In support of school band

In my family, spring means that it's time to look ahead to the following school year and try to figure out what activities to sign up for.  Should we continue with soccer?  Add a new sport?  Try a youth orchestra?  It’s always challenging to accommodate everyone’s interests while managing to not overschedule ourselves AND to stay within our budget.  We try to find low-cost activities and ones that are in our neighbourhood or near the children’s school. 

We’ve been increasingly grateful for the programs that are offered as options at the school itself.  My children have participated in cross-country running, track and field, school choir, and drama.  And this past year, Sophia, as a grade 5 student, was able to join the school band, playing the oboe.  It’s been great.  The school band is convenient – right at the school where we’re going anyway; it’s with her friends, so they get the pleasure of playing music together; and, to be perfectly honest, the price is right.  School band is free.  (Well, free-ish.  There’s a small fee, plus we have to rent the oboe, and buy the books and reeds.) And band is going well.  Her music teacher seems to be doing a fine job of herding all these 10-year-old kids, all with completely different music backgrounds and playing all sorts of different instruments, into a semblance of a musical ensemble.

So I was completely unimpressed to hear that the Vancouver School Board is proposing to eliminate their elementary school band and strings programs in an effort to save money.  Argh.

This is happening everywhere, I know.  Music programs are among the first to be cut when there are budgetary concerns.  The decision-makers can very clearly see that reading and math are good for kids, but many believe that the arts programs are “fluff”, dispensable.  So I thought I’d spend a little time today putting together a list of the strong scientific evidence for the positive effects of musical training on cognition and well-being.  Ammunition, if you will, for fighting in favour of music programs in the schools.

Before I get to that, I feel that should add a caveat.  While I definitely believe that musical training has cognitive benefits, that is not why I enrol my children in music lessons.  Music offers us an unparalleled access to joy, a vehicle for self-expression, and, by playing in a group, an opportunity to be part of something bigger than ourselves.  Musical training is a gift we give our children, like learning to read, or learning to understand the world around us.  It should be part of the educational program, so that no child is excluded from the multitude of benefits that learning to make music offers.

Benefits of Musical Training on Cognitive Function and Emotional Well-Being

Musical training enhances auditory processing, leading to better verbal skills and increased reading ability:

• Musical training enhances brainstem auditory responses to both speech and music.  Musicians have better encoding of pitch information in speech, which is important for understanding what is being said, as well as the emotional content of speech. (Musacchia et al.,2007; Strait et al., 2009)

• Musicians are better able to filter away background noise, and so can better encode and understand speech in the presence of background noise (Parbery-Clark et al., 2009)

• Adults who had musical training as a child (but did not necessarily continue playing music as an adult) still have better brainstem responses to sound.  This indicates that changes in the brain in response to early musical training are long-lasting.(Skoe and Kraus, 2012)

• Musical training protects against the normal age-related decline in auditory processing.  Older musicians show the same accurate processing of sounds as young people.  This effect of musical training is not limited to professional or life-long-musicians.  Even a few years of musical training during childhood had a protective effect on auditory processing in seniors, even 50 years later.  (Parbery-Clark et al., 2012; White-Schwoch et al., 2013)

• University students with musical training before the age of 12 had better verbal memory  than people with no musical training (Chan et al., 1998)

• Children  with at least 3 years of musical training performed better on vocabulary tests than children with no musical training.There was a positive correlation between duration of musical study and performance on test; in other words, the longer the child had studied music, the more likely she was to do well on the vocabulary test. (Forgeard et al., 2008)

• A six-month study on 8-year-olds found that children given music lessons improved their reading abilities more than children given painting lessons (Moreno et al., 2009).

• In 4- and 5-year-old children, music skills were found to correlate with phonological awareness and reading development. “Music perception appears to tap auditory mechanisms related to reading”. (Anvari et al., 2002)

• In university students, the ability to recognize differences in pitch contour (shape of a melody) correlated with reading ability.  “Acoustic perception constrains the development of phonological skill and literacy acquisition”. (Foxton et al., 2003)

• Improvements in verbal skills were seen in 4- to 6-year old children after only 20 days of musical training using a computer program.  (Moreno et al., 2011)

 

Musical training leads to increased spatial and mathematical abilities:

• Orchestra musicians perform better than non-musicians on a task of 3-D mental rotation.  Imaging studies showed this mental task was accompanied by activation in Broca’s area in addition to the regular activation in visuospatial areas of the brain. (Sluming et al, 2007)

• Children given 6 months of piano training had improved spatial-temporal reasoning abilities and were faster at learning proportional math concepts taught in a video-game format. ( Graziano et al.,1999)

• Cheek and Smith (1999) report that grade 8 students who have had at least 2 years of private music training score better on the mathematics portion of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than students with no private music training.  In addition, they found that students whose lessons were on a keyboard instrument have better math skills than those whose music lessons were not keyboard related. 

