Why Music
Music training for the development of auditory skills
Neuroscience research has shown that music training leads
to changes throughout the auditory system that prime musicians for listening challenges beyond music processing. This effect of music training suggests that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness. Therefore, the role of music in shaping individual development deserves consideration.
Hearing the Music, Honing the Mind: Scientific American
Studies have shown that assiduous instrument training from an early age can help the brain to process sounds better, making it easier to stay focused when absorbing other subjects, from literature to tensor calculus. The musically adept are better able to concentrate on a biology lesson despite the racket in the classroom or, a few years later, to finish a call with a client when a colleague in the next cubicle starts screaming at an underling. They can attend to several things at once in the mental scratch pad called working memory, an essential skill in this era of multitasking.
Improved effectiveness of performance monitoring in amateur instrumental musicians
New research finds musical training appears to sharpen our ability to detect our own mistakes, and rapidly make needed adjustments.
- Summary Article
- Full Article
- ABSTRACT:
Playing a musical instrument might improve the ability to monitor our behavior and adjust our responses effectively when needed. As these processes are amongst the first to be affected by cognitive aging, our evidence could promote musical activity as a realistic intervention to slow or even prevent age-related decline in frontal cortex mediated executive functioning.
Music and Cognition: The Mozart Effect Revisited
Kraus’ research has shown that musicians, who memorize sounds and patterns, can process music and language better than people who don’t have musical training. Over time, she says, musical experience fundamentally changes how the nervous system responds to sound. Among other things, musicians are better at hearing speech in noise, an important skill for kids trying to learn in a bustling classroom.
A Little Goes a Long Way: How the Adult Brain Is Shaped by Musical Training in Childhood
Playing a musical instrument changes the anatomy and function of the brain. But do these changes persist after music training stops? We probed this question by measuring auditory brainstem responses in a cohort of healthy young human adults with varying amounts of past musical training. We show that adults who received formal music instruction as children have more robust brainstem responses to sound than peers who never participated in music lessons and that the magnitude of the response correlates with how recently training ceased.
Our results suggest that neural changes accompanying musical training during childhood are retained in adulthood. These findings advance our understanding of long-term neuroplasticity and have general implications for the development of effective auditory training
programs.
Music Making as a Tool for Promoting Brain Plasticity across the Life Span
Playing a musical instrument changes the anatomy and function of the brain. But do these changes persist after music training stops? We
probedthis question bymeasuring auditory brainstem responsesin a cohort of healthy young human adults with varying amounts of past
musicaltraining.We showthat adults who receivedformal music instruction as children have more robust brainstem responsesto sound
than peers who never participated in music lessons and that the magnitude of the response correlates with how recently training ceased.
Our results suggest that neural changes accompanying musical training during childhood are retained in adulthood. These findings
advance our understanding of long-term neuroplasticity and have general implicationsforthe development of effective auditorytraining
programs.
Playing music for a smarter ear: cognitive, perceptual and neurobiological evidence
Playing a musical instrument changes the anatomy and function of the brain. But do these changes persist after music training stops? We probed this question by measuring auditory brainstem responses in a cohort of healthy young human adults with varying amounts of past
musical training.We show that adults who received formal music instruction as children have more robust brainstem responses to sound than peers who never participated in music lessons and that the magnitude of the response correlates with how recently training ceased.
Our results suggest that neural changes accompanying musical training during childhood are retained in adulthood. These findings advance our understanding of long-term neuroplasticity and have general implications for the development of effective auditory training
programs.
The Landfillharmonic Orchestra
You will see children who live in a landfill and make instruments out of the trash that they live on. It goes to show you that human beings require music-making in our lives, no matter where/when we are or what challenges life presents to us.
Music Training Sharpens Brain Pathways
New research suggests that the complexity involved in practicing and performing music may help students’ cognitive development… music training may increase the neural connections in regions of the brain associated with creativity, decision-making, and complex memory, and they may improve a student’s ability to process conflicting information from many senses at once. “It’s really hard to come up with an experience similar to that” said Gottfried Schlaug, the director of the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Not only does it require attention and coordination of multiple senses, but it often triggers emotions, involves cooperation with other people, and provides immediate feedback to the student on how well he or she is progressing, he said.
Karl Paulnack Welcome Address
In a welcome address to students and families of incoming music students at The Boston Conservatory, Karl Paulnack describes the value of music:
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world… The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang…
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
Why Your Brain Craves Music – from TIME Science
Our highest and lowest processing regions explain the irresistible appeal of a song.
If making music isn’t the most ancient of human activities, it’s got to be pretty close. Melody and rhythm can trigger feelings from sadness to serenity to joy to awe; they can bring memories from childhood vividly back to life. The taste of a tiny cake may have inspired Marcel Proust to pen the seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, but fire up the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and you’ll throw the entire baby-boom generation into a Woodstock-era reverie.
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-playing-an-instrument-benefits-your-brain-anita-collins#watch