003, 2010, 2020a, 2020b; Sternberg, Jarvin, & Grigorenko, 2011).
A combination of MI theory (Gardner) with the theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg) is empirically viable (Williams et al., 1996, 2002), although this combination has yet to be tested empirically in the musical domain.
Third, a theory ought also to be heuristically useful. As of early October 2020, according to Google Scholar, Gardner’s work on MI theory and related issues has been cited roughly 193,000 times (h index = 157) and Sternberg’s work on successful intelligence and related issues has been cited roughly 190,000 times in the scholarly literature (h index = 210). These indices suggest that the theories, as they exist, are having heuristic impact in psychology and related fields.
The role of the theory of successful intelligence in understanding musical intelligence
The theory of successful intelligence potentially can be useful in understanding at least some aspects of musical intelligence. Consider the roles of creative, analytical, and practical intelligence as well as of wisdom.
Creative intelligence
The first aspect of the theory is creative intelligence, which is used to generate novel but also feasible ideas (see Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019). An individual is creative when she or he creates, invents, discovers, explores, supposes, designs, or imagines. Meaningful creativity always requires a knowledge base: One cannot think creatively—beyond what has been done before—unless one has some idea and appreciation of what has been done before. Creative intelligence is involved in music in a variety of ways.
A first application of musical creative intelligence is in composing new music. The musical Amadeus highlighted the competition between Mozart and Salieri, which was apparently a real competition (interestingly, it appears that, despite their rivalry, they collaborated on a piece [https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/news/mozart-salieri-opera-score/]). Salieri was technically highly competent but Mozart, at least as judged by historical impact and the judgments of experts (see Amabile, 1996, for a discussion of the consensual assessment technique), was the more creative of the two. In musical composition, technical adequacy is not enough—creativity matters for a piece making its mark on history. Indeed, creativity is ultimately judged over time by the experts in a field, with those judgments usually somewhat constant but sometimes varying over time and place (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013; Gardner, 2011a; Simonton, 1975, 2014). More discussion on this topic can be found in Sawyer (2011).
Sometimes, creativity is in creating not just new music but even a new musical genre, such as South Korean K-pop music. The genre was created in a way that successfully appealed to South Korean audiences. But its compelling synthesis of so many musical traditions—rock, gospel, jazz, hip hop, and others—has led to its being enjoyed and valued all across the contemporary world. Afropop (African pop) music similarly has enjoyed worldwide success, combining traditions of jazz, salsa, rumba, and blues.
A second application of creative musical intelligence is in playing existing music in a musical way that reflects an interpretation that is true to the composer and yet expresses the individuality and uniqueness of the performer. It is useful, for example, to listen to the same piece of music played by different great performers. An example might be the often-played Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1007). As is well known, Bach provided notes but very little guidance in the way of just how the music should be played. If one listens to the Prelude played by famous performers such as Anner Bylsma, Pablo Casals, Natalia Gutman, Yo-Yo Ma, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Janos Starker, one recognizes the different renditions of the piece as indeed being of the same piece, but beyond that, there are major differences in interpretation, perhaps with Starker representing an extreme of spare interpretation and Rostropovich representing an extreme of a more romantic interpretation. The same would hold for almost any other major work as rendered by different performer. For example, it probably would be fair to say that Jacqueline Du Pre’s interpretation of the Elgar Cello Concerto in E minor has never been equaled (Franks, 2018). Van Cliburn’s performance of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat minor also stands out in the annals of musical history as a particularly creative and perhaps unique interpretation. It was the first classical recording in history to go triple platinum (sale of 3 million units).
Creative intelligence and creativity, more generally, are not merely genetically-determined traits. Rather, they are in large part attitudes toward life (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). In particular, creativity involves an attitude of defiance toward the crowd, toward oneself, and toward the Zeitgeist, or prevailing beliefs about the world (Sternberg, 2018).
