The power of music!!

96% of parents say their children's involvement in music helped them academically.

66% say their children had more confidence and personality as a result of music involvement.


Each of us wants our children — and the children of all those around us — to achieve success in school, success in employment, and success in the social structures through which we move. But we also want our children to experience “success” on a broader scale. Participation in music, often as not based on a grounding in music education during the formative school years, brings countless benefits to each individual throughout life. The benefits may be psychological or spiritual, and they may be physical as well:

“Studying music encourages self-discipline and diligence, traits that carry over into intellectual pursuits and that lead to effective study and work habits. An association of music and math has, in fact, long been noted. Creating and performing music promotes self-expression and provides self-gratification while giving pleasure to others. In medicine, increasing published reports demonstrate that music has a healing effect on patients. For all these reasons, it deserves strong support in our educational system, along with the other arts, the sciences, and athletics.” — Michael E. DeBakey, M.D., Leading Heart Surgeon, Baylor College of Medicine.

“Music has a great power for bringing people together. With so many forces in this world acting to drive wedges between people, it’s important to preserve those things that help us experience our common humanity.” — Ted Turner, Turner Broadcasting System.

Easy to Understand Bottom Line Summary of Why Music Makes You Smarter!

Body of research:

In a study released in 2000, second graders from a low income school in Los Angeles were given eight months of piano keyboard training, as well as time playing with newly designed music software. The result? These students, taking the Stanford 9 Math Test, went from scoring in the 30th to the 65th percentile. These second graders were performing sixth grade math. An interesting finding given the TIMMS results of 1998.
(Neurological Research, March 15, 1999; Gordon Shaw, Ph.D, University Of California, Irvine)

A related study by University of Wisconsin Professor, Dr. Frances Rauscher published in 1997 in the Scientific Journal Neurological Research showed that children involved with keyboard instruction at an early age showed significantly enhanced abstract reasoning abilities, critical to success in science and complex math.

After learning about this research, the Wisconsin School District of Kettle Moraine wanted to see how this concept would work in the real world. They implemented a program that replicated the Rauscher study, using kindergarten students and group piano keyboard instruction. At the end of the school year, students in classes that had received piano keyboard instruction outscored those who received no keyboard instruction by 46 percent! The program has since expanded to K through 6 students across the entire district.

The critical point here is the students were not taught math using music they were taught music. It was the process of learning music that helped improve their math skills.
(Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2000)

NEW STUDIES SUPPORT ORIGINAL FINDINGS THAT MUSIC LESSONS HELP IMPROVE MATH SKILLS


New research continues to show music lessons, especially piano lessons, can help elementary school students score higher on math tests.

In a 1999 report, Dr. Gordon Shaw of the University of California, Irvine studied three groups of second graders. One group received piano lessons and used a special mathematics computer program. Another group used the mathematics program and also received English training. A third group received only standard classroom instruction.

After four months of this training, the second-grade students in the group that received piano lessons and used the math computer program scored 15 percent to 41 percent higher on tests of ratios and fractions than the students in the other two groups.

In a 2000 report, Dr. Shaw studied the math test scores of a group of second graders from inner-city Los Angeles who were given piano lessons twice a week for a year. Shaw compared the test scores of this group to the scores of elementary school students in affluent Orange County who did not receive piano lessons.

The second graders from Los Angeles scored as well as fourth graders from Orange County. Half of the second graders in the study scored as well as fifth-grade students in Orange County.

The study of music and improvement in math seem to be closely connected. These new studies add credibility to the results of 1997 research, when a specific link between music and math was first reported.

Source: Sharon Begley, "Music On the Mind," Newsweek, July 24, 2000.

Are there hidden benefits to music lessons?

Music lessons may offer children intellectual benefits and fine-tune their sensitivity to emotion in speech, according to research by two University of Toronto psychologists presented at APA's 2003 Annual Convention.

In one of the reported studies--in press at Psychological Science--E. Glenn Schellenberg, PhD, recruited 144 6-year-olds to take free weekly arts lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto for one year. He randomly assigned children to either keyboard or voice lessons--the experimental groups--or drama lessons or no lessons--the control groups. The drama lessons served to control for increases in IQ that could result from participation in any extracurricular activity, said Schellenberg.

