Nature and Nurture

There are two excellent reviews out this week, both from top-notch music-and-brain research labs.  And both cover the same general topic:  are musicians made or born?  One paper (by Barrett et al., out of Nina Kraus’ lab at Northwestern University) covers the research showing how musical training alters brain structure and function, while in the other paper, Robert Zatorre of McGill University also discusses the idea of predisposition to learning music.

Scientific studies have shown that there are distinct differences in the brains of musicians compared to non-musicians.  For example, they have larger auditory cortices, larger cerebellums, and greater connections between the two sides of the brain via the corpus callosum.  Current research is trying to figure out whether musician’s brains became that way because of all the musical training, or whether those people became musicians because they were genetically predisposed to having brains like that.  The evidence, thoroughly reviewed by Barrett et al., weighs heavily in support of the idea that musical training does alter the brain.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t individual differences in brains and their musical abilities, and specifically in their ability to learn musical skills.  This topic is reviewed by Zatorre, pointing to studies on both speech and music in which subjects can be classified into groups of slow learners or fast learners.  He highlights in particular his own study of micro-interval discrimination in which learning rate was related to the brain’s discriminatory responses before training.  His results indicate that certain pre-existing brain capabilities led to faster learning. It’s not clear (nor does Zatorre make this case) that the differences in learning were based on genetic predisposition rather than environmental factors, but there are obviously individual differences between people, and we know that genetic variability exists. We are all different, after all.

There’s an ongoing and never-ending debate about whether success as a musician (or in any other art or skill) is due to innate aptitude (what some people might call natural talent), or whether it is due to working hard and having access to the right teachers and opportunities.  It’s the old nature-vs-nurture question, and while everyone agrees that both factors play a role, there is much to learn about what role each factor plays. 

It seems that for a long time people have leaned strongly towards the idea that talent is inborn:  either you are a musical person or not.  When I was a teenager, people used to say to me, quite often, how lucky I was to be so musically talented.  And I remember thinking that these people were wrong:  I was just lucky that I enjoyed playing music so much that I was happy to practice a lot.  I fairly recently had a woman ask me if I would listen to her child fool around on the piano, to see if I thought the girl had enough talent that it was worthwhile pursuing music lessons.  My response was that of course she should have piano lessons; her natural musical ability shouldn’t really have any bearing on that decision.  But many people think musical talent is something you are born with.

There is certainly a grain of truth to this idea.  Every music teacher can see that some students find music lessons much easier than others.  These students tend to have certain characteristics that help them:  a good sense of pitch, good fine motor control, an ability to focus their attention, and a willingness to self-correct.  Every person is different, so certainly some people begin music lessons with a head-start.  They may not have had any musical training, but they have already some of the skills that are useful for studying music.  But does that mean they are genetically more musically talented?  Not necessarily.  These things that they’re good at (pitch, motor control) could be there because of other experiences they have had in life.  

On the other hand, I’d bet that every music teacher could also tell you about students who seemed musical but didn’t get far with their lessons because they didn’t practice regularly.  And there are definitely students who start off with seemingly mediocre abilities, but who work hard and learn to play well.  For the last few years I've been teaching a young boy who has always been an inconsistent practicer, just managing to keep up with his class. However, this year he is on a kick of seeing how many days in a row he can practice.  He’s up to almost 300 days of practice, and the difference in his playing is remarkable.  It’s an excellent example that, no matter what your predisposition, if you put in the hours at your instrument, your playing will improve. The experience of playing music changes your musical brain.

Every student is different, and comes to music lessons with their own set of skills, their own capacity for learning, and their own personality. Their brains are all different at the start of their musical training, and they will each develop in different ways. At the same time, every student has the capability to learn well with enough effort.  The job of the music teacher is to be aware of those individual differences so that she can try to strengthen the students’ weak points, and also find ways to motivate the students so that they are willing to put in the daily practice required to improve. I find that the children who seem to have more musical “ability” at the beginning of lessons tend to improve more quickly.  It’s hard to know if this is because they have a genetic advantage, or if they simply are more motivated to practice because they find music easier to start with.  There’s such an interaction between predisposition and experience that it is extremely difficult to untangle them.  Aptitude and hard work are intrinsically linked by motivation.  This is part of what makes nature and nurture inseparable in the debate about where talent comes from.

