Research study: Childhood Music Training Induces Change in Micro and Macroscopic Brain Structure: Results from a Longitudinal Study (Assal Habibi et al.)

From the abstract: “We conclude that music training induces macro and microstructural brain changes in school-age children, and that those changes are not attributable to pre-existing biological traits.”

Where to find it: Cerebral Cortex, Volume 28, Issue 12, December 2018, pp. 4336 – 4347 or click here to download the article from Oxford University Press.  

News article: Want to ‘Train Your Brain’? Forget Apps, Learn a Musical Instrument (Mo Costandi)

From the article: “Unlike commercial brain training products, which only improve performance on the skills involved, musical training has what psychologists refer to as transfer effects – in other words, learning to play a musical instrument seems to have a far broader effect on the brain and mental function, and improves other abilities that are seemingly unrelated.”

Where to find it: The Guardian, 24 October 2016 or click here to access the online article at their site. 

Research study: Does Music Instruction Improve Fine Motor Abilities? (Eugenia Costa-Giomi)

From the abstract: “A significant improvement in fine motor skills was found only for the children who received the lessons, and a significant difference in the speed of response was found between the two groups at the end of the two years of instruction. The innumerable opportunities to assess, refine, and time their motor responses to specific stimuli during musical practice and the availability of constant evaluative feedback (i.e., sound) may allow musicians to improve the accuracy and speed of perceiving and responding to relevant stimuli.”

Where to find it: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1060, Issue 1, January 2006, pp. 262-264 or click here to access from researchgate.net.

Research study: Early Musical Training and White-Matter Plasticity in the Corpus Callosum: Evidence for a Sensitive Period (Christopher J. Steele et al.)

From the abstract: “[…] Our findings indicate that early musical training enhances the development of white matter pathways in the CC and temporal lobe that support interhemispheric interaction and sensorimotor integration. Enhanced white matter plasticity in ET in these regions may be the result of an interaction between training during an early sensitive period and on-going practice. Thus, early training may induce initial changes in white-matter connectivity that serve as a scaffold on which later training continues to build.”

Where to find it: Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 33, Issue. 3, 16 January 2013, pp. 1282-1290; access the full article here or read an explanatory overview from Neuroscience News here.

Research study: The Effect of Music Intervention on Attention in Children: Experimental Evidence (Yuka Kasuya-Ueba et al.)

From the conclusion: “[…] Results suggest that music intervention may be a promising tool to train attention control in children by eliciting underlying induced oscillatory activity associated with attentional ability and neuroplasticity.”

Where to find it: Frontiers in Neuroscience, Volume 14, 24 July 2020 or access it here directly.

News article: Musical Training Can Improve Attention and Working Memory in Children (Maryam Clark)

From the article: “Musically trained children perform better at attention and memory recall and have greater activation in brain regions related to attention control and auditory encoding, executive functions known to be associated with improved reading, higher resilience, greater creativity, and a better quality of life.”

Where to find it: Frontiers Science Communications in Featured News: Neuroscience, 8 October 2020 or click here for a direct link.

Research study: Neural Dynamics of Improved Bimodal Attention and Working Memory in Musically Trained Children (Leonie Kausel et al.)

From the abstract: “Participants were presented with a pair of bimodal stimuli (auditory and visual) and were asked to pay attention only to the auditory, only to the visual, or to both at the same time. The stimuli were afterward tested with a memory task in order to confirm attention allocation. Both groups had higher accuracy on items that they were instructed to attend, but musicians had an overall better performance on both memory tasks across attention conditions.”

Where to find it: Frontiers in Neuroscience, Volume 14, 8 October 2020; read it here online.  

Research study: Music Training and Working Memory: An ERP Study (Elyse M. George et al.)

From the abstract: “These findings demonstrate that long-term music training is related to improvements in working memory, in both the auditory and visual domains and in terms of both behavioral and ERP measures.”

Where to find it: Neuropsychologia, Volume 49, Issue 5, April 2011, pp. 1083-1094 or find it here on sciencedirect.com. 

Research study: Cognitive Control in Auditory Working Memory Is Enhanced in Musicians (Karen Johanne Pallesen et al.) 

From the study: “[…] Superior working memory task performance in musicians rely on an enhanced ability to exert sustained cognitive control. This cognitive benefit in musicians may be a consequence of focused musical training.”

Where to find it: The Public Library of Science (PLOS), 15 June 2010 using the link here.

Research study: Music Lessons Enhance IQ (E. Glenn Schellenberg et al.)

From the abstract: “Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic achievement.”

Where to find it: Psychological Science, Volume 15, No. 8, 2004, pp. 511–514 which can be accessed online here through SAGE Journals.

Report: Involvement in the Arts and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement in Music and Theater Arts (James Catterall et al.) 

