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 “Music training directs children's attention to sounds, and teaches
them to make sound-meaning connections, eventually leading to
heightened biological processing of sound that is associated with
superior academic performance,” study leader Nina Kraus told Reuters
Health in an email.
“Learning to make music appears to remodel children’s brains in ways
that facilitate and improve their ability to learn academic
content,” said Kraus, who directs Northwestern University’s Auditory
Neuroscience Laboratory in Evanston, Illinois.
The children were actively playing instruments themselves rather
than passively listening to others’ music, Kraus pointed out.
The study team collaborated with Harmony Project, a community music
program that has provided free music instruments and instruction to
more than 1,000 children in the Los Angeles area in low-income
neighborhoods, Kraus said.
“Studies of music training’s benefits have generally focused on
private instruction, which tends to be expensive and is usually an
option only for privileged children,” Kraus said.
“The breakthrough with this study is the discovery of positive
biological changes following participation in a free community music
education program offered in low-income neighborhoods,” she added.
As reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, 44 children between the
ages of six and nine participated in the study. They all went to
public schools and lived in gang-reduction zones of Los Angeles.
The children were split into two groups. One group started lessons
right away. For two hours per week, they received training in music
fundamentals and learning to play the recorder. Most kids progressed
to group instruction with instruments after about six months.
The second group waited a year before starting lessons.
Each year the research team evaluated the children’s ability to
process speech.
Children who took lessons for two years showed improvements in their
ability to distinguish similar sounds. These changes were not
apparent after only one year, however.
“We’re not claiming music is a quick fix and we’re not saying music
is the single, perfect way to improve academic performance, but
music-making does provide a host of ingredients for brain
stimulation,” Kraus said.
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Aniruddh Patel, a psychology researcher from Tufts University in
Boston, told Reuters Health by phone, “I think it’s an important
study -- we need a lot more of this kind of work where
neuroscientists actually go into the schools and look at the effect
of real world musical training programs on children.”
Studies should focus particularly on “children who stand to gain a
lot from these things – low socio-economic status children that may
not be receiving a lot of other enrichment at home or in other
activities,” said Patel. He has done research on how musical
training produces benefits but wasn’t involved in this new study.
Patel would like to see more studies that build on this one. For
example, he would like to see music training compared to other types
of training, or studies of both neural and behavioral measures of
language processing.
“So there are clearly ways in which the study could be expanded, and
future work could ask more and deeper questions, but in terms of
getting a foot in the door with this type of research, I think it’s
a landmark study,” he said.
Patel said more work like this is needed, particularly as
communities think about reshaping school curricula and setting
priorities.
“It always seems like music is the first to go when budgets get
tight - never based on any evidence but just on the intuition that
it’s kind of a frill,” he said. But, he added, we know that music
deeply engages the emotional system of the brain and children learn
best when they’re excited about things.
More information about Harmony Project is available at http://www.harmony-project.org/.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1w919qx Journal of Neuroscience, online
September 3, 2014.
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