References

Barrett, K.C., Ashley, R., Strait, D.L., and Kraus, N. (2013). Art and science: how musical training shapes the brain. Front Psychol 4, 713.

Zatorre, R.J. (2013). Predispositions and plasticity in music and speech learning: neural correlates and implications. Science 342, 585–589.

“This piano doesn’t know your piece yet”

Last spring, some of my piano students participated in the annual Vancouver Music Festival Workshop, a non-competitive festival at which the students receive immediate oral feedback from the adjudicators. My students, in the youngest festival classes, had the privilege of working with the lovely and encouraging Yvette Rowledge, an experienced adjudicator with a knack for expressing comments in a way that young children can understand.  The festival took place at a church, and the students played on a beautiful grand piano.  Of course, every piano is a little bit different, and it takes a little while to adjust to playing a different instrument, especially for these young pianists. Yvette acknowledged this to the students, often by using the phrase: “This piano doesn’t know your piece yet”. This was a cute way of saying that the students’ brains hadn’t adapted to playing on this different piano.

Changing our movements to adapt to different environmental conditions is known as motor adaptation, an important category of motor learning. Motor adaptation is believed to work through feedback modification of existing motor programs. Think about it this way: when you go to play something on the piano, you automatically move your fingers, hands, and arms a certain way, with a certain amount of force, because you have learned that the keys give a particular amount of resistance and are a certain distance apart, etc. You have learned that making these particular movements on the piano will lead to certain sensory results: your fingers will feel the resistance of the keys and your ears will hear the resulting pitches at a certain tempo and volume level. This mapping of motor commands to sensory consequences is called a forward model – the brain takes the motor commands that have been generated, and predicts forward what the sensory result will be.

The human brain, with the cerebellum coloured in pink.

The part of the brain that has been shown to do this prediction is the cerebellum, a structure the size of a slightly flattened baseball, at the lower back of the brain, just above where the back of your head attaches to your neck. The cerebellum not only predicts what the sensory result of actions should be, it also compares the real sensory result with the predicted one. So if you’re playing a different piano and it has a stiffer action than you’re used to, the sensory result will be different than you expect: your fingers will feel more resistance, the keys will move more slowly, and the sounds you produce will be quieter and perhaps uneven. In other words, what you feel and hear will be different from what you expected. The cerebellum will register that there is some kind of error, some difference between the predicted result and the actual result. The cerebellum will then alter the forward model to try to reduce that error. In this example, it will change the model to take into account that more velocity is required to move the piano keys.

This is what motor adaptation is: the updating of a forward model, so that the prediction about sensory results better matches the actual sensory results of the movement. Sensory feedback allows our brain to learn the precise forces, directions, and velocities of movement required in a particular situation. This updating of the model is an ongoing activity, happening while we perform a movement. It’s not like you play something on the piano and then, after you finish, your brain figures out what went wrong. Motor adaptation is happening while you’re playing: as you press down the key, you immediately feel and hear a difference in how the piano responds, and you adapt our movements continually. Of course, getting the adaptation exactly right takes a bit of time, so that your playing improves throughout the whole piece.

Motor adaptation learning occurs all the time, in all sorts of situations, whenever you learn to change the force and/or direction of your movements in response to changes in the environment.  For example, every time you drive an unfamiliar car, you have to adapt to how it handles.  To turn a corner, you may need to exert more or less force on the steering wheel than in the car you are used to driving.  Similarly, if the brakes in the unfamiliar car are more sensitive than the brakes in your own car, your stops may be jerky at first.  But you quickly learn, without thinking too much about it, what forces are required for steering and braking in this car, and adapt your movements so that you turn and brake smoothly and automatically.

Motor adaptation certainly plays an important role in performing music.  As we've seen, every time a musician plays on a different instrument, she must adapt to the different forces needed.  When we play in a different hall with different acoustics, we adapt.  When we need to play more quietly because someone is sleeping or watching TV in another room, we adapt our movements.  If the bench is too close to the piano or an orchestral player is crammed into a tiny orchestra pit, we need to adapt our movements.

