Gift of music lasts a lifetime

While clearing a wardrobe in his mother’s house, 21-year-old Jacques Ruffin came across a letter written by the owner of their local music store.

His mother had rented a trumpet for her young son. When she met with financial difficulties, she told Mr. Jones, the shop owner, she’d be unable to make further payments. “You do not have to pay me any more for the trumpet,” he’d replied. “It is yours to play.”

Mr. Jones may not have realized fully the generosity of his gift.

Research shows learning to play a musical instrument confers a huge range of benefits.

Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego concludes that, because there is overlap between the areas in our brain that process music and process speech, learning to play an instrument is associated with better reading skills and advanced linguistic comprehension.

Adrian Hille and Jurgen Schupp at the German Institute for Economic Research found that musically trained adolescents had better school grades and were more conscientious, open-minded and ambitious.

Overall, musical training — particularly when taken up before the age of seven — is linked to greater plasticity in the brain, making it easier to acquire a range of skills.

Research by Laurel Trainor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., led her to conclude that “the adult brain is also open to change.”

Learning an instrument in adulthood has been shown by researchers across Europe and North America to be associated with increased aural acuity, greater self-confidence and enhanced recovery of motor control after suffering a stroke.

Finally, one of the most encouraging findings is that individuals are likely to maintain cognitive flexibility even if their musical training doesn’t continue into adulthood.

Travis White-Schwoch and colleagues at Northwestern point out that delays in processing fast-changing speech, especially in noisy environments, are often assumed to be an inevitable part of aging.

This needn’t be the case, however. Their research showed that adults who’d had music training in early life, preferably for more than four years — even if they hadn’t played a musical instrument for over four decades — didn’t show the expected delays in neural timing.

In other words, they were still able to process speech much as when they were younger.

So this Christmas, why not give the incredible gift of music to someone you love?