• Musicians doing mental math use different parts of the brain than non-musicians:  there is more activation in the left fusiform gyrus (used for shape processing) and the left prefrontal cortex (which is the site for working memory). (Schmidthorst and Holland, 2004)

Musical training leads to improvements in executive function:  attention, discipline, and working memory:

• Children given twenty sessions of musical training over a month showed an improvement on an executive function task testing working memory and response inhibition. (Moreno et al., 2011)

• Young adults who were musical performers showed better performance than non-musicians on two tasks measuring executive function. (Bialystok and Depape, 2009)

• Professional musicians perform better than amateurs on the Stroop test, a measure of selective attention and cognitive flexibility. (Travis, 2011)

• Musical training leads to improvements in working memory (Bergman Nutley et al., 2013)

• Musical training can be used to offset the decline in executive function that can occur with aging.  Seniors given six months of piano lessons had significantly improved scores on executive function test of planning and working memory.  (Bugos et al., 2007)

Musical training has a small effect in increasing overall IQ:

• A year-long study in Toronto showed that children who were given musical training had a slightly greater increase in overall IQ compared children who were not given music lessons. (Schellenberg, 2004) 

• High school students studying music have better grades in virtually all subjects (Cabanac et al., 2013)

Making music improves mood, decreases levels of stress hormones, and boosts the immune system:

• Choir singers, after rehearsing, have increased levels of immune system markers, decreased levels of stress hormones, and better mood. (Beck et al., 2000; Kreutz et al., 2004)

• Singers after a singing lesson report feeling more joyful, relaxed and energetic. (Grape et al., 2003)

• Drumming therapy decreases blood levels of stress indicators and increases immune system indicators (Bittmann et al., 2001)

• Musically-trained university students had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol before a math exam compared to non-musician students, suggesting that musically-trained students more emotionally stable. (Laohawattanakun et al., 2011) 

• Non-musicians showed improved mood (using a questionnaire) after singing in a group for 30 minutes(Unwin et al., 2002)

References

Anvari, S.H., Trainor, L.J., Woodside, J., and Levy, B.A. (2002). Relations among musical skills, phonological processing, and early reading ability in preschool children. J Exp Child Psychol 83, 111–130.

Beck, R.J., Cesario, T.C., Yousefi, A., and Enamoto, H. (2000). Choral Singing, Performance Perception, and Immune System Changes in Salivary Immunoglobulin A and Cortisol. Music Perception 18, 87–106.

Bergman Nutley, S., Darki, F., and Klingberg, T. (2014). Music practice is associated with development of working memory during childhood and adolescence. Front Hum Neurosci 7, 926.

Bialystok, E., and Depape, A.-M. (2009). Musical expertise, bilingualism, and executive functioning. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 35, 565–574.

Bittman, B.B., Berk, L.S., Felten, D.L., Westengard, J., Simonton, O.C., Pappas, J., and Ninehouser, M. (2001). Composite effects of group drumming music therapy on modulation of neuroendocrine-immune parameters in normal subjects. Altern Ther Health Med 7, 38–47.

Bugos, J.A., Perlstein, W.M., McCrae, C.S., Brophy, T.S., and Bedenbaugh, P.H. (2007). Individualized Piano Instruction enhances executive functioning and working memory in older adults. Aging & Mental Health 11, 464–471.

Cabanac, A., Perlovsky, L., Bonniot-Cabanac, M.-C., and Cabanac, M. (2013). Music and academic performance. Behavioural Brain Research 256, 257–260.

Chan, A.S., Ho, Y.C., and Cheung, M.C. (1998). Music training improves verbal memory. Nature 396, 128.

Cheek, J.M., and Smith, L.R. (1999). Music training and mathematics achievement. Adolescence 34, 759–761.

Forgeard, M., Winner, E., Norton, A., and Schlaug, G. (2008). Practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning. PLoS ONE 3, e3566.

Foxton, J.M., Talcott, J.B., Witton, C., Brace, H., McIntyre, F., and Griffiths, T.D. (2003). Reading skills are related to global, but not local, acoustic pattern perception. Nat. Neurosci 6, 343–344.

Grape, C., Sandgren, M., Hansson, L.-O., Ericson, M., and Theorell, T. (2003). Does singing promote well-being?: An empirical study of professional and amateur singers during a singing lesson. Integr Physiol Behav Sci 38, 65–74.

