Early music lessons

(Taken from an article of a major news weekly)

When children learn to play a musical instrument, they strengthen a range of auditory skills. A study published recently shows that music lessons in childhood may lead to changes in the brain that persist years after the lessons stop.

Scientists are puzzling out the connections between musical training in childhood and language-based learning – for instance, reading. Learning to play an instrument may confer some unexpected benefits, recent studies suggest.

We aren’t talking here about the “Mozart effect”, the claim that listening to classical music can improve people’s performance on tests. Instead, these are studies of the effects of active engagement and discipline. This kind of musical training improves the brain’s ability to discern the components of sound – the pitch, the timing, and the timbre.

“To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sound, make sound-to-meaning connections,” said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. “Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument.”

Alexandra Parbery-Clark, a doctoral candidate, observed “if you get a kid who is maybe 3 or 4 years old and you’re teaching them to attend, they’re not only working on their auditory skills but also working on their attention skills and their memory skills – which can translate into scholastic learning,” she said.Now Ms. Parbery-Clark and her colleagues can look at recordings of the brain’s electrical detection of sounds, and they can see the musically trained brains producing different – and stronger – responses. “Now I have more proof, tangible proof, music is really doing something,’ she told me. “One of my lab mates can look at the computer and say, ‘Oh, you’re recording from a musician!”Different instruments, different teaching methods, different regimens – families need to find what appeals to the individual child and what works for the family, since a big piece of this should be about pleasure and mastery. Children should enjoy themselves, and their lessons. Parents need to care about music, not slot it in as a therapeutic tool.“We want music to be recognized for what it can be a in a person’s life, not necessarily, ‘Oh, we want you to have better cognitive skills, so we’re going to put you in music,’ “Ms. Parbery-Clarksaid. “Music is great, music is fantastic, music is social – let them enjoy it for what it really is.”