AND YOU THOUGHT THOSE MUSIC LESSONS WERE A WASTE?

It is one one of the cliches of childhood and child-rearing:  you pay for lessons (unless it’s at school for free)  and an instrument or at least rental, the kid plays for a year or two or three, and then decides there are other things more enticing  than practicing and the music career is over.  Done by the age of 12.  Most parents would look back at the experience and feel the investment in time and money to have been wasted, resources that could have been better invested.

But for the many parents who have gone through this and the many who hesitate to even start because of this perception, comes some uplifting and redemptive evidence that there is actually enduring and significant benefit to children with only a few years of musical training.  A study reported by Northwestern University neurobiologist  Dr. Nina Kraus in August in the Journal of Neuroscience, demonstrated that such short periods of childhood musical training provides lasting benefits.   Such musical experience  improved listening and complex processing in brain functioning, and “makes them better listeners in life,” even “confer(ing) advantages in how one perceives and attends to sounds in everyday communications” in focusing on the meaningful  sound with a noisy background, according to Dr. Kraus, and providing  “long-lasting positive outcomes.” 

The study grouped 45 adults into age and intelligenc- matched groups based on years of musical instruction, usually starting at about the age of nine.  The results, as predicted, demonstrated that even the shorter duration music lessons conferred better neural processing of sound as adults.  Previous studies had demonstrated such benefit in individuals who studied for many years or even became professional musicians.

As a side note, another 2012 music-related study from McMaster University in Canada,  compared really young children, one-year olds, who had interactive musical experiences with motion and simple instruments with a control group who were simply  playing with their parents at toy stations with “Baby Einstein” music  in the background.  “Babies who participated in the interactive music classes with their parents showed earlier sensitivity to the pitch structure in music…preferring a version of a piano piece that stayed in key…verses out of key notes,” in contrast to the control babies, noted author  Laurel Trainor. “Even their brains responded to music differently.. with “larger and/or earlier brain responses to musical tones.”

Now, obviously  such  findings and claims as those from these studies can take further investigation to really substantiate.  However, it seems reasonable to think that parents could be guided by the implicit recommendations of these studies:   if cost is not an obstacle, offering children instruction in a musical  instrument is a very good idea, and even  interactive exposure to good music in the very young can offer an early start to the benefit of music to brain development.  And compared to what kids are doing with much of their spare time,  music instruction really has a lot going for it.