Graziano, A.B., Peterson, M., and Shaw, G.L. (1999). Enhanced learning of proportional math through music training and spatial-temporal training. Neurol. Res. 21, 139–152.

Hyde, K.L., Lerch, J., Norton, A., Forgeard, M., Winner, E., Evans, A.C., and Schlaug, G. (2009). Musical training shapes structural brain development. J. Neurosci 29, 3019–3025.

Kreutz, G., Bongard, S., Rohrmann, S., Hodapp, V., and Grebe, D. (2004). Effects of choir singing or listening on secretory immunoglobulin A, cortisol, and emotional state. J Behav Med 27, 623–635.

Laohawattanakun, J., Chearskul, S., Dumrongphol, H., Jutapakdeegul, N., Yensukjai, J., Khumphan, N., Niltiean, S., and Thangnipon, W. (2011). Influence of music training on academic examination-induced stress in Thai adolescents. Neurosci. Lett. 487, 310–312.

Moreno, S., Marques, C., Santos, A., Santos, M., Castro, S.L., and Besson, M. (2009). Musical training influences linguistic abilities in 8-year-old children: more evidence for brain plasticity. Cereb. Cortex 19, 712–723.

Moreno, S., Bialystok, E., Barac, R., Schellenberg, E.G., Cepeda, N.J., and Chau, T. (2011). Short-Term Music Training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function. Psychological Science 22, 1425–1433.

Musacchia, G., Sams, M., Skoe, E., and Kraus, N. (2007). Musicians have enhanced subcortical auditory and audiovisual processing of speech and music. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A 104, 15894–15898.

Parbery-Clark, A., Skoe, E., and Kraus, N. (2009). Musical experience limits the degradative effects of background noise on the neural processing of sound. J. Neurosci 29, 14100–14107.

Parbery-Clark, A., Anderson, S., Hittner, E., and Kraus, N. (2012). Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing. Neurobiology of Aging.

Schellenberg, E.G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychol Sci 15, 511–514.

Schmithorst, V.J., and Holland, S.K. (2004). The effect of musical training on the neural correlates of math processing: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans. Neurosci. Lett 354, 193–196.

Skoe, E., and Kraus, N. (2012). A little goes a long way: how the adult brain is shaped by musical training in childhood. J. Neurosci. 32, 11507–11510.

Sluming, V., Brooks, J., Howard, M., Downes, J.J., and Roberts, N. (2007). Broca’s area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians. J. Neurosci 27, 3799–3806.

Strait, D.L., Kraus, N., Skoe, E., and Ashley, R. (2009). Musical experience and neural efficiency: effects of training on subcortical processing of vocal expressions of emotion. Eur. J. Neurosci 29, 661–668.

White-Schwoch, T., Carr, K.W., Anderson, S., Strait, D.L., and Kraus, N. (2013). Older adults benefit from music training early in life: biological evidence for long-term training-driven plasticity. J. Neurosci. 33, 17667–17674.

 

Sensitive periods in music learning

 

Perhaps a little too young?

When people call to enquire about piano lessons, they often ask me what age is ideal for starting piano.  And my first answer is invariably:  it depends on the child.  There are a lot of factors that go into determining whether the time is right for beginning music lessons  But in general, I can say that earlier is better (up to a limit – three and a half is usually my cut-off on the early end).  Older children can learn faster than younger children, and so will “catch up” quickly, but there is general agreement among musicians and scientists that something is lost by waiting to begin music lessons.  As for learning languages, there seems to be a window in brain development during which we are more able to take in musical learning.

Windows in development:  sensitive and critical periods

A window in development like this is known to scientists as a sensitive period or a critical period.  A critical period is a time window during which, if the appropriate stimuli are not received, the brain does not develop properly, and will never be able to correctly process that type of stimuli.  The classic example was provided by the pioneering studies of Hubel and Wiesel in the 1960’s.  They showed that if kittens were prevented from seeing during a particular time window in development, the visual cortex did not develop properly.  Allowing the kittens to see later did not reverse this effect: once the window was closed, the visual cortex would never develop properly.  That time window is a critical period.

A sensitive period is a little more forgiving than a critical period.  If the appropriate input to the brain is not received during a sensitive period, input at a later date can have an effect, but to a lesser degree.  Studying language is like this.  There is a sensitive period that closes around the age of six, but you can still learn French as an adult; it’s just going to be a little harder and you might never be as fluent.

A window for musical brain development?