He tested children's IQ before and after the year of lessons, and found that while IQs increased across the board by about 4.5 points because of attending a year of school, scores for the children in the music groups increased an additional 2.5 points.

That's a small, but significant, connection, he noted. He suggested that the periods of focused attention, memorization and concentration associated with the lessons and practice may explain the increase.

"We also know that schooling raises IQ, and it may be that music training is enough of a school-like activity to do the same," he explained.

When the children took the post-lessons IQ test, a subset of them also participated in a study--in press at Emotion--led by Bill Thompson, PhD, to test whether music lessons promote sensitivity to speech prosody, which is the musical aspects of speech used to convey emotions. But they were surprised to find that children who took keyboard lessons scored just as high, and significantly better than the children who took voice or no lessons. What's more, the researchers found similar results in additional studies with adults who had taken music lessons as children.

Benefit One: Success in Society

Perhaps the basic reason that every child must have an education in music is that music is a part of the fabric of our society. The intrinsic value of music for each individual is widely recognized in the many cultures that make up American life — indeed, every human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals. The importance of music to our economy is without doubt. And the value of music in shaping individual abilities and character are attested in a number of places:

Secondary students who participated in band or orchestra reported the lowest lifetime and current use of all substances (alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs). — Texas Commission on Drug and Alcohol Abuse Report. Reported in Houston Chronicle, January 1998
“Music is a magical gift we must nourish and cultivate in our children, especially now as scientific evidence proves that an education in the arts makes better math and science students, enhances spatial intelligence in newborns, and let's not forget that the arts are a compelling solution to teen violence, certainly not the cause of it!”— Michael Greene, Recording Academy President and CEO at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards, February 2000.
The U.S. Department of Education lists the arts as subjects that college-bound middle and junior high school students should take, stating "Many colleges view participation in the arts and music as a valuable experience that broadens students’ understanding and appreciation of the world around them. It is also well known and widely recognized that the arts contribute significantly to children’s intellectual development." In addition, one year of Visual and Performing Arts is recommended for college-bound high school students. — Getting Ready for College Early: A Handbook for Parents of Students in the Middle and Junior High School Years, U.S. Department of Education, 1997

Benefit Two: Success in School

Success in society, of course, is predicated on success in school. Any music teacher or parent of a music student can call to mind anecdotes about effectiveness of music study in helping children become better students. Skills learned through the discipline of music, these stories commonly point out, transfer to study skills, communication skills, and cognitive skills useful in every part of the curriculum. Another common variety of story emphasizes the way that the discipline of music study — particularly through participation in ensembles — helps students learn to work effectively in the school environment without resorting to violent or inappropriate behavior. And there are a number of hard facts that we can report about the ways that music study is correlated with success in school:

“The term ‘core academic subjects’ means English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography.” — No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, Title IX, Part A, Sec. 9101 (11)
A study of 237 second grade children used piano keyboard training and newly designed math software to demonstrate improvement in math skills. The group scored 27% higher on proportional math and fractions tests than children that used only the math software. — Graziano, Amy, Matthew Peterson, and Gordon Shaw, "Enhanced learning of proportional math through music training and spatial-temporal training." Neurological Research 21 (March 1999).
In an analysis of U.S. Department of Education data on more than 25,000 secondary school students (NELS:88, National Education Longitudinal Survey), researchers found that students who report consistent high levels of involvement in instrumental music over the middle and high school years show “significantly higher levels of mathematics proficiency by grade 12.”

