Does learning to play an instrument make children smarter? Music educators certainly would like to think so, but the truth is, no one has a clear answer to this complicated question yet.
It is obvious that learning to play an instrument is beneficial. Music students learn that there is a connection between the practicing they do and the results they obtain. In other words, they learn that actions have consequences: Work harder, play better; practice less, play less well. Success depends largely on effort. Raw talent is important, but talent isn’t everything. This is a good lesson to learn when starting out in life.
Music students also gain experience working with others. A musical ensemble is a team, and members of the group work together to achieve common goals. Many people, not just those in the arts, work in teams throughout their lives. It is a good thing to acquire teamwork skills early in life.
Music students develop self-confidence from performing in public. Whether they sit in the middle of a section or stand front and center playing a solo, young musicians learn how to present themselves. Surely this experience, and the self-confidence it produces, will come in handy later in life when former students are called upon to make a sales presentation, argue a legal case, or give a speech.
It is clear that music students benefit from their studies in important ways, but does studying music actually increase a young person’s intelligence? Two decades ago Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher conducted experiments to ascertain whether students who listened to music before taking academic tests performed differently than students who took the exams without listening to music. The students who listened to music by Mozart before taking the tests performed better than the students in the control group, which did not listen to music.
A French otolaryngologist named Alfred Tomatis believed that many patients’ health problems were due to an inability to hear or listen well. Tomatis had patients with serious illnesses including ear, speech, and other problems listen to music of Mozart. His prescription for these patients varied depending on the situation but included listening to Mozart for some period of time each day. His patients improved. Tomatis coined the term “Mozart Effect” to describe this healing phenomenon. Don Campbell subsequently compiled the results of Tomatis’s and others’ research showing the wide range of impact that music, and particularly the music of Mozart, could have in the areas of health, education, and brain development. Campbell trademarked the “Mozart Effect” term and popularized the concept through lectures and a series of books.
An old adage asserts that “music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.” Perhaps music’s beneficial effects are due to its calming and relaxing properties. It might have a psychological effect that could equally well be achieved through meditation or another relaxation technique. Could listening to music have a physical effect on the brain that can be measured, or is there just something special about Mozart?
In an article on a 1998 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Los Angeles Times science writer Robert Lee Hotz reported, “Researchers [have] discovered direct evidence that music stimulates specific regions of the brain responsible for memory, motor control, timing and language.” Hotz quoted McGill University neuroscientist Anne Blood as saying that the brain responds directly to harmony. According to Blood, McGill researchers using a PET scanner to monitor changes in neural activity discovered that different parts of the brain involved in emotion are activated depending on whether music is consonant or dissonant.
Thus, there is evidence that listening to music can have beneficial effects, and it even appears that different types of music affect our brains in different ways. Perhaps there is something special about Mozart, but learning to play an instrument apparently has effects on the brain as well.
Scientists have observed that the brain grows in response to musical training the way a muscle responds to exercise. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston discovered that classically trained male musicians had significantly larger brains than men who did not have extensive musical training. (The study only included men.) The cerebellum, which contains about 70% of the brain’s neurons, was about 5% larger in expert male musicians who were studied than in non-musicians. Gottfried Schlaug, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who conducted the research, says that musicians are not just born with these differences. He asserts that the cerebellum grows because of frequent practice of the virtuoso motor skills needed to play an instrument. These findings are significant, but they still do not really show that studying music makes people smarter.
Shaw and Rauscher, who conducted the original Mozart listening experiments, have released research findings showing that preschoolers who took music lessons had statistically significant gains in spatial reasoning ability, that is, the ability to perceive the visual world accurately, to form mental images of physical objects, and to recognize variations in objects. These are the kind of higher brain functions needed to perform complex mathematics. In fact, preschoolers with only eight months of keyboard or music lessons showed a 46% boost in spatial IQ compared to the baseline improvement of 6% in the control group. Learning to play an instrument clearly has effects on children’s brains, and these effects do relate to what most people would describe as intelligence.
Gottfried Schlaug in Boston has expanded on his earlier research. He studied 41 eight- to eleven-year-old boys and girls who took private lessons in piano or a string instrument for three years or more. Schlaug and his colleague Ellen Winne compared the music students to a group of 18 children who had no instrumental training. (Both groups took general music classes in their schools.) The results, published in 2008, showed that in addition to scoring better on skills related directly to their musical training (auditory discrimination and finger dexterity), the young musicians also scored higher in two important skills that appear to be unrelated to music: verbal ability (as measured by a vocabulary IQ test) and visual pattern completion (as measured by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices). The longer the students studied their instruments, they better they scored on these tests.
Scientists at Northwestern University reported in 2012 on a study that showed music training may enhance communication skills needed for speaking and reading. The study, which involved measuring electrical activity in the brainstem, the pathway that processes both music and speech, suggests that musical training could help children develop literacy skills and combat literacy disorders. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, where the work was performed, told a reporter that “audiovisual processing was much enhanced in musicians’ brains compared to non-musician counterparts, and musicians also were more sensitive to subtle changes in both speech and music sounds.”
Some commentators believe that studying music contributes to a young person’s psychological development, quite apart from whether it has physical effects on the brain. Alexandra York says that the study of music “inspires the moral imagination” and helps young people develop emotionally. Writing in the June 1998 issue of Imprimis, she said:
[M]usic is indispensable for guiding psychological development because it speaks directly to the sentient consciousness. One might say that music is emotion, because feelings are its primary themes. The instrument chosen to channel music’s emotional flow, whether it be piano, clarinet, violin, or voice, is not important. Learning to master the instrument is. The discipline of serious music is exact and exacting, teaching the precision of mathematics in a poetic realm as well as the exhilarating balance and the exalted integration of “reasoned harmony” (music’s form) and emotions (music’s content). It is not often in our culture that children are taught to unite reason and emotion. Tonal and melodic classical music does this for all of us. So the competence to hear it and to appreciate it as a practitioner can be a rare source of indescribable pleasure and a safe emotional release.
Research on the brain continues, and as neurologists, psychologists, and others learn more about how the brain works, they will discover more about how music affects us. There is little doubt at this point, however, that studying music and listening to music can be rewarding to people throughout their lives. That’s why it is so important to introduce children to music at an early age.
Bruce D. Perry, formerly chief of psychiatry for Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston and now an adjunct professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, summed this up: “Even a prodigy like Mozart could not have composed had he never heard music in the first years of life…. Once developed—once organized—the brain is hard to modify. Childhood experiences, therefore, create the person. These organizing childhood experiences should be consistent, nurturing, structured, and enriched, resulting in flexible, responsible, empathic, and creative adults.”
Students benefit in many ways from studying music. They develop good work habits and gain self-confidence. They learn to unite reason and emotion. Their brains grow, and perhaps they even become smarter. Every child can benefit, and every child deserves a chance to benefit from consistent, nurturing, structured, and enriching musical experiences.