The question with respect to musical training is:  Is there really a sensitive period for musical brain development?  Scientific studies seem to support the idea that starting music lessons earlier is better, but it’s hard to separate out the effects of starting music lessons early from the effects of studying for longer.  After all, if you start music at four, then by the time you’re twenty, you’ve been playing for sixteen years, but if you start at twelve, you’ve only been playing eight years by the time you’re twenty.  So if scientists compare twenty-year-old musicians, are they analyzing the effects of starting early, or the effects of studying longer?

Researchers from Concordia University have tried to level the playing field (so to speak) in a new study that compares two groups of musicians who have been playing on average the same length of time:  one group that began lessons before the age of seven, and one group who began when they were older than seven.  Their results strongly support the idea that there is a sensitive period in the development of the brain that responds to musical training.  People who had begun musical training early in life had a greater connection between the two sides of the brain, particularly the connection between regions of the brain responsible for motor control and sensory input of the hands.  The early-musical-training group had more white matter in their corpus callosum, and (presumably because of this extra white matter) was better able to synchronize their hands, as shown in a behavioural tapping test.  There was also altered connectivity in the left temporal lobe, probably due to stronger ties between the auditory cortex and motor cortex.  These connections are key for sensorimotor integration, which is the way the brain forms links between the movements we make and the sensations that the movements produce.

 

From a neurological standpoint, beginning lessons before the age of seven is advantageous.  Does that mean that older children don’t really benefit from music lessons?  That idea is clearly ridiculous.  Many musicians (myself included) begin their training after the age of seven.  In fact, it’s possible that people who begin lessons later are more likely to truly enjoy playing music (and therefore are more motivated to practice): they are learning music because they want to, not because their parents have decided they should.  In any case, musical training at all ages has a multitude of benefits.  But, all other things being equal, why not start music lessons before the age of seven to take advantage of that sensitive period?

 

Reference:

Steele, C.J., Bailey, J.A., Zatorre, R.J., and Penhune, V.B. (2013). Early musical training and white-matter plasticity in the corpus callosum: evidence for a sensitive period. J. Neurosci. 33, 1282–1290.

 

Music for the Little Ones

Am I ready for piano lessons?

I’ve been asked before, many times, at what age I think children should start musical training.  And I know that what people are really asking is “When should we start piano lessons?”  But really, musical training starts as soon as a child is able to hear: in utero, before the child is even born.  Because the initial part of musical training is all about listening to music.  A baby’s brain is learning how to make sense of sounds.  This is true for speech, environmental sounds, and, of course, music.  It’s unclear how much babies can hear in the womb, or what sense they make of sounds, but babies are certainly born able to understand pitch and rhythm.  And as they listen to music over the first few years of their lives, they become “enculturated”, meaning they learn to recognize and enjoy the basic norms of the music of their culture.  For example, children enculturated to Western music prefer tonal music over atonal, and can recognize when out-of-key chords are inserted into songs.

Baby Music Classes?
But what about taking actual music classes – at what age is that really worthwhile?  Should parents just listen to music at home with their infants and toddlers, or is there extra benefit from taking a music class?  A recent paper from Laurel Trainor and colleagues at MacMaster University in Ontario describes research showing that babies gain a lot from participating in music classes.  The 6-month study looked at infants who were 6 months old at the beginning of the experiment, and 12 months old at the end.  The babies were split into two groups:  one group participated, along with their parents, in a music class (including movement, singing, and playing rhythm instruments), while the second group participated (again with their parents) in a play-based class where music was playing in the background.

This study showed three main results:

1) The babies who had attended the music class for six months more strongly preferred tonal music over atonal music compared to babies in the play class.  This indicates that music classes had helped the babies become more enculturated; they had a better understanding and preference for Western tonal music than the other babies.

2) Musical tones were processed differently by the brains of babies who had attended music class.  This was shown by EEG recordings, which use electrodes pasted on the babies' heads to measure brainwave activity.  Actively participating in a music class led to the babies being better able to process musical sounds.

3) Parents of babies who had attended the music class reported that their children had more positive social interaction with them, were easier to soothe, and showed more smiling and laughter, compared to reports from parents whose babies participated in the play classes.