Benefit three: Success in Developing Intelligence

Success in school and in society depends on an array of abilities. Without joining the intense ongoing debate about the nature of intelligence as a basic ability, we can demonstrate that some measures of a child’s intelligence are indeed increased with music instruction. Once again, this burgeoning range of data supports a long-established base of anecdotal knowledge to the effect that music education makes kids smarter. What is new and especially compelling, however, is a combination of tightly-controlled behavioral studies and groundbreaking neurological research that show how music study can actively contribute to brain development:

In a study conducted by Dr. Timo Krings, pianists and non-musicians of the same age and sex were required to perform complex sequences of finger movements. Their brains were scanned using a technique called “functional magnetic resource imaging” (fMRI) which detects the activity levels of brain cells. The non-musicians were able to make the movements as correctly as the pianists, but less activity was detected in the pianists’ brains. Thus, compared to non-musicians, the brains of pianists are more efficient at making skilled movements. These findings show that musical training can enhance brain function. — Weinberger, Norm. “The Impact of Arts on Learning.” MuSICa Research Notes 7, no. 2 (Spring 2000). Reporting on Krings, Timo et al. “Cortical Activation Patterns during Complex Motor Tasks in Piano Players and Control Subjects. A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.” Neuroscience Letters 278, no. 3 (2000): 189-93.
“The musician is constantly adjusting decisions on tempo, tone, style, rhythm, phrasing, and feeling--training the brain to become incredibly good at organizing and conducting numerous activities at once. Dedicated practice of this orchestration can have a great payoff for lifelong attentional skills, intelligence, and an ability for self-knowledge an

A University of California (Irvine) study showed that after eight months of keyboard lessons, preschoolers showed a 46% boost in their spatial reasoning IQ. — Rauscher, Shaw, Levine, Ky and Wright, "Music and Spatial Task Performance: A Causal Relationship," University of California, Irvine, 1994
Researchers found that children given piano lessons significantly improved in their spatial- temporal IQ scores (important for some types of mathematical reasoning) compared to children who received computer lessons, casual singing, or no lessons. — Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L., Levine, L.J., Wright, E.L., Dennis, W.R., and Newcomb, R. (1997)

Music training causes long-term enhancement of preschool children's spatial temporal reasoning. Neurological Research, 19, 1-8.

A McGill University study found that pattern recognition and mental representation scores improved significantly for students given piano instruction over a three-year period. They also found that self-esteem and musical skills measures improved for the students given piano instruction. — Costa-Giomi, E. (1998, April). The McGill Piano Project: Effects of three years of piano instruction on children's cognitive abilities, academic achievement, and self-esteem. Paper presented at the meeting of the Music Educators National Conference, Phoenix, AZ.

Physician and biologist Lewis Thomas studied the undergraduate majors of medical school applicants. He found that 66% of music majors who applied to medical school were admitted, the highest percentage of any group. 44% of biochemistry majors were admitted. — As reported in "The Case for Music in the Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, February 1994

Students who participated in arts programs in selected elementary and middle schools in New York City showed significant increases in self-esteem and thinking skills. — National Arts Education Research Center, New York University, 1990

According to a 2001 study by Barry Bittman, M.D., of the Mind-Body Wellness Center in Meadville, Pa., drumming increases the number of disease-fighting, white blood cells, known as the body's natural killer cells.

The study, which included 111 participants, measured blood levels of immune system markers both before and after drumming. The end result? Drum circle participants showed a significant increase in immune activity.

The study gives us an important building block that says music making can have a positive effect on biology, Bittman said.

Drumming can be used as a meditative process or in collaboration with others, said Gunnell, who uses it frequently in the psychiatric unit -- with immediate results.

"For those experiencing very disorganized thinking, drumming almost breaks that and moves them into something that is demanding of their attention and very rhythmic and organized," Gunnell said. "Many patients comment after the session that they feel both 'relaxed' and 'energized.' "

Drumming also provides a means of non-verbal communication.

In working with a pediatric patient unable to express feelings of helplessness, Gunnell asked her to take part in a role-playing game in which she could select and play the drum of her choice to represent the voice of her parents or doctor.

"She asked me to play her voice, which she described as 'quiet' and she played the doctor's voice," Gunnell said. "She wailed away: 'Boom, boom, boom!' on the biggest drum I had to offer and when she was done, I quietly responded 'tap, tap, tap.'

"Afterwards, she was able to talk about her feelings related to not being 'heard' as a child patient and what that was like for her and how we could improve it."