What impact does music have on a child’s developing brain?
Research reveals links between music and cognitive skills
The power of music to nurture the soul has always been known. Its power to shape the mind is something we are only really beginning to understand.
Tap a beat on a baby’s back, sway with your child to a simple tune or expose toddlers to rhythms and rhymes, and you are forging connections in their brain.
Help that child continue on a musical journey as they grow, and they will thrive in other areas of their development — areas like perception, language, creativity and memory.
Dr. Sean Hutchins is Director of Research at the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) and is delving into the mysteryies of music and the mind. A musician himself, Hutchins is an accomplished neuroscientist fascinated with the effects ythat music can have on development. “There’s always been quite a bit of hype around music and the mind,” says Hutchins. “Over the past 20 years or so there have been numerous studies and claims about this type of thing… and what we want to do here is make sure that everything we are talking about with music and the mind is really grounded in solid scientific evidence.”
The RCM has had a research centre since 2014, which works closely with the Marilyn Thomson Early Childhood Education Centre, Glenn Gould School, Royal Conservatory School, and other Royal Conservatory initiatives to better understand the effect that music can have on the brain.
“We’ve been running fullscale research studies involving hundreds of children now, to try and get to the heart of this,” said Hutchins. “We’ve also been running other studies using the adult students at the Glen Gould School to assess what the outcomes of music education can be.”
One of the most important things that this research has found is that simply listening to music isn’t really enough, according to Hutchins.
“The benefits that we’re seeing from music come from practice and come from actually learning and training on music. When you are practising music you are engaging a whole host of skills that you’re not fully engaging just by perceiving music. These are things like recognizing and being able to perform very subtle timing differences, for example, which are skills that are useful in music, but are also useful in language. Musicians also need to practise attention and memory skills, and these are things that are applicable to other walks of life.”
RCM recently hosted a conference which brought together some of the leading researchers in the field of music and cognition.
Dr. Ben Zendel outlined his work studying how music in youth can affect perceptual abilities as people age. He found that older musicians could do better at things like speech and noise tests and that musicians who were 70 performed at the same level as non-musicians who were about 50.
Dr. Virginia Penhune is researching the effects early childhood music training can have on development and looks at neurological differences between musicians and non-musicians. Her work shows effects in areas such as motor co-ordination and language skills.
“Our own work here has been looking at the development of language skills for very young children who are taking music lessons. This involves our Smart Start program which is music lessons for children between the ages of 0 and 6,” says Hutchins. “And we’re measuring both their linguistic and musical development as they progress through our program and our research has been seeing benefits to things like vocabulary size, to things like pre-reading abilities, as well as associated musical benefits.
“We see quite a bit of evidence that musicians perform better at a whole host of cognitive and perceptual and linguistic tasks than non-musicians, and there have been a number of studies linking these directly to music training.”
His research also seems to indicate the earlier the better when it comes to taking up music. “So far we haven’t found a lower limit for beginning. All the evidence that we have shows that the earlier a child starts their musical training, the more benefit we can see. So that’s age-appropriate musical lessons, even for our youngest students.”
Hutchins hopes his research will help parents and educators gain an appreciation for the importance of music in a well-rounded education, as well as assist parents to find ways to encourage their children to stay involved in music.
He suggests that parents let the child explore types of music they might be more interested in. It’s also important for the child, the teacher and parents to establish a good working relationship.
“Music can be a very personal type of experience, and part of what makes music effective is the fact that it is generally fun,” says Hutchins.