By Andre Ferreira
Music has a power that is practically immeasurable. It transcends time and language, expresses and influences our emotions, educates and entertains and so much more. Scientists are also beginning to understand the impact music has on our brains. Essentially, the effect is massive and it has a particularly strong influence on the brains of children.
The brain is the ultimate organ of adaptation, and music can help develop an infant’s brain. Music ignites all areas of a child’s brain progress and skills for school readiness, particularly in areas of language acquisition and reading skills. Learning a language and learning the fundamentals of music, are almost identical.
Interestingly, Dr Wilhelm Lichtenberg, on whom an article on a different topic appears on this platform, is a case in point. Not only is Dr Lichtenberg, a cardiothoracic surgeon based in Cape Town, fluent in four languages, he also has a deep love for music and is a gifted singer.
According to American musician, songwriter, audio engineer and record producer Rick Beato, a child’s brain has in the first three years up to twice as many synapses as it will have in adulthood. He says there is a critical window of a child’s brain development from the second trimester through the end of their first year, where their brains are wired to learn the algorithms of language.
“During this time, a window of learning opportunity opens and then closes, never to return. A baby’s brain plasticity (the ability to learn and adapt through experience), is at its peak performance during this time. When they hear sounds, they have to decide where a word begins and ends and they begin to recognize phonemes at this stage in their development.”
There are 2 000 unique phonemes in the 6 500 languages spoken on the planet. The English language uses 44 of the 2 000, but all babies can be trained to hear all the sounds found in all 6 500 languages at a very early stage in their development. These are the sounds that syllables make, one of the basic building blocks of language.
Patricia Kuhl, a professor in Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, agrees. She says the ability to internalize these phonemes happens up until about the age of seven. “There’s a critical window that goes to until age two or so. Then there’s a second one that kids can tap into to develop language fluency relatively easily up until they are the age of six.
“After the age of 6,” she says, “it becomes much harder to learn new languages and almost impossible to develop perfect pitch (a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone), an ability that less than one in 10 000 people have.
Beato says the power of music is that it’s not only mathematics, but also a language. “Think of the phonemes as the notes, the rhythm is the punctuation. This is all the same to a baby, the processing of music, language, and math,” he says.
A new study at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington (I-LABS), shows that a series of play sessions with music, improved 9-month-old babies’ brain processing of both music and new speech sounds.
“Rocking your baby or dancing and tapping in sync with music, will affect a baby’s developing brain,” says lead author Christina Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher at I-LABS. “Experiencing a rhythmic pattern in music improves the ability to detect and make predictions about rhythmic patterns in speech. Our study is the first in young babies to suggest that experiencing a rhythmic pattern in music. It can also improve the ability to detect and make predictions about rhythmic patterns in speech.”
Beato points out that babies gravitate toward music that is unpredictable and has an element of surprise as well as depth. “One of the secrets of using music to spur intellectual development is the type of music used. Jazz is a good example of high information music, it is full of surprises melodically and harmonically. The runs of chromatic scales and abrupt changes in tempo and melody keep the baby engaged and helps them form processing centers for complex information,” he says.
According to the study, babies crave melodic content, they want complexity and they thrive on orchestral arrangements rather than synthesized music loops. Cases in point are composers such as Chopin, Wagner, Beethoven, Ravel, and 20thcentury composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
The study also showed that high information music (complex, unpredictable patterns of sound and rhythms) and music immersion dramatically increase the brain’s recall ability as well as the ability to rapidly process and retain fast sequences of auditory information. Music such as this that uses all or most of the 12 notes, simultaneously activates multiple regions of the brain to boost cognition at an early age.
Links between music and memory are nothing new. It’s been found that singing helps people learn a foreign language and that music can help bring back memories from those suffering from Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injuries. There are many more studies with similar findings.
Music also plays a significant part in enhancing memory. Recently, scientists have been looking at the effects of music on the brains of infants and children. Studies have found that even a year or two of musical training, such as learning to play an instrument, can improve both memory and focus in children.
“Playing music with other people might be particularly influential,” says Laurel Trainor, who directs the Institute for Music and the Mind at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Her research indicates that musical training seems to modify the brain’s auditory cortex. She suggests that playing music in concert with others, requires a particularly high level of attention and memory, perhaps leading to greater effects.
Music furthermore enhances Spatial Reasoning skills. Research by psychologist Dr Frances Rauscher and neuroscientist Gordon Shaw showed that preschoolers who took music lessons, performed better on spatial and temporal reasoning tasks than preschoolers who took computer lessons instead. Similar research by Brigham Young University indicates that engaging infants with music can have similar results.
Classical music has been found to be particularly beneficial for special reasoning, in children and adults alike. For example, after listening to classical music, adults can do a spatial reasoning task, such as putting a puzzle together, faster. This kind of effect is thought to be possible because classical music is mathematical and has a more complex structure than other types of music. The pathways we use for classical music are the same pathways we use for spatial reasoning. However, simply listening to music – not playing it – only has temporary effects.
Learning to actually play an instrument, on the other hand, has longer-lasting effects. It’s been found that children who took piano lessons for six months, improved their ability to complete puzzles and do other spatial tasks by as much as 30%. It is believed that musical instruction creates new pathways in the brain.
Music lessons also appear to improve children’s IQ and academic performance. In fact, the longer children study music, the larger the effect. This is not the first time this link has been found: It was also found that six-year-olds who had a year of voice or piano lessons, had a larger increase in their IQ than another group who started with music lessons a year later.
A 2006 study found that for children, music lessons were positively correlated with higher school grades and higher scores on achievement tests. It also found that musical instruction was a predictor of higher IQs in young adulthood as well as higher high-school grades.
In the field of education, the power of music is perhaps the most important. More and more research is showing us that at least some musical education has a positive impact on both social and cognitive development in children. And these effects are long-lasting. When Involved in community or social music-making, there is a very positive way in which children interact, including children that come from very different cultural backgrounds.
It is so important … and yet music is disappearing from the curriculum. This is particularly sad in a country such as South Africa with its many cultures known for their love of music and their natural talent to sing and keep rhythm.
| Andre Ferreira holds a Diploma In Music (Jazz Studies) and a B.Mus. (Honours) degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT). |
