The Sound of Music

Never Under estimate the power of Music!  Dr Janine Spencer, Child Development Psychologist has written an article on The Sound of Music which actually confirms you should never under estimate the power of music. 

Music is one of the few activities that involves using the whole brain. It is intrinsic to all cultures and can have surprising benefits not only for learning language, improving memory and focussing attention, but also for physical coordination and development. The rhythm in music and its intrinsic emotional content help children coordinate their movements and make physical play more fun.

It may come as a surprise that when children beat out a rhythm on a drum or tap out a tune of a tambourine they are learning more than just musical skills. The reinforcement of rhythm and structure from playing music helps general language skills and problem solving.  

Hearing is one of the first senses to develop. Music heard in the womb can help a baby relax after it is born. The emotional effect music can have on us is with us from before birth.   Over time, babies' auditory abilities become attuned to the speech and music they hear, but they never lose the ability to be moved sometimes literally by what they hear.

Babies older than 12 months lose the ability to hear all the different speech sounds of different languages. This is because the complex process of language learning makes them specialise in the sounds of their own language. Likewise with music, different cultures have music with different timing and beat combinations. Six month olds can notice changes in the metre of foreign music, but beyond a year in age, this becomes much more difficult for them they're specialising to their own musical environment.

Hearing music, however, is not an emotional activity it's a complicated process that feeds into our emotions but involves the logic and reasoning parts of our brains to make sense of. This is why listening to music can help memory, learning and thinking.

Of course, music can be distracting if it's too loud or too jarring, or if it competes for our attention with what we're trying to do. But for the most part, passive exposure to many kinds of music has beneficial effects: it improves performance on intelligence tests and exam scores; it makes you better at maths and better at understanding what you're reading. These effects aren't huge, but they can be measured and they are significant. Even children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder have been shown to benefit in mathematics tests from listening to music beforehand.

Music that you think you might ignore while concentrating on a difficult task can also have beneficial effects. Easy listening music or relaxing classics improve the duration and intensity of concentration in all age groups and ability levels. It's not clear what type of music is better, or what kind of musical structure is necessary to help, but many studies have shown significant effects.

Music helps concentration in mental tasks for a number of reasons. Firstly, its emotional resonance can promote a calming and mood enhancing atmosphere. It can help prevent intrusive thoughts popping into your head when studying or concentrating. Music also has a structure and rhythm that engages the logical, problem solving part of our brains.

For learning or memory performance, it's important that music doesn't have a vocal component; otherwise you're more likely to remember the words of the background song than what you're supposed to be recalling. On the other hand, children often make up songs when they are playing musical instruments and this helps them understand the structure and flow of language.

How loud should music be? That depends on what you're doing, but soft to medium seems better for most tasks. Similarly, sometime fast tempo music helps more than slow, but again it depends on the task. Slower tempo is better for activities that require concentrations, but a faster tempo may actually help simple memorisation tasks.

Some of these effects have also been shown in rats and monkeys, so it's not just human's recognition or preference for different types of music that helps us learn.

While this research is fascinating, what's more directly relevant to parents today is not just how music can help children's mental development, it's how it can help their physical development. The growing child needs to learn lots of motor skills, from the gross motor skills involved in standing, walking, running and jumping to the fine motor skills such as pointing, grasping, touching and writing.

Every parent knows how much children like dancing to music, but it's less well known how music can benefit physical development in general. Moving to music comes naturally to children, and they respond to sounds without thinking. It enables them to learn about timing, coordination and rhythm. 

The first step is mastering a steady beat. Being able to express beat is important for coordinated movement. This sense of timing is crucial for whole body skills like walking, as well as close-control skills like drawing or cutting.

It is possible to teach children a sense of rhythm from an early age using rhymes and songs, and it's often possible to overcome delays in physical development by introducing or stepping up a child's exposure to musical language.

Before they are old enough to do it themselves, we help babies learn motor skills by holding their hands while we pat out rhythms that go with the nursery rhymes we're telling or the songs we're singing. Children's motor skills will develop more rapidly and with greater confidence if they are given enough time to practice and learn from their mistakes. Children's confidence improves enormously when they are doing something successfully, and this includes moving to music.

As musical activity helps a child focus on the physical part of what they are doing. The emotive content of music whether it's a simple, happy tune, or a more complex piece will help bring a story alive and having a coherent story or narrative helps frame a child's learning. This shows once again the multi-faceted nature of music in relation to thinking and learning. What's more profound is that the way we move to music influences how we hear it. The melody of music is something we hear but the beat is something we feel. In order to move in time to music, we need to be able to interpret the weak and strong beats in a rhythm. Normally, the strong beats are louder or longer and we can easily pick up the rhythm. But scientists have found that when babies are played an ambiguous rhythm with no physical accents to make the beat clear the way babies move to the music affects how they hear the beat.

Some seven-month-olds were familiarised with an ambiguous rhythm pattern. Half of them were jiggled on their parent's knee every second beat, and half were jiggled on every third beat. When the babies were then played versions of the music with clear beats, they all preferred the version to which they had been jiggled to. This didn't work if they simply watched someone else dance to the music  the babies had to be bounced to the rhythm themselves in order to hear it a certain way.

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