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Music Makes You Smart: BENEFITS ON TEACHING MUSIC TO CHILDREN: MUSIC AND BRAIN RESEARCH

"Music is Language and Language is Music" ~ Karen Ellis

Music makes you Smart. The benefits of teaching music to children and effects of music on the brain are proven to foster creativity and improve development. Learn about the benefits on teaching music to children.

CHILDREN'S BRAINS ARE WIRED FOR MUSIC

Language, Music, and Dance are connected!

 

 

 

The Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida, researchers train for contact by trying to talk with dolphins. Behavioral biologist Denise Herzing started studying free-ranging spotted dolphins in the Bahamas more than two decades ago. Over the years, she noticed some dolphins seeking human company, seemingly out of curiosity. “We thought, 'This is fascinating, let's see if we can take it further,'” Herzing said. “Many studies communicate with dolphins, especially in captivity, using fish as a reward. But it's rare to ask dolphins to communicate with us.” Dolphins have large, sophisticated brains, elaborately developed in the areas linked to higher-order thinking. They have a complex social structure, form alliances, share duties and display personalities. Put a mirror in their tank and they can recognize themselves, indicating a sense of self. When trained, they have a remarkable capacity to pick up language. At the Dolphin Institute in Hawaii, Louis Herman and his team taught dolphins hundreds of words using gestures and symbols. Dolphins, they found, could understand the difference between statements and questions, concepts like “none” or “absent,” and that changing word order changes the meaning of a sentence. Essentially, they get syntax.

U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley
During a two-day visit to Interlochen Center for the Arts, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley called for music and the arts to be a basic part of every child's education. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000705/mi_interlo.html

An Artistic Processes Model that leads to independent musicianship. *There are three Artistic Processes involved in instruction and assessment. Creating, Performing, and Responding Developmentally appropriate goals and objectives at each grade level will give more rounded instruction and assessment, and allow kids to find success in many ways.

Brain Research Resources

Dabbling in the arts boosts students' math test scores, concludes Canada's largest long-term study measuring the effects of art, music, drama and dance on student achievement. Math scores jumped 11 points among elementary students at 170 schools across the country enrolled in a program that incorporates art instruction into the regular science and math curriculum, compared to schools without the enhanced arts classes, researchers from Queen's University reported yesterday. The program, created by the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, brings artists into the classroom to teach children to sing, paint, sculpt and dance during math and science lessons.

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(__) Wolfgang Amadeus Moo-zart
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"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Sandra Trehub is one of the authors of a noted study on musically untutored babies, showing that they prefer harmony to dissonance.

2007 EVERY ENGLISH SCHOOLCHILD GRANTED A FREE TICKET TO A CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERT
England's eight top symphony orchestras are jointly promising that they will give every schoolchild free entry to a classical music concert. The goal is part of a 10-year plan to promote classical music, which includes a prize for budding composers. The organizers fear that with a crowded curriculum and tight budgets, music easily gets squeezed out of timetables. They say it enriches children's lives, teaches the value of sustained effort and can help disruptive youngsters. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's principal conductor, Marin Alsop, said: "When I was a kid, I was a bit of a troublemaker. Then I started taking violin lessons. What it did for me was it gave me a feeling of self-esteem because I did something that was unique. A spokesperson for the Department for Education and Skills agreed that as well as being a worthwhile activity for its own sake, music was "a powerful learning tool which can build children's confidence, teamwork and language skills". "A better musical education for pupils can also help them hit the right note in their studies," a spokesman said. Among other things, the government has announced significant new funding to boost music education, especially school singing, both in and out of school hours.

2005 Hearing and Language

Research - Mozart Effect and much much more!

MUSIC AND INTELLIGENCE AN INTERDISCIPLINARY MODE

Making the arts a central part of the curriculum and applying rigorous standards not only improved students' learning of art, but other subjects as well, says an evaluation of an experimental program. From 1987 to 2001, the National Arts Education Consortium, with organizations based in California, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, has developed, tested and designed professional development and curriculum programs that stress the comprehensive approach to arts education. Westat, Rockville, Md.-based researchers, found that the arts program also supported other schoolwide reform efforts. Song and Dance boost grades in Math, Science National 11/27/2002
'We knew it worked': Study measures effects of music, drama, art
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=87B77771-E2C6-4D60-838C-C2BB0BA730EB

Music Spatial-Temporal Math Program for 2nd Graders Enhances Advanced Math Concepts and Stanford 9 Math Scores; Peterson, Bodner, Cook, Earl, Hansen, Martinez, Rodgers, Vuong, Shaw.

The Music and Science Information Computer Archive The Memetic Origin of Language: modern humans as musical primates Intelligence Considered Scientific American -The Definition of Intelligence http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/1198intelligence/1198yam.html

Music Training and the Brain

How classical music helps children to be well behave
Dr David Lewis, a scientist who has been investigating the effect of classical music on the mind and body for more than 10 years, said that his research shows that baroque music, in particular Vivaldi and Mozart, have a "particular mathematical arrangement" which stimulates alpha waves in the brain, making the subject calm and relaxed, yet more capable of learning.

Time Magazine Story "Music on the Brain" Story
"The Biological Foundations of Music," sponsored last week by the New York Academy of Sciences, at which experts in disciplines ranging from neuroscience and neurology to brain imaging and psychology met to exchange notes about what's known and still unkown.