On the practical side, studies have shown that it’s possible to improve at adaptation.  If we practice playing on lots of different pianos, we are better equipped to make the necessary changes for each individual one.  This occurs because our cerebellum will get an idea of what types of possible errors are out there and how to correct for different errors. 

The ability to adapt to different pianos is especially important for my beginner students, some of whom practice at home on cheap digital keyboards with unweighted keys.  (I don’t recommend it, of course, but I understand parents’ desires to keep costs down while they’re uncertain about whether their children will continue with piano).  When these children are playing on an acoustic piano, and actually have to press the keys down hard enough to make the hammers hit the strings, the forces required are quite different, and I hear the familiar refrain of “It was better at home”.  They need to learn to adapt.  And I think the more different pianos they play on, the better for motor adaptation.  That way, every piano they play will “know their piece”.

References:

Krakauer, J.W., and Mazzoni, P. (2011). Human sensorimotor learning: adaptation, skill, and beyond. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 21, 636–644.

Shadmehr, R., Smith, M.A., and Krakauer, J.W. (2010). Error correction, sensory prediction, and adaptation in motor control. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 33, 89–108.

 

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.

 

Feeling the Beat

It’s a Thursday morning, and I’m leading a Music Circle Time at the local drop-in playcentre.  The kids are enthusiastic and adorable: mostly one- and two-year-olds, some infants, and a handful of older preschoolers, all eager to sing, dance, jump, twirl, tap and shake.  I run through a repertoire of fun songs that all involve some kind of movement.  Even for sit-down songs with no obvious actions (like “Old MacDonald had a Farm”, for example), we clap or tap to the beat.  This keeps the kids engaged, but more importantly, it activates their sense of rhythm.  Literally, they “feel” the beat of the music.

If you stop to think about this phrase, “feeling the beat”, you might find it a bit odd.  Listening to music is something we do with our hearing, not our sense of touch, right?  Surely we don’t actually feel the beat any more than we can smell the colour in a painting.  In fact, that’s not entirely true.  A recent study (Huang et al., 2012) published in PLoS ONE looked at how we use different senses to “feel” the beat in music, and found that we can perceive musical beat and meter with both hearing and touch, and not only that, but the two types of sensory information are integrated together in the brain. 

Before we get into this, let me explain what I mean by meter.  Music almost always has a regular beat to it, and when we listen to these beats, we hear them grouped into patterns of strong beats and weak beats.  A slow waltz, for example, will have a pattern of strong - weak - weak, strong - weak - weak, etc.  This is known as triple meter.  A march would have a pattern of strong - weak - strong - weak; this is duple meter.  Studies have shown that even if the music is generated such that it doesn’t actually contain strong and weak beats, people will impose a meter upon the music and think of it as either duple or triple meter.

In the Huang study, the subjects had to identify whether they thought the meter of a rhythm was duple or triple.  This identification was based either on the pattern of accents put into the rhythm (i.e. some beats were made to be louder and sound or feel like strong beats), or based simply on whether there was generally a note or a rest where we would expect the strong beat to be.  The subjects were able to tell easily whether the rhythm was duple or triple when the rhythm was presented as an audible series of notes (i.e. using hearing) or when the rhythm was presented as a series of taps on the subject’s hand (i.e. using touch).  This is not a new result – previous studies have shown that we are quite good a recognizing rhythm using touch (although, interestingly, not with vision).  

Where this new study showed something really interesting was when the subjects had to recognize the meter using both hearing and touch.  In this part of the experiment, some of the beats were presented as audible notes, and some of the beats were presented as taps on the hand.  The subjects had to integrate both modalities in order to identify whether the meter was triple or duple.  And the study showed that they could, although it was easiest to identify the meter if all the strong beats were presented in a single modality, e.g. all the strong beats were taps on the hand and the weak beats were audible notes.  If the two different modalities of sensing rhythm were given information that interfered with each other (i.e. the notes going to touch felt like duple meter, and the notes going to hearing sounded like triple meter), the subjects had a much harder time figuring out what meter the combined rhythm was in, showing that the two types of inputs interact to a great extent.  The auditory information tends to be dominant, having a greater influence on meter perception than touch.