Defiance of the crowd means that one is willing to depart in some way from what others are doing. This often is hard to do because, no matter how much people may say they value creativity, they often value it only when it does not threaten them personally (Sternberg, 2018). Even highly creative people, perhaps especially highly creative people, feel threatened when people’s diverging views threaten the reputation they have built up for themselves, whether with others or through one’s own lens of self-importance or self-respect.
Defiance of the self means that one is able to go beyond one’s past ways of seeing and doing things—that one is willing to move on, even if it means letting go of ideas that have been important to one for many years. Great musicians do not merely do the same thing, over and over again. Rather, one can see evolution in their work. Franz Schubert died at age 31, and yet one can hear the progress in his work from, say, his earlier symphonies to his later ones. Similarly, Beethoven symphonies evolved, from the first to his ninth (like Schubert’s ninth). This is not to say that the later work was necessarily “better”—simply, that it showed an evolution in the composer’s sense of music and how to compose it. Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, similarly, is a work that one simply could not imagine Mozart having composed early in his career. Similarly, in performance, one can hear an evolution from Yo-Yo Ma’s earlier renditions to his later renditions of the Bach Six Suites for the cello.
Defiance of the Zeitgeist means that one is willing to toss to the wind conventions that other composers and many audiences may not even recognize as conventions but rather may view as simply part of what music is. Composers like Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Dai Bo, and Philip Glass come to mind as defiers of the Zeitgeist, sometimes at great risk to their own reputations. They went beyond defying the crowd, defying the very conventions that people thought made music, music. Performers, too, can defy the Zeitgeist, as when Yo-Yo Ma played the six cello suites in very different settings a six-part video presentation “Inspired by Bach.” Today, many performers do crossovers, performing both classical music and popular music that in the past would have been performed by different artists. An example is cellist Tina Guo or violinists Joshua Bell and Caroline Campbell. Such crossovers have a fairly long tradition. Liberace, a popular pianist of the mid-twentieth century, played music of all kinds, from classical to modern, always with a certain distinctive flair that some people loved and others detested.
Creative contributions (as well as practical and wise ones, as discussed below) can be assessed only subjectively. There are no adequate short-answer or multiple-choice tests for assessing creativity. Such subjectivity has discouraged some educators from taking creativity seriously. But in the real world, people do not do their jobs by taking multiple-choice tests. The creativity of musicians or anyone else is judged subjectively, by experts and, of course, by lay audiences. Creativity only can be judged, subjectively, by those in a field who have some training that allows them to be adequate judges of what is new and what is useful (Amabile, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi, 2013).
Analytical intelligence
Analytical intelligence involves ascertaining the analytical strength of an idea. It is involved when one analyzes, compares and contrasts, judges, critiques, evaluates, or assesses. According to the theory of successful intelligence, learning and problem-solving are very highly related, because except for rote learning, learning always involves some level of problem-solving (Sternberg, 2020b). Problem-solving, in turn, involves six “metacomponents” (Sternberg, 2020b), or executive cognitive processes. These are as follows. Keep in mind that the processes are iterative—that is, one can go through this problem-solving cycle again and again as one tries one thing out, perhaps finds it does not work, then tries something else, and so forth.
Recognizing the existence of a problem
The first step of problem-solving actually occurs prior to seeking a solution. That first step is even recognizing that there is a problem to be solved. For a musical performer, for example, one cannot solve a problem of intonation if one cannot hear that one is playing a note out of tune; one cannot solve a problem of an error in rhythm if one does not recognize that one’s “beat” is wrong or inconsistent. For a composer, recognizing the existence of a problem may start with one’s having some melodies floating around in one’s head and then realizing that they can be combined into a musical composition.
It is important, in music as in any other field, to develop one’s own skills in problem recognition, as there will not always be a teacher or fellow students to tell one that one is performing in a suboptimal way. Similarly, a composer needs to recognize when there is enough going on in her or his head to serve as the basis for creating a musical piece.