 Definitely ready for rhythm instruments

Wednesday mornings are one of my favourite times of the week.  I teach a class called Music Pups, in which I get to sing, dance, twirl, jump, play rhythm instruments and just be generally silly, with a group of adorable little ones and their happy parents.  I’ve been teaching this class for years, ever since my son was a baby, and I love it.  So I didn’t need to read a research paper to convince me that music classes for infants are worthwhile.  Even the littlest ones babble along with the music, and shake instruments, and laugh and coo when their mothers dance with them.  The class is designed for a mixed age: babies to four-year-olds.  I’ve had children who have taken the classes over a number of years and so I’ve been able to watch their musical development.  It’s amazing to see these toddlers begin to sing along easily with their favourite songs, to echo back (on pitch!) little musical phrases, and to beat their drums in time to the music.  Some of these kids are now my piano students and it’s obvious that the early music classes give them an edge.  But more than that, this type of music class helps reinforce a love for music and give the children an early taste of what music teachers really want to impart to their students:  the joy of music-making.

Reference

Trainor, L.J., Marie, C., Gerry, D., Whiskin, E., and Unrau, A. (2012). Becoming musically enculturated: effects of music classes for infants on brain and behavior. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1252, 129–138.

Music makes us happy

It’s 2:55 on a Monday, and, as usual, I’m standing in the hallway at the elementary school, waiting for the 3:00 bell to ring and the children to come pouring out of their classrooms.  Another mom stops to chat with me, and says, with no preamble, “Okay, what would you say are the top three benefits to studying music?”  The subtext here is clearly: Is all this effort worthwhile?, a thought that is common to parents of young children studying music, and one I'm definitely familiar with.  Because it really is a lot of work for parents to encourage, motivate, schedule and nag their children to practice every day.

As I said last week, I really feel the number one reason to study music is for the joy of it, but it’s clear that not every second of practicing will bring you joy.  In fact, many of the minutes of practicing are just hard work, and not pleasurable at all, especially for young children who don’t really see that there is a worthwhile goal far down the road from all this effort.  One of the jobs of the teacher and parent, of course, is to try to bring the goals closer and give children some satisfaction from small accomplishments.

Music Improves Mood

But it made me think:  Is there any real scientific evidence to show that music makes you happy?  Well, happiness is kind of difficult to measure scientifically, isn’t it?  There are some standard questionnaires that can be given to people to assess mood, and, using these, it has been shown that singing (either in a choir or individually) improves people’s mood.  In addition, just listening to music can improve your mood, and has been shown to activate the pleasure centres of the brain.  Music therapy has been shown to improve mood in patients with dementia, stroke, cancer, traumatic brain injury, and depression.  So clearly, yes:  music makes people happy.

Physiological Effects of Music

There is also a body of research showing that music (either making it or listening to it) can cause physiological changes in our bodies, such as decreasing stress levels, causing our blood vessels to dilate, boosting our immune response, and acting to reduce our pain perception.  The majority of this research has been performed simply by having people listen to joyful or relaxing music, and doing before-and-after measurements of things like saliva cortisol levels (to measure stress), or saliva immunoglobulin levels (to measure immune response).

The Autonomic Nervous System

How does music entering our ears manage to affect our body?  It kind of sounds like hippie mumbo-jumbo, but there is a good anatomical explanation.  A lot of our bodily functions are looked after by the autonomic nervous system (ANS).  The ANS is made up of nerves that talk to our internal organs --  heart, lungs, glands, blood vessels, etc.  The main role of the ANS is keep all our bodily functions chugging along at a relatively even keel, so that if, for example, our heart rate starts getting too fast, the ANS will try to slow it back down to the right speed.  But what sets what the “right speed” is?  That’s the job of the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that is the master control centre for the ANS.  It uses input from the body and from the other parts of the brain to decide exactly what all our organs should be doing.  The hypothalamus has direct connections with the emotional parts of our brains, so if we’re happy, that affects how our body functions.

Does musical training make you happier?

If all these benefits can be had simply by listening to music, is there extra benefit to performing the music?  Is all this musical training worth it?  I certainly think so, but what does the research say?  I was surprised to find very little research on whether musical training increases overall happiness, but as I mentioned, happiness is something that’s tricky to study. 

Here’s what I did find:  a recent study conducted in Thailand showed that students with musical training had much lower levels of stress hormones right before a stressful math exam than students without musical training.  The researchers concluded that musicians were more emotionally stable.

Another study compared professional vs. amateur musicians and investigated whether they reported having “peak experiences”, defined as “experiences of ego transcendence, glimpses of higher consciousness lying beyond ordinary daily experience”.  The study found that professional musicians were more likely than amateurs to report having these transcendent experiences, and that performing music caused these moments, in both professionals and amateurs.  I can certainly relate, and I'd be curious to know how non-musicians would compare with these two groups of musicians.

Despite the lack of research, I would argue that people with musical training are more likely to listen to music and more likely to be made happy by listening to music.  Simply put, being a musician brings more music into your life. And the satisfaction of making music yourself cannot be denied.  I keep getting sidetracked to the piano today because all this talk of how enjoyable music is makes me just want to go and play music.