This study reminds me of a classic paper published in the journal Science in 2005, from Laurel Trainor’s lab.  This classic study used metrically ambiguous music (i.e. could be interpreted as duple or triple), and had infants bounced to the beat in either two or three.  Then the music was played back to the infants with accents added so that it was clearly either in duple or triple meter, and the infants preferred the meter in which they had been bounced.  The researchers concluded that this effect was probably due to vestibular (balance) input interacting with auditory input.  The main point was that body movement plays an important role in rhythm perception.

All of this suggests that in order to help students with their rhythm and meter, we should take advantage of the integration of auditory musical information with movement and touch sensation.  This works just as well with older students as it does with my little ones at the playcentre.  The more senses we can enlist to help students feel the beat, the better.

For instance, the teacher could play the piece while the student marches, bounces, dances or moves in some way to the beat.  With younger children, the parents can bounce them on the strong beats.  This leaves the movement to someone who presumably can feel the meter.  Having the children move on their own may be useful but if they are not feeling the beat already, asking them to move may not improve it.  There are other options, rather than having the students get up and move:  the student could sway to the beat while playing, or nod their head.  Movement of the head strongly activates the vestibular system, so this is probably a better reinforcer of meter than having the student just tap their foot.  That being said, clapping and tapping are also useful, although having the student move their whole leg (“walking” their feet while sitting down) is more effective than just tapping, since the bigger the movement, the better.  The teacher or parent could also tap the beat on the student’s shoulder while they are playing, remembering to accent the strong beats.  In this way, they are receiving both touch and auditory information about the meter.

I’m sure there are many other ways to incorporate touch and balance into our daily interactions with music.  I’d be interested in other ideas – please share what works for you!

References:

Huang, J., Gamble, D., Sarnlertsophon, K., Wang, X., and Hsiao, S. (2012). Feeling Music: Integration of Auditory and Tactile Inputs in Musical Meter Perception. PLoS ONE 7, e48496.

Phillips-Silver, J., and Trainor, L.J. (2005). Feeling the Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception. Science 308, 1430–1430.

Learning in Your Sleep

Imagine climbing into bed, turning off the light, and shutting your eyes.  As you drift off to sleep, a small machine monitors your brainwaves, and when it indicates that you have entered a stage of deep rest known as slow-wave sleep, a Mozart sonata begins to play softly.  You’ve spent a solid hour practicing this sonata during the day, and while it plays repeatedly during your slumber, the memory trace laid down in your brain during that practice session becomes reactivated in both the auditory and motor parts of the brain.  In the morning, unaware of your nighttime “practice session”, your performance of the sonata is significantly improved.

I would normally be highly skeptical of this type of claim.  It reminds me of that scene in Huxley’s Brave New World where children listen to history lessons in their sleep, instead of having to go to school.  It sounds like new age mumbo-jumbo to me.

Except that this exact type of learning effect has been shown by researchers at Northwestern University and published in this month’s issue of Nature Neuroscience.  The experiment was straightforward:  Sixteen people learned to play two short melodies on the piano, and then had a 90 minute nap.  When they entered slow-wave sleep, one of the melodies was quietly played twenty times.  After the nap, performance on the melody that had been played during the nap was significantly improved compared to the melody that wasn’t played.

This study brings together two interesting aspects of music learning.  The first is the role of sleep in aiding learning.  Previous studies have shown that memory consolidation during sleep is an important source of improvement between practice sessions. The second aspect is the importance of sensorimotor integration in learning to play an instrument.  During practicing, our brains learn to associate the sounds we produce (the auditory feedback) with the movements that lead to those sounds. The auditory and motor parts of our brains become more highly linked, so that just hearing a song that we know how to play activates motor parts of the brain, and just making the movements associated with playing a song (like pressing the keys of an unplugged keyboard) causes auditory parts of the brain to light up.  This is why hearing the music in our sleep can cause improvements in our motor performance:  the replaying of the song reactivates the auditory memory, which simultaneously reactivates the motor memory, strengthening both these memories and their association with each other.