Newsweek Magazine "Music on the Mind" 7/00
"Music on the Mind Scientists are finding that the human brain is pre-wired for music. Could this sublime expression of culture be as much about biology as art? Music on the mind: new studies clearly show wiring for music in the brain.

Indigenous Amazonians display core understanding of geometry
Researchers in France and at Harvard University have found that isolated indigenous peoples deep in the Amazon readily grasp basic concepts of geometry such as points, lines, parallelism and right angles, and can use distance, angle and other relationships in maps to locate hidden objects. The results suggest that geometry is a core set of intuitions present in all humans, regardless of their language or schooling. Steve Bradt steve_bradt@harvard.edu 617-496-8070 Harvard University

CAIRSS for Music- A bibliographic database of music research literature.

Dr. Norman Weinberger Web Site and DATABASE for this information - Online Newsletter

Music Education Resource Base (MERB)

Queen's University Psychology 385 Psychology of Music

Music and the Brain Research 7/03 from Nature Magazine
- Music and the brain p. 661 by John Spiro
- The evolution of the music faculty: a comparative perspective pp 663 - 668 by Marc D Hauser & Josh McDermott
- The developmental origins of musicality pp 669 - 673 by Sandra E Trehub
- Language, music, syntax and the brain pp 674 - 681 by Aniruddh D Patel
- Swinging in the brain: shared neural substrates for behaviors related to sequencing and music pp 682 - 687 by Petr Janata & Scott T Grafton
- Modularity of music processing pp 688 - 691 by Isabelle Peretz & Max Coltheart
- Absolute pitch: a model for understanding the influence of genes and development on neural and cognitive function pp 692 - 695 by Robert J Zatorre

First Evidence That Musical Training Affects Brain Development In Young Children[1]
(This is not the First Evidence and you do not need the Suzuki Method in order to make kids smarter. ~ KE)
Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.
The findings, published today (20 September 2006) in the online edition of the journal Brain , show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way to those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.
Dr Laurel Trainor, Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University and Director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, said: "This is the first study to show that brain responses in young, musically trained and untrained children change differently over the course of a year. These changes are likely to be related to the cognitive benefit that is seen with musical training." Prof Trainor led the study with Dr Takako Fujioka, a scientist at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute.
The Canadian-based researchers reached these conclusions after measuring changes in brain responses to sounds in children aged between four and six. Over the period of a year they took four measurements in two groups of children -- those taking Suzuki music lessons and those taking no musical training outside school -- and found developmental changes over periods as short as four months. While previous studies have shown that older children given music lessons had greater improvements in IQ scores than children given drama lessons, this is the first study to identify these effects in brain-based measurements in young children.
The research team designed their study to investigate (1) how auditory responses in children matured over the period of a year, (2) whether responses to meaningful sounds, such as musical tones, matured differently than responses to noises, and (3) how musical training affected normal brain development in young children.
At the beginning of the study, six of the children (five boys, one girl) had just started to attend a Suzuki music school; the other six children (four boys, two girls) had no music lessons outside school.
The researchers chose children being trained by the Suzuki method for several reasons: it ensured the children were all trained in the same way, were not selected for training according to their initial musical talent and had similar support from their families. In addition, because there was no early training in reading music, the Suzuki method provided the researchers with a good model of how training in auditory, sensory and motor activities induces changes in the cortex of the brain. Brain activity was measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG) while the children listened to two types of sounds: a violin tone and a white noise burst. MEG is a non-invasive brain scanning technology that measures the magnetic fields outside the head that are associated with the electrical fields generated when groups of neurons (nerve cells) fire in synchrony. When a sound is heard, the brain processes the information from the ears in a series of stages. MEG provides millisecond-by-millisecond information that tracks these stages of processing; the stages show up as positive or negative deflections (or peaks), called components, in the MEG waveform. Earlier peaks tend to reflect sensory processing and later peaks, perceptual or cognitive processing.
The researchers recorded the measurements four times during the year, and during the first and fourth session the children also completed a music test (in which they were asked to discriminate between same and different harmonies, rhythms and melodies) and a digit span memory test (in which they had to listen to a series of numbers, remember them and repeat them back to the experimenter).
Analysis of the MEG responses showed that across all children, larger responses were seen to the violin tones than to the white noise, indicating that more cortical resources were put to processing meaningful sounds. In addition, the time that it took for the brain to respond to the sounds (the latency of certain MEG components) decreased over the year.
This means that as children matured, the electrical conduction between neurons in their brains worked faster.
Of most interest, the Suzuki children showed a greater change over the year in response to violin tones in an MEG component (N250m) related to attention and sound discrimination than did the children not taking music lessons.
Analysis of the music tasks showed greater improvement over the year in melody, harmony and rhythm processing in the children studying music compared to those not studying music. General memory capacity also improved more in the children studying music than in those not studying music.
Prof Trainor said: "That the children studying music for a year improved in musical listening skills more than children not studying music is perhaps not very surprising. On the other hand, it is very interesting that the children taking music lessons improved more over the year on general memory skills that are correlated with non-musical abilities such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ than did the children not taking lessons. The finding of very rapid maturation of the N250m component to violin sounds in children taking music lessons fits with their large improvement on the memory test. It suggests that musical training is having an effect on how the brain gets wired for general cognitive functioning related to memory and attention."
Dr Fujioka added: "Previous work has shown assignment to musical training is associated with improvements in IQ in school-aged children. Our work explores how musical training affects the way in which the brain develops. It is clear that music is good for children's cognitive development and that music should be part of the pre-school and primary school curriculum."