<p>Long term involvement with music, especially if started at a young age, is associated with a thicker corpus callosum: the axons that facilitate communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.</p>
<p>That is not why I encouraged music ( I didn’t know that little factoid). I valued musical literacy and wanted my son to have the enhanced understanding and enjoyment of music that such literacy and experience imparts. Was I expecting a prodigy? Not at all. He stayed with piano through middle school and played cello during middle school and high school. I think it is just one more thread in his tapestry.</p>
<p>And, as mentioned previously, I think it was very good experience for him to undertake something in which he did not immediately excel.</p>
<p>^ But isn’t this all correlational evidence? Most of the brain imaging studies are pretty bogus…there is never a decent control group. Which parents willingly agree to be part of a study that would randomly assigned their child to either the treatment group (music lessons) or the control (no music lessons).</p>
<p>I totally agree, and this is exactly what saddens me. </p>
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<p>So so true! The million dollar question for parents-- when to push, when to let go; when to know if they are showing signs of a temporary phase vs. permanent dislike or signs of tough spots vs. no talent. Not just with music, but so much else.</p>
For my son it was almost the opposite. School has at times been a struggle, and music has provided the breeze. Not that he hasn’t worked hard at it, but music has always come naturally to him: mastery correlates very straightforwardly with effort. Even though he’s a very bright kid, that hasn’t always been the case with academics.</p>
<p>I know that for many kids at his highly competitive high school, music provides a point in the day that is more about doing something for its own sake, and a bit less about struggle and competition and grades, than the rest of their day. There is certainly work involved, but music is to the hard-core academic classes as working in the garden is to working in an office.</p>
<p>starbright:
you will notice that I said “is associated with.”
You may find the brain imaging studies bogus; that’s fine. I find them intriguing.</p>
<p>Some of the studies were performed on adults: those who were life long musicians and those who did not study or play music. Yes, there was a correlation. I do not claim causation.</p>
<p>Any way, I think there are other benefits, just as compelling as any causation of a thick corpus collosum.</p>
<p>While my son is a singer and not an instrumentalist, I think that music has helped him in numerous ways so far. As a number of posters have noted (probably Batlo best in #18), musicians have to deal with a lot of issues related to the loss of time caused by their relative commitment to music. My son has been singing in school choirs since he was in Third Grade. He had various ups and downs in elementary school, but generally did well in the limited way that academics are measured at that level. When he made the transition to middle school (6th Grade) he suddenly found that he did not have enough time to get all of his schoolwork done. He began to limit his time in Scouts and Tae Kwon Do (choir was a class and didn’t require any additional time). However, because of his love of singing, we suggested that he try out for the school musical in November. We watched with amusement as his interest in the musical increased seemingly each week from “NO”, to “I want to be on crew”, to “I want to be in the cast”, to “I want a speaking role”. But what was more interesting was that with the addional time required for the musical, he actually became <em>more</em> efficient with his time - to the extent that he resumed Tae Kwon Do practice and became more active in Scouts.</p>
<p>When he reached HS, he continued with choirs (and musicals) and began to take voice lessons. He stopped Tae Kwon Do after Freshman year, but continued in Scouts. By Sophmore year he was in three choirs (1 class, 2 EC) and was in three all through HS. He could not have done better academically (4.0 UWGPA), but the choirs pulled down his WGPA and he was not quite in the top 5% of his class. He also got an IB diploma. He wrote one of his essays on how much he loved to sing (and in part what he had to give up/trade off to do it). He does admit that he could have <em>learned</em> more because he was able to get good grades without necessarily doing all of the reading.</p>
<p>He believes that music has helped him academically. In his case, I’m not sure if math helped music or music helped math, but he certainly did well in math and helped informally tutor friends in math through HS. He has no interest however in math as a subject. Where he really believes that music helped him is with languages and at least in part this is because he is a singer rather than an instrumentalist. He taught himself IPA (useful for a singer) and he has an excellent ear for both language and dialect/accent. His current “major” is linguistics with either a minor or double major in music. Music is still a huge part of his life and currently consumes about 20 hours a week. Even he admits that that may be too much.</p>
<p>BTW, maybe its a choir thing, but at least at my son’s HS, the choir was not necessarily composed of dedicated, hardworking academics. While there were certainly some high-achieving students, there were a number of the biggest slackers in the school. My son can sight-read, but many could not and it was sometimes frustrating for him because of the additional time practice would take. In one of his four current choirs all of the members can sight-read and he says that it takes them about a half-hour to completely learn a song. He just spent the last several days of his vacation teaching his mom how to sight-read music because she joined a local choir.</p>
<p>Wow, this was a long post for the OP’s relatively simple question.</p>
<p>I took two years of piano lessons as a kid and 1 year as an adult. The year as an adult convinced me I was never going to be any good even if I did practice, though I did enjoy it, I felt my time would be much better spent painting, which I am actually good at.</p>
<p>S1 took a year or two of piano, found it frustrating, switched to clarinet and had a great time in elementary school. (The band teacher was lovely.) Unfortunately the middle school band teacher, while competent, was not nearly as nice a person and my son dropped band in high school. He had private lessons while he was in middle school.</p>
