Questions and Answers

1. Why is it important to learn music?
Learning music along with academics and sports helps to make you a well-rounded individual. Here are a few studies about how music helps:

Young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year, compared to children who do not receive musical training. Musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics, and IQ. - Dr. Laurel Trarinor, Prof. of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior at McMaster University, 2006.

Playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brain stem's sensitivity to speech sounds. This relates to encoding skills involved with music and language. Experience with music at a young age can "fine-tune" the brain's auditory system. - Nature Neuroscience, April 2007.

1997 - Researchers found that children given piano lessons improved much more dramatically in their spatial-temporal IQ scores (important for some types of mathematical reasoning) than children who received computer lessons or no lessons.

1997 - A research team exploring the link between music and intelligence reported that music training is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills, the skills necessary for learning math and science.

A study with 69 children with autism, attention deficit disorder, and epilepsy showed that while they are exposed to music, (and in some cases, for significant periods afterwards), their social skills and concentration improved dramatically in almost all cases. A related study proved that after a year of piano lessons and music therapy, the seizures in 79% of epilepsy patients disappeared completely.

Music students out-perform non-music students on achievement tests in reading and math. Skills such as reading, anticipating, memory, listening, forecasting, recall, and concentration are developed in musical performance and these skills are valuable to students in math, reading, and science. - B. Friedman, "An Evaluation of the Achievement in Reading and Arithmetic of Pupils in Elementary School Instrument Music Classes, "Dissertation Abstracts Internationa."

If you have a question you would like me to answer about learning music please email me at Catherines.Music.Notes@gmail.com

Have a Musical Day!!! *smiles*

Catherine

"Music lessons should be about the student. Each student learns in different ways, and at different speeds. Music is a journey, and on that journey, we will work and learn together." - Catherine

Books with CDs include:
Impressions Volume One, Two, and Three
Marches
The Frog Prince
CDs include:
Wedding Bells
Lullabies

http://sites.google.com/site/musicbycatherine
www.ShoutLife.com/ClassyKeys
http://catherinesmusicnotes.blogspot.com/