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Briana Nave’s cheeks swelled as she released a deep breath into a spirometer — a tool used to measure lung function — catapulting its piston into a steady jiggle in the air.

“We’re going to have to do that again,” the respiratory technician said. “I know it’s just your training.”

What began as a routine doctor’s appointment had become stuck in a loop of odd results. Across the room, new results slowly populated the computer screen.

“It’s just because you’re a singer,” the tech added with a sigh, studying the latest outcome. “You’ve got this musical technique.”

Puzzled, Nave took a moment to wonder. Technique… of breathing? Her persistence almost made Nave believe she had the power to override her natural reflexes. Yet she couldn’t help but notice a peculiar connection: her musicality was being framed as a liability, even a barrier to her care.

“What blew my mind was that she saw that my body contained some kind of esoteric difference by virtue of being a musical body,” Nave reflects.

In that moment, Nave felt like the technician was interpreting her training as a singer as a medically significant fact. A skill she had learned through years of practice was being treated as a physical abnormality, something that medicine might want to measure and quantify.

Today, that realization sits at the center of Nave’s research as a musicology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She traces the history of how music, once understood primarily as a cultural practice, became something science tried to measure, rank, and explain through biology. By following that shift across time, Nave reveals how social values, racial hierarchies, and Western norms have quietly shaped what society calls “talent” — and who is presumed to possess it.

Testing talent

Before she could grasp a musical scale, Nave knew she loved to sing. Taking note of her constant singing, her parents decided to enroll her in classical voice lessons. She later earned a scholarship to study music performance at Salem College, where the contrast between her training and the rock-heavy atmosphere that energized her childhood home came as a shock.

“My musical knowledge was very much American and British from the ’60s forward,” she says. “While those around me had really deep thoughts on the merits of Ravel versus Debussy, I was thinking, Now, who? That’s something that distinguished me from a lot of my peers.”

Although she trained as a performer, Nave found herself increasingly drawn to questions surrounding music history. Why were certain forms of musical knowledge treated as more legitimate than others? Who decided what counted as talent, taste, or technique? Graduate study offered her space to pursue those questions more fully.

Her first master’s thesis at the University of Maryland examined rock star Courtney Love and her tumultuous legacy in the male-dominated genre. At Carolina, she completed another thesis on the psychoanalytical style of Ellen Willis, The New Yorker’s first rock critic.

Then, as she prepared for her PhD program, Nave stumbled onto cases of talent testing that were popular following World War I, and she wanted to know: How did the notion of measurable talent gain authority in the first place? That question led to a dissertation on medical studies and interventions in musicians’ health in the early 20^th century, a project that came to include talent testing, music therapy for shell shock, and theories of how to teach singing through physiological manipulation.

This took her to the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia to study the “Seashore Tests of Musical Ability,” developed in the 20^th century by American psychologist Carl Emil Seashore. The battery of assessments — designed to evaluate pitch, rhythm, harmony, and other musical components — was Seashore’s attempt to quantify musical talent, which he believed could be objectively measured and subjected to scientific study.

Nave recognized echoes of Seashore’s work even closer to home. While combing through Wilson Library’s archives at UNC-Chapel Hill, she encountered the work of Guy Benton Johnson, a former Carolina professor and sociologist who applied Seashore’s tests to more than 3,000 Black students across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. He suggested the evaluations favored specific educational and social backgrounds — not innate genetic differences.

Nave’s dissertation also examines neurological studies of musical sensitivity, including the use of music therapy to treat the physical and psychological trauma experienced during and after World War I, called shell shock. Many veterans returned with symptoms like shaking, exhaustion, insomnia, and memory loss but few visible injuries, making it difficult for doctors to determine whether the condition originated in the body or the mind — or whether it was a legitimate diagnosis at all.

Music therapy faced similar skepticism. Therapists argued that music could physically soothe damaged nerves, while most doctors believed it helped patients feel better emotionally. This overlap helped both shell shock and music therapy gain recognition: Treating the condition helped legitimize the therapy, and the therapy helped validate the condition. Together, they show how music became a way for patients and doctors to negotiate care in the uncertain space between physical and mental health.

When measurement becomes judgement

Seashore’s assumptions are just one example of how early 20^th century music morphed from an expressive art to a benchmark — a ruler used to rank forms of creativity and, by extension, the people who produced them.

Following World War I, America’s social order was in flux. Women began entering the workforce and Black Southerners streamed north in the Great Migration. Urban centers swelled, and with them, longstanding racial and cultural tensions rose to the surface. For those already at the top, the shifting ground felt like a threat — and many went to extraordinary lengths to hold their place.

“There’s a lot of jockeying for power,” Nave says. “The U.S. was growing in global importance, and the elite class wanted to make sure they weren’t destabilized by the newcomers they were encountering in their daily lives, who, if we’re being honest, they didn’t like very much.”

Music did not escape these tensions. Scientific authority was often invoked to delegitimize entire genres like jazz and ragtime, portraying their study as irrational or uneducated. Nave hopes to trace how those views rose to dominance.

“Music wasn’t always understood as a biological talent,” she explains. “Earlier Western cultures have said that it was like channeling something divine. In the Romantic period, it may have been considered as the expression of a particularly sensitive soul.”

A century later, many of the tools have changed, but the assumptions behind them linger. Neurological and psychological music experiments may reveal more about upbringing than innate aptitude.

“Music cognition, therapy, and talent studies are overwhelmingly done with relatively privileged populations and are based on Western classical music as opposed to something like Indian ragas, Japanese gagaku, popular music, or jazz,” Nave describes. “There’s limitation in what you can reasonably claim when you haven’t taken account for the entire range of human experience.”

Culture as context

There’s a popular phrase that makes musicologists like Nave uneasy. “Music is a universal language” might sound unifying, but it suggests that music is naturally understood the same way around the world — an assumption Nave argues is deeply misleading.

“What we value aesthetically and what we think of as beautiful is so culturally defined,” she says.

Although these approaches to talent have long been challenged, the idea that exceptional ability reflects fixed human differences can be tempting.

“There’s a certain comfort in being able to say, ‘that’s because they’re special,’” Nave admits. “There’s such a difficulty about why some people are creative enough to do things that pass comprehension. When we ascribe these medical ideas, it takes away the uncertainty.”

That instinct, she argues, can ignore more questions than it answers.

“I’m not denying that complex processes have to happen for people to make music and to make it well,” she says. “But I want to challenge ideas that are attached to biological determinism, that special accidents of birth predetermine certain groups of people to be good at certain things.”

Today, these judgments remain in more casual ways. Musical styles perceived as complex often attract greater prestige, while those built on patterned rhythms are often dismissed as simple. When Nave encounters this assumption in the classroom, she pushes her students to reconsider.

“I’ve had students describe Delta Blues as simple because it lacks many chord changes or rhythmic complexity — Western values,” she reflects. “Think about how this attitude can change if we also consider the individuality of vocal timbre or the song’s message.”

Cultural relativism, she’s found, also offers a bridge between disciplines.

“For a couple hundred years now, the sciences and the humanities have been very split in the academy, and I think the two sides have meaningful things to say to each other,” she says.

As Nave prepares to defend her dissertation this spring, she leaves Carolina with a refined set of questions. With plans to continue her research and someday turn it into a book, she hopes to keep challenging how talent itself is defined.

“The ability to create music still has a lot of mysticism around it today,” she says. “It’s very complicated — and I want to dive deeper into that complexity.”