Defining the problem
The second step is to define the problem—that is, to figure out what the problem is. For example, a performer may recognize that he or she is playing out of tune but not recognize why. Is the violinist’s hand in the wrong position, or is her or his finger in the wrong position, or is the string out of tune, or is he or she perhaps hearing incorrectly? Similarly, if there is a rhythm problem, is the performer playing or singing some notes too fast, or others too slow, or failing to coordinate with a soloist who is idiosyncratic, or what? If the composer thinks she or he has a possible piece to write, what form will it take—a sonata, a concerto, a symphony, or perhaps just a song, or what?
Allocating resources to the solution of the problem
In allocating resources, the problem solver decides how much time and effort to put into solving a problem, as well as what kind of effort to put in. For example, in musical composition, a composer may have a number of pieces commissioned, or simply may have a lot of pieces in mind to write. The composer may not have the time to put her or his heart and soul into all of them. The composer has to decide which ones are worth serious effort and which perhaps are worth a minor effort or no effort at all. In practicing music, virtually all of us have been aware of making errors that we decide are just not worth correcting. Maybe we think we will get it right next time, or maybe the problem is not large enough to be worth bothering with, or we may feel that our way of playing the music is better than what we see written—perhaps a phrasing that we find better than that in the written music.
Mentally representing the problem
The mental representation of a problem refers to how the musical problem is represented in one’s mind. There are several different forms of mental representation. One, of course, is a sequence of musical notes, for example, an aural representation of a clarinet solo—the clarinetist may hear the music from beginning to end in her or his head. A second kind of mental representation is in terms of visual imagery. One may actually see the notes as they are written on a sheet of music paper. One plays a piece with the notes seemingly written down, but in one’s mind rather than on paper. A third form is propositional, where one talks one’s way through a piece, for example, saying “I begin on G above middle C and then play eight notes down to E; then a play a C chord,” and so on.
Formulating a strategy for solving the problem
Once one has represented the music, one needs a strategy for practicing a piece. For example, one might decide to practice it very slowly to ensure one gets the notes and phrasing right. Or one might decide to practice a piece, paying very little attention to individual notes, to make sure that the piece, as a whole, sounds musically correct. Strategy is important in composition as well, as the composer has to decide on a strategy for getting the music to sound to listeners as it sounds in the composer’s mind—perhaps, which parts go to the bassoon, which to the trombone, which to some other instrument.
Monitoring problem-solving while it is in progress
Monitoring problem-solving means keeping track of how things are going while one is in the midst of problem-solving. How is the piece sounding that one is playing or singing? Is it on the right track, or does one need to devise a wholly different strategy for making the piece sound the way one wants it to sound? Are the notes coming out right? Are the “colors” of the tones the right ones, or are the tones “off-color”?
Evaluating problem-solving after it is completed
Finally, after one is done with problem-solving, one must ask whether things worked out the way one had hoped. Does the piece, as a whole, sound the way one wishes it to? Is it being played too fast, too slow, with uneven tempo, and with just the right degree of adherence to what the composer intended while still showing one’s own creativity?
The theory of successful intelligence also posits performance components, which execute the commands of the metacomponents, and knowledge-acquisition components, which learn how to do tasks in the first place. In musical performance, metacomponents are used to plan, monitor, and evaluate one’s playing; performance components are used to execute the playing; and knowledge-acquisition components are used to learn how to play the music. The identities of each of the particular kinds of components are discussed elsewhere (Sternberg, 1985, 1997)
Practical intelligence
One uses practical intelligence when one implements a plan, puts a plan into action, puts a plan into practice, or attempts to persuade others of an idea. Practical intelligence is used to adapt to, shape, and select environments. Adaptation occurs when one changes oneself to fit better into an environment. Shaping occurs when one changes the environment to be a better fit to oneself or what one believes is important. Selection occurs when one decides that the environment one is in is nonoptimal and that it is time to find an environment that is a better fit. For example, if one takes on a position in a string quartet and then finds that one’s musical predispositions differ from those of others in the group, one first might try to adapt to the tastes of the group; over time, one might try to shape the group to be more to one’s liking; and if that does not work; one might leave the quartet to find another ensemble that is a better fit to one’s musical tastes.