From the report: “[…] Arts involved students do better on many measures, their performance advantages grow over time, and […] these two general performance comparisons also hold for low SES children.”

Where to find it: Published by the University of California at Los Angeles as part of The Imagination Project, 1999; the study is available on the Kennedy Center webpage here as a downloadable PDF. 

Research study: Examination of Relationships between Participation in School Music Programs of Differing Quality and Standardized Test Results (Christopher Johnson et al.)

From the abstract: “Analysis of elementary school data indicated that students in exemplary music education programs scored higher on both English and mathematics standardized tests than their counterparts who did not have this high-quality instruction; however, the effect sizes were slight. Analysis of middle school data indicated that for both English and math, students in both exceptional music programs and deficient instrumental programs scored better than those in no music classes or deficient choral programs; however, the effect sizes were not large.”

Where to find it: Journal of Research in Music Education,  Volume 54, No. 4, Winter 2006, p. 293 or find it here on the Institute of Education Sciences website.

News article: NYC’s Only K-12 School with Music as Core Subject Sees High Outcome (Tara García Mathewson)

From the article: “This focus on music doesn’t detract from an emphasis on academics, and the Special Music School’s standardized test scores prove it. SMS students routinely rank among the highest in the city on state math and English language arts exams.”

Where to find it: Published by K-12 Dive, 17 January 2017 and accessible online here. 

Research study: A Population-Level Analysis of Associations Between School Music Participation and Academic Achievement (Martin Guhn et al.)

From the abstract: “Music participation was related to higher scores on all 4 subjects and these relationships were stronger for instrumental music than vocal music […]. School music achievement positively related to scores on all subjects; such relationships were stronger for achievement in instrumental music compared with vocal music. Higher levels of music engagement (number of courses) was related to higher exam scores on all subjects; this pattern was more pronounced for very high engagement in instrumental music […] compared with vocal music […].

Where to find it: Journal of Educational Psychology, Volume 112, No. 2, 2020, p. 308-328 with a direct link here. 

Research study: Neural Correlates of Accelerated AuditoryPprocessing in Children Engaged in Music Training (Assal Habibi et al.) 

From the study: “Our findings provide evidence, for the first time, that experience with music training in younger children interacts with development and is associated with accelerated cortical maturation necessary for general auditory processes such as language, speech and social interaction.”

Where to find it: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 21, October 2016, pp. 1-14 and available here at sciencedirect.com.

Research study: Music Training Alters the Course of Adolescent Auditory Development (Adam T. Tierne et al.)

From the abstract: “Although phonological processing improved in both the music training and active control groups, the enhancement was greater in adolescents who underwent music training. Thus, music training initiated as late as adolescence can enhance neural processing of sound and confer benefits for language skills. These results establish the potential for experience-driven brain plasticity during adolescence and demonstrate that in-school programs can engender these changes.”

Where to find it: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Volume 112, No. 32, 20 July 2015 and available on their website here.

Research study: The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies (James S. Catterall et al.)

From the study: “Young adults who had intensive arts experiences in high school are more likely to show civic-minded behavior than young adults who did not. They take an interest in current affairs, as evidenced by comparatively high levels of volunteering, voting, and engagement with local or school politics. In many cases, this difference appears in both low and high-SES groups.”

Where to find it: Published through National Endowment for the Arts and available here on the arts.gov website. 

Research study: How Learning a Musical Instrument Affects the Development of Skills (Adrian Hille et al.) 

From the study: “Our findings suggest that adolescents with music training have better cognitive skills and school grades and are more conscientious, open and ambitious. These effects do not differ by socio-economic status. Music improves cognitive and non-cognitive skills more than twice as much as sports, theater or dance.” 

“In addition, when carried out in a group, music education can promote the development of social skills as well as the sense of belonging to a group.”

Where to find it: Part of The German Socio-Economic Panel Study at DIW Berlin (SOEP), September 2013; click here for a direct download.

Research study: The Chorus Impact Study: How Children, Adults, and Communities Benefit from Choruses (Chorus America)

From the study: “Parents of children in choirs are significantly and consistently more likely to report that their children are better team players and have more advanced social skills than parents of children who’ve never participated. An overwhelming majority of these parents date improvements in these areas to when their child joined a choir, and also say their child’s ability to manage his/her emotions and/or read the emotions of others improved after they became choral singers.”

“Educators—drawn widely across disciplines in our sample—are even more emphatic about the positive role that choirs play in childhood education and development. Large majorities of educators, often 80 percent or more, agree that choir participation can help make students better participants in groups, help develop stronger social skills, lead to better emotional expression and management, improve overall academic performance, help instill self-discipline and punctuality, and more.”

Where to find it: Talking points and more resources are available here on the Chorus America website, or a direct download can be accessed here. Published 2009.