Oh, yes...

And the second and third of the top three benefits of music training?  I would say they are the improvements to executive function and to verbal skills, which I really will get around to blogging about one of these days.

References:

• Beck RJ, Cesario TC, Yousefi A, Enamoto H. (2000). Choral singing, performance perception, and immune system changes in salivary immunoglobulin A and cortisol.  Music Percept. 18:87-106.
• Bernatzky G, Presch M, Anderson M, Panksepp J. (2011). Emotional foundations of music as a non-pharmacological pain management tool in modern medicine. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 35(9):1989-1999. 
  
• Grape C, Sandgren M, Hansson L-O, Ericson M, Theorell T. (2003). Does singing promote well-being?: An empirical study of professional and amateur singers during a singing lesson. Integr Physiol Behav Sci. 38(1):65-74.
• Khalfa S, Bella SD, Roy M, Peretz I, Lupien SJ. (2003). Effects of relaxing music on salivary cortisol level after psychological stress. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 999:374-376. 
• Kreutz G, Bongard S, Rohrmann S, Hodapp V, Grebe D. (2004). Effects of choir singing or listening on secretory immunoglobulin A, cortisol, and emotional state. J Behav Med. 27(6):623-635.
• Laohawattanakun J, Chearskul S, Dumrongphol H, et al. (2011). Influence of music training on academic examination-induced stress in Thai adolescents. Neurosci. Lett. 487(3):310-312. 
  
• Menon V, Levitin DJ. (2005). The rewards of music listening: Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system. NeuroImage. 28(1):175-184.  
  
• Miller M, Mangano CC, Beach V, Kop WJ, Vogel RA. (2010). Divergent effects of joyful and anxiety-provoking music on endothelial vasoreactivity. Psychosom Med. 72(4):354-356.
• Travis F, Harung HS, Lagrosen Y. (2011). Moral development, executive functioning, peak experiences and brain patterns in professional and amateur classical musicians: Interpreted in light of a Unified Theory of Performance. Consciousness and Cognition. 20(4):1256-1264. 

Music Training and IQ

No one doubts it: Parents have a hard job.  In addition to all the day-to-day cooking, cleaning, cajoling, and ferrying kids about, parents have to make big decisions about what’s best for their child.  We all want our kids to be well-adjusted, happy, and living up to their potential.  And one of the trickier minefields to maneuver through is the choice of extra-curricular activities.  Dance, swimming, drama, a multitude of team sports, martial arts, chess club, scouts, Mandarin class, gymnastics, the list goes on.  Oh, and did I mention music?  The parent has to weigh out the time involved, the child’s eagerness to participate, and the potential benefits to the child.

Does music training make you smarter?

Which is, of course, where I’m going with this.  It’s hard to nail down all the benefits of musical training, but one that keeps coming up again and again is the idea that musical study makes people smarter.  But does it?  A few weeks back I advised you to take research about music and IQ with a grain of salt.  Ask around, and you’ll hear that people who study music are smarter overall than people who don’t, and the common assumption is that the musical training itself contributes to the increase in IQ.  But the causation could run the other way too:  people who are smarter are more likely to take and stick with music lessons.  The basic question is this:  Does studying music make people smarter OR do people study music because they are smarter already?

The only way to really test this question is by a longitudinal study, where people are randomly assigned to either receive music lessons or not, and the effects on IQ are studied.  In the last decade, there have been a couple of good studies that have investigated this question.

Figure from Schellenberg (2004).

Music training leads to a greater increase in IQ

The first, a study by Glenn Schellenberg at the University of Toronto was published in 2004.  In this study, 6-year-old children were placed into four different groups:  piano classes, voice classes, drama classes, or no classes.  The children were given IQ tests at the beginning of the study, and at the end, after 36 weeks of classes.  All groups showed an increase in IQ, which is expected, because they were 9-10 months older, and had been attending school during that time.  But here’s the key result:  children taking music (piano or voice) classes had a slightly larger increase in overall IQ compared to control or drama students.  The researchers made sure there were no overall differences in the parent’s socio-economic status between the four groups, and included the drama class control group to prove that it was specifically music and not extracurricular activities in general that improved IQ.

Music training causes structural brain changes

In 2009, a similar study was published by a group of scientists in Boston. In this study, there were only two groups:  one group received 15 months of keyboard lessons, and the second group received no lessons.  The children were given a set of behavioural and IQ tests before and after the 15 months and it was found that keyboard training increases performance on finger fine-motor tasks and melodic and rhythm discrimination tasks.  However, this study found that there were no significant differences in IQ between the two groups of children.  This result may be due to the small number of children in this study.  Only 31 children were studied, compared to 144 in the Schellenberg study.  When the differences to be observed are small, a large number of test subjects is required.