Practical musical intelligence always has been important. It is essential today. It is used to figure out how to get auditions for orchestras or choral groups, to figure out what the judges will want to hear in an audition, to get audiences interested in or even thrilled by one’s singing or instrumental playing or compositions, and to get along with other people in ensembles, among many other things.
Practical musical intelligence, like all kinds of practical intelligence, derives primarily from tacit knowledge, or what one needs to know to succeed in a particular environment that typically is not explicitly taught and often is not even verbalized (Sternberg et al., 2000; Sternberg & Hedlund, 2002). It is learned from practical experience. Most tacit knowledge is in people’s heads, not in books. That said, it can be codified when people make an effort to do so, as in music teachers’ telling students the ins and outs about creating a successful career in music.
For better or worse, practical musical intelligence also can be decisive in cases where it gives musicians an edge over more creatively or analytically talented performers. In music as in other professions, there are those who succeed for reasons of their practical skills or the practical skills of their managers. In popular music, for example, it is extremely difficult to succeed in modern-day without a first-rate management team behind one.
Showing high levels of practical intelligence, some musicians have connected with audiences in ways that other musicians never will. For example, conductors Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini; cellists Jacqueline DuPré, Yo-Yo Ma, and Sheku Kanneh-Mason; violinists Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, and Anne-Sophie Mutter; or pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Lola Astinova, all have connected with audiences well beyond the usual listeners to classical music.
As I review the final version of this article (early August, 2020), the most popular musical video on YouTube is Despacito, by Luis Fonsi, with over 6.9 billion views. It combines Reggaeton, Latin pop, and general pop traditions in a highly novel and compelling way. It exemplifies the use of practical intelligence in music to achieve worldwide recognition and appreciation.
Wisdom
Wisdom involves the use of one’s skills and knowledge toward the attainment of a common good. Wisdom might not seem to be an important feature of music but often it is. Simply playing to an audience can be uplifting for that audience and, often, for the performer, making all their lives better for the effort. Wisdom also shows up in the tireless efforts of those music teachers who seek to teach their students not only to be good musicians but also good citizens and neighbors who will contribute something—whether their music or something else—to the world. There are also pieces that have held a lesson for people to learn. Jacques Brel’s “If We Only Have Love” is one excellent example, as is the powerful pro bono performance of it by various groups, such as the performance of it by the West End Singers to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Childline, an organization devoted to the welfare of children. The rendition of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s “We Are the World” to benefit USA for Africa would be a second example of how music can be turned, through benefit concerts, to do good for the world. The song was also used in a 2010 benefit concert for Haiti. Lady Gaga organized, on April 18, 2020, a “One World: Together at Home” concert in honor of those who medical workers who sacrifice their lives for the sick.
A reviewer questioned whether “‘Feed The World’ and the movements that went along with them were/are at best patronizing and possibly racist and not wise at all.” The question illustrates a point about wisdom, namely, that people differ greatly in their conception of what constitutes a “common good.” There is no objective definition of a common good and often such goods are perceived differently, as in this case, between the reviewer and those who agree with the reviewer, on one hand, and those who organized, contributed to, and donated funds as a result of the concert, on the other. Wisdom problems, unlike multiple-choice standardized test problems, do not have a single “correct” outcome. What is common to wise thinking is not a particular “correct” outcome, but rather, a set of thought processes leading to action—a knowledge-based, reflective, diligent, and often, collective effort to balance intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests over the long term as well as the short term toward an ethically derived common good.
Music, of course, also can be used for much less admirable purposes, for example, supermarket music designed to keep shoppers in the supermarket and buying more, or the omnipresent jingles on television designed to sell unhealthy products, such as sugary cereals or, in the past, cigarettes. Moreover, for every wise musician who has done something good for the world, such as Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and James Taylor in their rainforest benefit concert, there are musicians like Richard Wagner who are notorious for one reason or another (in Wagner’s case, anti-Semitism), which makes one wonder how someone could produce great music and yet hold such toxic beliefs. Musician Pierre Fournier has gone down in history as one of the great cellists of the twentieth century, but he also is remembered, perhaps at least as much, for his collaboration with the Nazis, which led to his later being ostracized by many members of the musical community.