So, am I going to start listening to piano music in my sleep?  I’m certainly considering giving it a try.  There are a few possible caveats to the potential gains here.  First, music might interfere with sleep.  In the research study, there were a couple of subjects who did wake up while the music was playing, so this could definitely be a downside.  Another issue to consider is that the music should probably be played during slow-wave sleep, as it was in the research study, to have maximum effect (although the effects of playing music during other stages of sleep have yet to be examined).  Most people (myself included) don’t keep track of when they are in deep sleep.  However, there are iphone apps that claim to monitor stages of sleep (usually these aim to waken you during light sleep) and these could potentially be adapted to trigger music during deep sleep.  A third issue is that the effect on music motor learning might simply be a bias instead of an absolute gain in learning.  What this means is that listening to one song might improve performance on that song at the expense of other songs being learned.  In the research study, the melody that was played during sleep improved 7.9%, while the other melody only improved 2.6%.  Meanwhile, for people who didn’t have either melody played during their sleep, both melodies improved about 4.4%.  Perhaps there is a limit to how much improvement can happen during sleep: listening to the one melody caused it to be improved but maybe also caused the other melody to improve less.

In any case, it sounds like a fun summer project and I do have a couple of piano pieces I’m trying to learn, so why not?  Sweet dreams!

Reference:

Antony, J.W., Gobel, E.W., O’Hare, J.K., Reber, P.J., and Paller, K.A. (2012). Cued memory reactivation during sleep influences skill learning. Nature Neuroscience 15, 1114–1116.

Effort

Whew!  May and June are crazy months for me.  As the end of the school approaches, it’s time to focus on finishing up my piano classes for the summer.  Last weekend saw my year-end piano recital, and this week I teach my last classes and lessons, except for those students who have exams at the end of June.  In addition, these months are the time when I have to look after my least favourite part of music teaching:  the shameless self-promotion, trying to fill my new classes for the fall.  My musical theatre group’s summer show opens in two weeks (unbelievably soon!), and I am scrambling to memorize lines and master dance steps.  And on top of all that, it’s time for me to start preparing for the summer university course that I teach, “Elements of Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology”.  I’ve been lining up guest lecturers, comparing textbooks, and starting to review my notes and presentations. 

All of this is by way of explanation for the recent dearth of posts here on my blog.  I have a post that’s been two-thirds finished for weeks now, and I really will get around to those last few paragraphs soon.  And since I’m in the process of reviewing all of neuroanatomy, you can expect posts this summer discussing specific areas of the brain, how they work, and their role in music-making.

In the meantime, I wanted to point out this excellent blog post by Jonah Lehrer (whose fascinating new book “Imagine” is one of several that I am halfway through reading).  His post describes a new research paper looking at what parts of the brain are active when we are deciding whether or not a task is worth the effort we are expending.  I won’t describe the research in any detail, because Lehrer does such a good job, but it turns out that there are specific parts of the brain (left striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that receive more dopamine in people who are more willing to persist with a difficult job, and different parts of the brain (the insula) that receive more dopamine in people who give up easily.

This observation struck a chord with me because I’ve been busy researching about the topic of “Motivation and the Brain” for a talk I will be giving to the B.C. Music for Young Children teachers in the fall.  The question of how to motivate students and encourage them to practice well and regularly is a never-ending one for most music teachers.  My experience as a teacher and a parent has been that the hardest challenge that students need to overcome is their own desire to just go and do something easier.  Practicing music is hard work, and the immediate rewards may be small, so it’s hard for students to stick with it, every practice session.  But it’s harder for some than for others.  Even between my own two children, the difference in “stick-to-it-iveness” is astonishing, and directly related to their different levels of success at playing the piano.  What I find remarkable is that we can now relate this aspect of personality to levels of neurotransmitters in specific parts of the brain.

The more important issue, to my mind, is whether there’s anything we can do to encourage the growth of persistence as a personality trait.  Can we learn to have higher levels of dopamine in the appropriate structures in the brain?  Perhaps if we can wheedle kids into practicing enough, they will learn to see the connection between the work and the reward; the neurons in the reward pathway will become rewired to reinforce those parts of the brain making the decision about whether practicing is worth the effort.  Certainly children can become more willing to work hard over time, but it’s difficult to know how much of that is learned and how much is simply brain development with age.  My nine-year-old is much more focused and hard-working about her piano practice than she was several years ago, but I’m pretty sure it’s not because of anything I’ve done to encourage her; she’s simply older than she was.

It’s something to ponder, and I’ll definitely have more to say here about motivation before I’m ready to give my talk in the fall.

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.