Research study: Cortical Thickness Maturation and Duration of Music Training: Health-Promoting Activities Shape Brain Development (James J. Hudziak et al.)

From the study: “Music training was also associated with the rate of cortical thickness development in both orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, brain areas that play a critical role in inhibitory control, as well as aspects of emotion processing. Indeed, portions of the OFC have been implicated in emotion regulatory processes via top-down modulation of the amygdalae.”

Where to find it: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology, Volume 53, Issue 11, November 2014, pp. 1153-1161 with a direct link to download here.

Research digest: Young People’s Mental Health (Centre for Cultural Values)

From the findings: “Engaging with culture also helps young people to cope with difficult feelings and act as a distraction from negative thoughts, with the phrase ‘safe space’ being a recurrent term within the literature. These spaces were referred to as ‘non-judgemental’, places for positive social experiences and an opportunity for escapism. Within these spaces young people were able to develop new friendships and feel a sense of belonging that they did not feel in other walks of life. Music composition and lyric writing in particular offered young people a creative outlet without directly relating it to their own experiences. The ability to use music composition as a method to cope with challenging circumstances and reflect on trauma was observed, with three studies reporting a reduction in self-harming behaviour. This was particularly linked to hip hop and rap.”

Where to find it: Published by the Centre for Cultural Values, November 2021 with information on their website here and a direct download here.  

Research study: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Improvisation on the Development of Children’s Creative Thinking in Music (Theano Koutsoupidou et al.) 

From the study: “Musical creativity has been associated with children’s cognitive and emotional development and its value is increasingly acknowledged in psychological and therapeutic studies. The importance of creativity has been stressed by many researchers and has been acknowledged in many different fields, including psychology, sociology, and education.”

“Analysis revealed that improvisation affects significantly the development of creative thinking; in particular, it promotes musical flexibility, originality, and syntax in children’s music-making.”

Where to find it: Psychology of Music, Volume 37, Issue 3, 2009, pp. 251–278 which can be found here. 

News article: Is Music the Key to Success? (Joanne Lipman)

From the article: “Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.”

Where to find it: The New York Times, 12 October 2013 and published online here. 

Research study: How Musical Training Affects Cognitive Development: Rhythm, Reward and Other Modulating Variables

From the study: “Learning to play an instrument offers a child the opportunity for creative self-expression and the development of an identity. Furthermore, musical training can be a leisure activity and a possibility to learn a form of discipline outside of the frame of the school curriculum, which gives the opportunity for rewarding experiences of self-achievement and positive reinforcement. Moreover, music education in preschool children, or first years of instrumental classes, as well as singing in a choir, has an important social component. Learning to make music together requires the respect of others and teaches implicit communicative rules and skills.”

Where to find it: Frontiers in Neuroscience, Volume 7, 2014; click here for access. 

Speech: Secretary Arne Duncan, Arts Education Partnership National Forum

From the speech: “Arts education is essential to stimulating the creativity and innovation that will prove critical to young Americans competing in a global economy.”

Where to find it: Access a video of the speech here, given April 9, 2010.

Research study: Effects of Three Years of Piano Instruction on Children’s Academic Achievement, School Performance and Self-Esteem (Eugenia Costa-Giomi) 

From the study: “The results of the study indicate that there are specific benefits associated with piano instruction, especially the development of self-esteem. The increase in self-esteem of the children who completed three years of piano instruction was significant while the changes in self-esteem of those who never participated in piano instruction or who dropped out of the lessons were not. Because of the longitudinal nature of the present investigation it is possible to assert that continuous participation in the piano lessons was the cause of the difference among the groups of children.”

Where to find it: Psychology of Music, Volume 32, Issue 2, April 2004, pp. 139-152 which is accessible here for purchase; an earlier article by the author is available here and was published in Journal of Research in Music Education, Volume 47, No. 3. Autumn 1999, pp. 198-212.

Research study: The Impact of Instrumental Music Learning on Attainment at Age 16: A Pilot Study (Susan Hallam et al.)

From the study: “There were high correlations between positive self perception, cognitive competence, self-esteem, and interest and involvement in school music. The confidence and self-beliefs that can accrue from learning to play a musical instrument and performing in public may increase motivation more generally leading to enhanced attainment across the whole curriculum.”

“If active engagement with music increases positive perceptions of self, this may transfer to other areas of study and increase motivation to persist.”

Where to find it: British Journal of Music Education, Volume 33, No. 3, November 2016, pp. 247-261 which can be downloaded here. 

Thesis: The Impact of Music Education on Select Students’ Self-Efficacy (Amber L. Gustafson) 

From the document: “Results revealed participation in the music program provided students with access to several sources of self-efficacy and produced strong positive correlations to measures of self-esteem and perseverance.” 

Where to find it: California State University San Marcos, 2017, p. 108 which is available here.