<p>S2 started violin in 2nd grade and has had private lessons most of the time since. He’s played in school orchestra since 3rd grade and is in two orchestras in high school as part of a special arts program. (The extra orchestra in high school he did at least partly to look good for colleges - they sell it that way - but also because all his friends were doing it.) </p>
<p>My oldest is gifted at math which was clear long before he took up an instrument. Younger son is pretty good, he’d be better if he could remember formulas, times tables and stuff like that! I think being able to read music is part of being educated and I think being able to play an instrument can bring a lot of pleasure to life. Our neighborhood has several bands and chamber music groups among the adults. I’m jealous of them. I don’t think it had much effect on my kids’ academic performance one way or the other.</p>
<p>Son played a song solo in 4th grade in front of 500 adults that came to see the yearly school music program. The orchestra leader stated “now there is a young man who will never have a hard time standing up in front of a room full of people.” He was so right.</p>
<p>Geez, sorry, I wasn’t criticizing you! You were just sharing some studies but I am assuming they weren’t your studies. In the context of the point of the thread (does music make a difference?), I think such correlations are rather misleading. </p>
<p>No more interesting to me than showing piano players have longer fingers or basketball stars are taller. My more general frustration is a gzillion good resaerch dollars are going into MRI studies these days at the expense of so much more needed research (and really it’s just a modern day version of very bad early psychology when they measured and correlated head circumferences and bumps with various outward behaviors and abilities).</p>
<p>Very interesting statement, starbright. I’m not into MRI research, pure curiosity here. Quite a few posters mentioned the association between music and math. I wonder how strong the association is. We know atomom, post #15, did very well academically, but how was your math? Also, are the kids good at math, Marian, post #30?</p>
<p>^ My wife reminded me that her private piano teacher used to ask his students how many diminished thirds (I think - I’m no musician) there were in a piano keyboard. His students would take this as part of their “homework” and then give him their answer/guess. He was generally told that it took them several hours to figure it out (if they actually did). But he had one student who looked as the keyboard, played a few notes, turned to the teacher and said three. When he asked her how she figured it out so quickly, she said it was a simple mathematical progression. She was either a math major or math teacher.</p>
<p>My many many years of classical piano lessons sort of taught me that there are some things that you can’t do if you don’t put the requisite work in. I’ve always been a very lazy student in school - I do very well, but that’s mostly I am unrivaled in my bull*****ting ability. I’ve always been the one to churn out a term paper the night before without having read the book, or to stay up all night cram-memorizing terms only to forget them all right after the test Because of this talent, in school I never really saw any consequences for my laziness. </p>
<p>However, in classical music (and I may be biased, but I think particularly piano, which I consider a slightly more hardcore, difficult solo instrument than most), you just literally cannot BS. You NEED to sit down and take apart what you’re playing, practice each individual section, figure out what each hand is doing and slowly piece it together or you will never be able to play the piece. If you do this correctly, you can see shocking payout for your work. One of my favorite feelings ever is getting a fresh difficult piece and looking it up online and thinking, “that looks impossible!”, then sitting down, spending two hours meticulously figuring out each part, and by the time I get up, I’ve made some serious tangible headway for that effort. Music is the kind of thing where if you don’t put in work, you won’t see results. You pretty much get exactly as much out of it as you put into it.</p>
<p>Regarding the possible correlation with music and academic achievement- I have friends who did as well, or better, than I did who did not go the HS music route. THEY went to grad school whereas I chose medical school… So much for anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>With only a few data points, my observation is that if a kid plays piano at a higher level than his/her peers, it’s likely that his/her academic achievements are higher as well, i.e., higher GPA at high school and acceptance at a better college (e.g., Harvard vs Chicago, both are top schools IMO).</p>
<p>Ds hated and despised the 7 years of violin lessons he suffered through - however, he went from being non-musical (never sang, hummed, etc.) to loving music, humming to himself, and appreciating all sorts of music. I’m not sorry I forced him into it (poor little guy :eek:) edit: 800 on SAT math twice - I guess the music lessons didn’t hurt, though I would hesitate to imply causation…</p>
<p>D was the worst little singer I ever heard–sounded like a cat in an alley-- when she got stuck in a singing class in 9th grade–scheduling mishap. By the end of the year she was singing like a bird, reading music, now this year twice as good and loving every minute. Her general confidence has soared because of this–she dares try new things much more easily, etc., etc. And she’s at home in the music department, among a lot of dedicated kids who have a real focus, and the discipline to support it. So–go music! For her it has been absolutely thrilling and has added a whole new dimension to her life. Oh, and-- it’s given her a new sense of herself physically too.</p>
<p>My D started piano at 4–her wish. She turned out to be wonderful, and continued piano until she graduated from high school. In 5th grade, at school, she began flute lessons for about 4 years, then tenor sax, then bassoon. We LOVE that bassoon, because it got her an almost full tuition merit scholarship at her first choice private college. She will graduate in May with a music education major. I am always glad when she comes home for vacations because my ears gets a workout. The house got too quiet when she left.</p>