Musicians IQ research finds people with music training score a little higher (r of about .1 to .26), but twin studies suggest lessons are not the cause.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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On average, people with more music training do score a little higher on IQ tests, with correlations of roughly .1 to .26 in the best studies. The catch is that most of this gap seems to exist before the training starts: children who are brighter and more open to new experiences, often from better-off homes, are more likely to take lessons and stick with them, and twin studies find that practice itself does not raise IQ.
So "musicians are smarter" is partly true as a description and mostly false as an explanation. This page covers what the comparisons between trained and untrained people show, who ends up taking lessons, what twin studies reveal about cause and effect, and why claims about the IQs of famous musicians are not data.
What the comparisons show
The most careful work on this question comes from E. Glenn Schellenberg and colleagues in Toronto, who gave participants standardized IQ tests in person.
• Children and undergraduates: In a 2006 study of 147 children aged 6 to 11 and 150 undergraduates, duration of music lessons had a small positive association with IQ in both groups. It held after accounting for parents' education, family income and involvement in other out-of-school activities, and it was weaker in the adults than in the children.
• Trained versus untrained children: In a 2011 study, musically trained 9- to 12-year-olds had higher IQs than untrained children, and the advantage extended across all the IQ subtests. Training was barely related to executive function, which argues against the idea that music sharpens attention and self-control and that this then lifts IQ.
• Sizes of the correlations: In a 2013 study by Kathleen Corrigall, Schellenberg and Nicole Misura, the correlation between years of playing music and IQ was .26 among 118 undergraduates and .21 among 167 children aged 10 to 12.
• A national twin sample: Miriam Mosing and colleagues studied more than 10,500 Swedish twins and found correlations between music practice and IQ of .11 for men and .10 for women.
A correlation of .2 is small. It means music training accounts for about 4% of the differences in IQ between people, and two people with the same amount of training will often differ far more than a trained and an untrained person do on average. The pattern is general, though: trained groups tend to score a little higher on most subtests, not just on the auditory or memory tasks you might expect music to help.
As for adult professional musicians, I am not aware of any large, representative study that reports their measured IQs. The good evidence is about people with more or less music training, most of them students.
Who ends up taking music lessons
Music lessons are not handed out at random. Parents decide whether to pay for years of them, and children decide whether to keep practicing.
The Corrigall study treated years of training as the outcome to be predicted, rather than the cause. Among the children, longer training went with higher family income (r = .18), more educated parents (r = .32), more involvement in other activities (r = .24), higher IQ (r = .21), better school grades (r = .25), and higher openness to experience (r = .27) and conscientiousness (r = .22). When demographics and personality were held constant, cognitive ability no longer predicted how long a child stayed in lessons, but openness to experience still did. The authors concluded that personality is at least as good as cognitive ability at predicting who takes music lessons.
Among the undergraduates, the picture was similar: longer playing went with more educated parents (r = .19), higher IQ (r = .26) and more openness to experience (r = .32). Schellenberg's 2011 conclusion, drawing on the wider literature, was that children with higher IQs are more likely than lower-IQ children to take music lessons.
This kind of selection is the main reason a cross-sectional comparison of musicians and non-musicians cannot tell you whether music made anyone smarter. The families that pay for years of lessons also tend to offer their children other educational advantages. A broader look at IQ and socioeconomic status shows why that matters.
What twin studies say about practice and IQ
Twin studies offer a way around the selection problem. Identical twins share their genes and their family, so if one twin practices music for years and the other does not, any IQ gap between them is hard to blame on genes or upbringing.
In a 2016 study of the same Swedish twin sample, Mosing and colleagues found that the link between practice and IQ disappeared when they compared co-twins. A highly practiced twin did not have a higher IQ than an untrained co-twin. Twin modeling showed that most of the association came from shared genetic influences. The authors concluded that the link between music practice and IQ in the general population is not causal.
An earlier study by the same group asked a related question about musical skill itself. In 10,500 Swedish twins, practice correlated .18 to .36 with music ability (rhythm, melody and pitch discrimination), and practice was 40% to 70% heritable. Identical twins who differed in how much they had practiced did not differ in music ability. That is a striking result, and it does not mean practice is useless for learning an instrument. It does suggest that the same predispositions drive both the inclination to practice and the abilities measured on tests.