The Boston researchers went one step further and performed MRI brain scans of the children before and after the 15 months of training.  Amazingly, they were able to show that musical training causes structural changes in children’s brains.  Children who had 15 months of keyboard lessons had more growth in the following areas (compared to children with no music training):

• The corpus callosum, which connects the two sides of the brain
• The right primary auditory cortex, which processes sound information
• The right motor cortex, especially the hand area, which controls the left hand
• The left and right frontal cortex, involved in working memory and the processing of harmony and tonality

So musical training causes changes in the brain, but for the most part, these changes occur in the places that one would expect, the parts of the brain that are involved in music processing and production.  Does growth in these parts of the brain lead to improvements in overall intelligence?  I would argue that it could, especially growth in the frontal cortex.  As I reported back in November, the frontal cortex is involved in a variety of general-intelligence skills known as “executive functions”, and these have been shown to improve in preschoolers taking music classes.  Increased connectivity between the two sides of the brain through an enlarged corpus callosum could also contribute to improved mental processing.  And a more finely-tuned auditory cortex could allow for improved verbal skills.  In sum, structural changes in the brain caused by musical training could certainly underlie a small increase in general intelligence.

But is this really the main benefit of musical training?

I should reemphasize that this 2009 study did not find any overall increases in IQ.  I think most researchers believe that the enhanced brain growth and rewiring caused by musical training results in an increase in overall intelligence, but the effect is small.  If we only focus on the benefits of musical training on intelligence, I think we are missing the boat.  Music offers so much more than this:  a vehicle for self-expression, training in self-discipline, solace, an opportunity to stand up in front of people and perform, a chance to be really good at something.

Personally, I want my children to study music simply for the joy of making music.  There’s nothing like it.

References:

• Schellenberg EG.  (2004) Music lessons enhance IQ.  Psychological Science 15(8):511-514.
• Hyde KL, Lerch J, Norton A, Forgeard M, Winner E, Evans AC, Schlaug G. (2009) Musical training shapes structural brain development.  Journal of Neuroscience 29(10):3019-3025.

Musical training protects auditory processing speed

 

Neurons in the auditory pathway have the fastest temporal responses of any sensory neurons.  And this makes sense:  visual, tactile, taste and smell stimuli don’t change as quickly as sounds do, so the neurons supporting those senses don’t have to be as fine-tuned in time as those that support hearing.

It has been known for a while that the auditory pathway in older brains doesn’t work as quickly as in younger brains, so that, quite apart from actual hearing loss, older people have a harder time understanding speech because they just can’t listen fast enough to be able to properly register to such high-speed auditory input.

But now a new study has shown that musical training can reduce or eliminate this decrease in neuronal processing speed in the auditory pathway.  The study, conducted in the lab of Nina Kraus at Northwestern University compared brainstem auditory responses to the sound “da” in four groups of people:  younger and older non-musicians, and younger and older musicians.  What they found was revealing:  older non-musicians had much slower responses to the transition between the consonant and the vowel in the sound “da”, compared to younger non-musicians.  In contrast, the auditory responses of older musicians were very similar to those of younger musicians.

 

(Figure from Parbery-Clark, 2012.  Panel A shows the temporal characteristics of the sound “da”, while Panels B and C show the subjects’ brainstem responses to the sound, as measured by EEG)

Musical training therefore acts in a protective fashion to maintain the auditory processing speed of older adults, which undoubtedly helps them to be able to understand speech.  The question now is whether musical training starting later in life can help elderly people regain auditory skills that they have lost.

Reference:

Parbery-Clark A, Anderson S, Hittner E, Kraus N. (2012) Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing.  Neurobiology of Aging in press, doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2011.12.015

A Grain of Salt

Studying music makes you smarter, right?  If you believe every research study that’s ever been done, music training increases your IQ, makes you better at math, enhances verbal memory, general verbal ability and non-verbal reasoning, improves fine-motor control and motor learning, increases vocabulary and reading ability, enhances visuospatial cognition, and improves executive function.

Musicians, especially classically trained musicians, are generally thought to be smart.  And music and math “go together” so that people who are good at one are good at the other.  These ideas are so frequently touted that many people just assume they are true, without really looking at the evidence.

There have a been a fair number of research studies looking at the question of how musical training affects other abilities.  What I’d like to make clear today is that not all studies are created equal. 

How would you study it?