Other theories and assessments
The study of musical intelligence has a rich background. Because of journal space limitations, I discuss here that work I believe to be most directly relevant to the topic at hand, namely, the combination of Gardner’s and Sternberg’s theories for understanding musical intelligence. Certainly, there is other work on musical intelligence that would be more relevant in other contexts (e.g., Bamberger, 1991; Cope, 1996; Liebman, 2019).
Seashore (1915, 1938; Seashore & Saetveit, 1960) proposed the first major test of musical abilities. He appears to have been heavily influenced by James McKeen Cattell (1890), probably the first American psychologists to attempt to measure abilities psychometrically. Seashore’s test seems to have been based largely on Seashore’s intuitions about what musical ability consists of. It is not the product of a comprehensive theory of musical ability or intelligence. The tests involved discrimination of pitches, intensity or loudness, consonance/dissonance, timing, and ability to remember tonal sequences. Other subsidiary tests measured timbre, rhythm, musical memory, and emotional reactions and self-expression in music.
Another, more recent test, also not theoretically based, is the Profile of Music Perception Skills (Law & Zentner, 2012). This test contains subtests of perceptual musical skills, including tonal perception (involving melody and pitch), qualitative perception (involving timbre and tuning), temporal (involving rhythm, rhythm-to-melody, accent, and tempo), and dynamics (loudness). The test has good reliability and apparently has reasonable predictive validity to aspects of musical skill. Law and Zentner (2012) have a table (Table 1 in their article) reviewing previous musical-aptitude tests.
The literature on the development of tests of musical abilities has in common with much of the early literature on the development of tests of intellectual abilities a rather thin theoretical basis. Notably, the seminal intelligence tests of Binet and Simon (1916) and of Wechsler (1939) and their successors were carefully thought through empirically but did not have a strong empirical basis. It is only since the development of the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence (McGrew, 2005; see also Carroll, 1993) that intelligence tests have, in general, started to become more theory-based.
Conclusion
Musical intelligence may be understood as at an intersection of Gardner’s (1983, 2011) theory of MI and Sternberg’s (1997) theory of successful intelligence. Although it is convenient to label various musical skills as occurring under the rubric of “musical intelligence,” the skills underlying musical intelligence are heterogeneous. For example, a musician could be a strong performer but a weak composer, or vice versa. Being able to sing does not imply one can play any particular musical instrument well, and vice versa.
Musical intelligence has creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based aspects. Developing a musician entails developing all of these aspects of musical thinking and performance. Even musical scholarship involves these aspects. Scholars generate creative ideas about the contributions (and limitations) or musical work, analyze the musical work, and communicate their ideas in a practical way that potentially enhances their audience’s understanding.
The different aspects of musical successful intelligence—creative, analytical, practical, wisdom-based—are not independent but rather interdependent and interactive. For example, in musical composition, one needs creative ideas to compose a piece of music that is original and viable (the two essential properties of creativity—Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019). One needs analytical skills to ensure that the composition is musically strong and coherent and “makes sense” as a unified composition. One needs practical skills to ensure that it will appeal to some target audience, whatever that target audience might be. And one needs wisdom-based skills to ask whether it helps to achieve a common good—such as giving people pleasure in listening to a great composition. Lack of wisdom can result in one’s achieving something not good at all—such as convincing people to buy products they don’t need or want or, worse, providing music that serves to inspire societal disorder (as in the use of music by totalitarian leaders to inspire mindless followership). In musical performance, one is creative in producing an original interpretation of a piece of music; one is analytical in ensuring that the performance is true to the composer’s music—that it does not depart too far from what the composer intended; one is practical in playing in a way that appeals to one’s audience and leaves them wanting to hear more; and one is wise in ensuring that one is playing for a good rather than a bad cause. Ideally, understanding how musical intelligence works may contribute to the societal good of understanding how music makes the world better for us all.