Do music lessons raise IQ?
The question of whether lessons cause IQ gains is covered in depth in our article on the Mozart effect and music lessons, so here is the short version. In Schellenberg's 2004 experiment, 144 six-year-olds were randomly assigned to a year of keyboard, voice or drama lessons or to no lessons, and the music groups gained 7.0 IQ points on average against 4.3 for the controls, a modest effect (d = 0.35). Larger syntheses are less encouraging. A 2020 meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet of 54 studies and 6,984 children found that once study quality was accounted for, the overall effect of music training on cognitive and academic outcomes was essentially zero. Small positive effects appeared only in studies without random assignment and without an active control group. A 2017 study by Swathi Swaminathan, Schellenberg and Safia Khalil found that music aptitude, rather than the amount of training, predicted fluid intelligence in adults. The same transfer story plays out in research on whether chess makes you smarter.
What about famous musicians' IQs?
Lists that give IQ scores for famous composers, rock stars or rappers circulate widely online. As far as I know, none of these numbers come from a published, properly administered IQ test. Some are guesses made from biographies, and some are invented. Historical composers lived long before IQ tests existed, so any number attached to them is an estimate at best.
Even if every figure were accurate, a list of celebrated musicians would not show that musicians in general are smarter. It would show only that a few exceptional people were also exceptional in other ways, and it ignores the many skilled musicians whose scores are average.
Frequently asked questions
Do musicians have higher IQs than non-musicians?
On average, people with more music training score slightly higher, with correlations of about .1 to .26. Much of that gap reflects who chooses to train, not what training does.
Does playing an instrument make you smarter?
The best evidence says not in any general way. Twin studies find that the more practiced twin does not have a higher IQ, and a 2020 meta-analysis found near-zero effects in well-designed training studies.
Is musical ability linked to intelligence?
In at least one adult study, music aptitude, such as the ability to tell apart rhythms and melodies, predicted fluid intelligence better than years of training did.
Why do children who take music lessons do better in school?
They tend to come from families with more income and education, and they tend to be more open and conscientious. Those differences predict both who stays in lessons and how well children do in school.
What was Mozart's IQ?
No one knows. Mozart died more than a century before IQ tests were invented, so any figure is a retrospective guess.
The takeaway
Musicians IQ research points to a real but small advantage for people with music training, and most of it seems to come from who takes up music rather than from the music itself. Learning an instrument has its own rewards, and a higher test score is unlikely to be one of them. If you are curious where your own reasoning ability stands, you can take the RIOT IQ test, which reports your results against a defined norm group.
References
1. Schellenberg, E. G. (2006). Long-term positive associations between music lessons and IQ. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(2), 457-468. [doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.98.2.457](. doi.org
2. Schellenberg, E. G. (2011). Examining the association between music lessons and intelligence. British Journal of Psychology, 102(3), 283-302. [doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2010.02000.x](. doi.org
3. Corrigall, K. A., Schellenberg, E. G., & Misura, N. M. (2013). Music training, cognition, and personality. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 222. [doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00222](. doi.org
4. Mosing, M. A., Madison, G., Pedersen, N. L., & Ullén, F. (2016). Investigating cognitive transfer within the framework of music practice: Genetic pleiotropy rather than causality. Developmental Science, 19(3), 504-512. [doi.org/10.1111/desc.12306](. doi.org
5. Mosing, M. A., Madison, G., Pedersen, N. L., Kuja-Halkola, R., & Ullén, F. (2014). Practice does not make perfect: No causal effect of music practice on music ability. Psychological Science, 25(9), 1795-1803. [doi.org/10.1177/0956797614541990](. doi.org
6. Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science, 15(8), 511-514. [doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00711.x](. doi.org
7. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Memory & Cognition, 48(8), 1429-1441. [doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2](. doi.org
8. Swaminathan, S., Schellenberg, E. G., & Khalil, S. (2017). Revisiting the association between music lessons and intelligence: Training effects or music aptitude? Intelligence, 62, 119-124. [doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2017.03.005](. doi.org
Hero image: Sheet music and violin, by Peachyeung316, CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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