Imagine you want to test the hypothesis that studying music increases your IQ.  There are two main types of study that you could use.  The first (and weaker) type of study is correlational. Usually the study works something like this:  you would recruit a group of people with musical training (often university students studying music), and a second control group of people with no musical training.  Both groups take an intelligence test.  You expect that the group with musical training would be found to be smarter, and if they are, the conclusion would be that musical training increases your IQ.

Correlation and causation

But have you really shown that?  Correlational studies like this should have an important disclaimer:  the study doesn’t actually prove that musical training makes you smarter.  Scientists like to say that “correlation does not imply causation”.  What this means is that a correlational study shows only that:  a correlation.  The study shows that there is some kind of relationship between musical training and increased intelligence, but it doesn’t show what that relationship is.  There are several possibilities:

1)  Musical training makes you smarter

2)  People who are smarter are more likely to take and continue with musical studies

3)  Both musical training and increased intelligence are caused by some third unknown variable (such as family income, or competitive personality, or strong parental support).

Do you see how correlational studies are kind of weak?  There are a lot of studies in the literature that are conducted this way, because it’s easy to do.  But the studies don’t necessarily tell us all that much.

Longitudinal studies

So what is the better way to do this study?  The second type of research study you could do is a longitudinal study.  This type of study takes two groups of people and follows them over time to see how musical training alters other skills.  You would recruit people for the study and divide them into two groups.  One group would receive music instruction and one group would not.  You give the subjects an IQ test at the beginning and end of the music instruction, which goes for a defined period of time.  Ideally there would be no difference in test scores between the two groups at the beginning of the study, but at the end of the study, the group with musical training would outperform the control group.  The conclusion would be that the musical training has caused the difference in performance on the test, and this would be a much stronger and believable conclusion.

Dividing up the groups

There are a number of issues to consider in this type of study.  The first is:  how are the participants divided into the two groups?  There are different ways of doing this.  One way is to divide them completely randomly, which might seem like it would be the best, but what if you accidentally ended up with all the smartest people in one group?  Then you would find a difference in IQ before you even started the experiment, and that would make your study kind of useless.  If you have a large number of participants in your study, you're probably okay with a random division into groups, because chances are it will work out okay, but if you have a small number of people, you need to be careful about this.

Another option is completely non-random:  you recruit a group of people who were about to start receiving musical training anyway, and then you recruit a group of control people who match them first group in IQ.  This option has the advantage that you don’t have to give the musical training; the subjects were already going to do that.  Of course, the disadvantage here is that by taking away the randomness, you may be preselecting people in your musical training group that have some other variable you can’t control for.  For example, maybe the people in the musical training group have a higher income, which is why they can afford music lessons, and this may affect the way intelligence develops over the course of the study.

The third option is called pseudo-random.  You recruit people, give them the initial intelligence test, and then divide them into two groups in such a way that the two groups are evenly matched for initial intelligence, and also matched for other variables like age, family income, etc.

Drop-outs

No matter how you split up your groups, there are other problems to be overcome with this type of study.  The main one is a kind of trade-off.  You want the study to run for as long as possible to ensure the biggest difference between the two groups.  If you only give one week of musical training, you’re less likely to find an effect on IQ.  But if the study runs for too long, you run into other difficulties. First of all, it’s expensive because you have to provide music lessons for all that time.  And second, you start running into problems where people drop out of the study, usually from the group receiving music instruction.  People do drop out of music lessons; it’s a big investment in time and not everybody is willing to make the commitment to daily practice, once they see how much work is involved.  So you have fewer people in your music-training group.  You might think this is not a big deal, but there’s another issue here.  If people who are less inclined to study music drop out, then you are left with people who naturally more inclined to study music.  Maybe these people are more intelligent to start with.  Or there is some other factor (like level of parental support) that could contribute to both continuing with musical training and also increased intelligence.  You see?  If too many people drop out, you lose your randomness.

The Bottom Line

I hope this discussion gives you some perspective on studies about the effects of musical training.  It’s actually hard to design and implement a really good study.  But then, what effect does musical training really have?  What can we believe from all the research that is out there?

I’ll discuss this research more in future posts, but it seems to me that there is pretty clear evidence that musical training improves verbal abilities, probably because music and speech both involve auditory parts of the brain.  And improved verbal abilities enhance reading skills.  A recent study also showed that musical training improved executive function in children.  I haven’t seen any good evidence that musical training improves math or spatial skills.  As for overall IQ, some studies have shown that musical training increases IQ, but some have not seen this increase, so I conclude that the effect is probably quite small.

Does studying music make you smarter?  Maybe a little.