A little while back Phi pointed to a fellow pointing to two studies suggesting that attractive people make better violinists. Assortive mating is mentioned as the culprit. Assortive mating, of course, is the notion that more desirable people reproduce with more desirable people and less with less. This creates a convergence of beauty and talent. I wouldn’t be surprised if that did play a significant role in the correlation between violin-playing ability and attractiveness, but I have another idea as to what might be the cause.

It seems to me that becoming an accomplished violin player requires a great deal of discipline and a lot of focus. It’s not something that I would expect slobs to become very good at. While I know that a degree of natural talent is required, I don’t think that violining is more meritocratic than is, for example, singing. People are born with better and worse singing voices whether they get any formal training or not. Two people that have never received any sort of training will have vastly different abilities by the time they’re 20. Two people never trained on the violin will have the same ability.

So I expect that the discipline required to become a great violinist would carry over into diet and other things. I would also expect that the same parents that are more demanding of their children in regards to the violin would be more likely to police diet as well. So I would think that those, along perhaps with assortive mating, would be factors.

The fact that the same is true with singers throws me off, though. First, because much of my rationale with violins is not true of song. The second is because it runs contrary to stereotypes that seem to hold up in my personal life.

I remember a while back Clint met someone online and talked to them on the phone. He commented that she had a very attractive voice. This was, actually, a point of concern. He didn’t even have to tell me that because I knew. Heavy women, we had long since discovered, have the more attractive voices. We guessed – correctly, as it turned out – that his new online friend was overweight.

Maybe this is just the difference between speaking voices and singing voices, but we do carry images in our mind of the fat lady singing, don’t we?

But apparently this is not the case. Or maybe the listeners were tailoring their appraisals based on what they thought the person looked like. But that doesn’t realy make a whole lot of sense. Nobody is going to say “that nasally voice sounded great” because they internally associate nasality with attractiveness. So maybe assortive mating plays a bigger role than I’ve given it credit for.

The last thought is in response to Phi’s tangent about the island that his parents live on where there are many more women than then. It reminds me a bit of Episcopal Youth Church, where me and this other guy were in the youth group with a dozen or so females. You’d think that would be an ideal situation… but it really wasn’t. Instead the result was that there was a lot of girls talk that we were shut out of. They were nothing but nice to me, but there was a pretty obvious line that I was on the other side of this.

It also reminds me of a particular private university in Colosse, Gulf Christian University, known for its snobby women who only date rich men. There’s an email joke that makes the rounds every couple of years that lists jokey complaints from attendees of all of the local universities in the form of “What I want to know is…”. GCU’s entry was something along the lines of “What I want to know is why in a university that is 75% female it’s the other 25% that can never get laid!”


Category: Coffeehouse

About the Author


5 Responses to Attractive Talent

  1. Sheila Tone says:

    “People are born with better and worse singing voices whether they get any formal training or not. Two people that have never received any sort of training will have vastly different abilities by the time they’re 20.”

    Actually, no. Whatever “natural” singing ability people have is not nearly what one needs to sing professionally. That requires training and practice. Singing is like a sport, it requires physical conditioning. By “professionally,” I mean, where you’d sound great singing a capella on American Idol. (Many pop singers, however, have average voices and rely on electronic alteration and background cover to sound good.)

    There’s a theory that extra weight helps with vibrato. Vibrato comes from abdominal muscle control. However, having a pleasant speaking voice isn’t the same as having a good singing voice. My impression is, a lot of overweight people work harder on those little details. The weight may make their voices deeper because of the diaphragm compression.

  2. Peter says:

    It could simply be that orchestras and other musical groups are reluctant to hire unattractive musicians even if they are quite talented. Still, that’s probably not the whole story. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, my current train reading, cites studies which have shown that at least 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to achieve mastery in a wide variety of artistic fields including the violin. Given that 10,000 hours is a lot of practice, it could well be that top violinists are so focused and have so much self-discipline that they easily avoid bad habits like overeating.

    As for the travails of the male students at Gulf Christian University, could part of the problem be that many of the female students are holding themselves out for marriage? After all, it’s Gulf Christian University.

  3. Webmaster says:

    Singing is an interesting point – in all honesty, you can train so far, but there is innate talent and simple vocal range / tonal quality differences. Un-coincidentally, a larger rib cage and diaphragm (the proverbial “fat woman” of the opera) make you better able to sustain a long, powerful note and phrase.

    Given that 10,000 hours is a lot of practice, it could well be that top violinists are so focused and have so much self-discipline that they easily avoid bad habits like overeating.

    Or perhaps, parents less likely to engage in (and pass on) those self-same destructive habits are also more likely to be “driving” their kids through the various lessons and practice times and everything else that makes for the professional or “pseudo-professional” musician sort later on?

  4. trumwill says:

    Whatever “natural” singing ability people have is not nearly what one needs to sing professionally.

    I can certainly believe that. But it’s enough that they can sing competently. To even play the violin competently, it would seem to me much more training would be required. However, the scope of the study focuses on the upper end, where both probably require more equivalent amounts of natural talent and practice. So your point is taken.

  5. trumwill says:

    As for the travails of the male students at Gulf Christian University, could part of the problem be that many of the female students are holding themselves out for marriage? After all, it’s Gulf Christian University.

    That probably factors in. The general reputation of the girls that go there is that they want rich guys. So maybe they’re not sleeping with the 20-something MBA types, but that’s who they are dating. The school is known for being more wealth-oriented than religion-oriented. In contrast to, say, Southern Cross.

    some of these Christian universities are only nominally so and GCU probably falls into that category.

Leave a Reply to trumwill Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

If you are interested in subscribing to new post notifications,
please enter your email address on this page.