The Music Advantage

1. Sound is Music: Baby's First Language

Around me and you right now is music—if you let your brain, and auditory processing system, think of it that way.

Babies process sound musically. From birth, a baby's brain understands sound through its musical elements like pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and timbre. This auditory processing system is the most active sense at birth, gathering crucial information about the world. It helps babies identify caregivers and understand emotional nuances in voices.

Sound is cognitive food. For tiny brains, sound acts as a vital nutrient, breaking down into elements like pitch and rhythm for processing. This helps babies learn about their environment and the people in it. Each voice has a unique "musical signature" that babies use to identify and trust their primary carers.

Manage the sound environment. While silence isn't the goal, auditory overload can quickly overwhelm a young child's processing capacity. Providing varied sound environments, including clear speech without excessive background noise, helps babies separate speech from other sounds. Music learning, even simple exposure, hones this crucial auditory processing skill.

2. Singing Builds Trust and Connection

Her research found that singing with an infant and moving in time with a beat with an infant may have a very primal connection to belonging and contributing to our tribe or family.

Singing is a primal bond. From an evolutionary perspective, music and singing are ancient human tools for connection, possibly as old as language. Babies, wired for sound, use song to identify family, tribe members, and those they can trust. Parentese, the musical, emotional tone used with babies, is halfway between speech and full song.

Song aids language decoding. Babies prefer song over speech because its varied rhythm and melody provide more information, maintaining attention longer. This extended attention is fundamental for learning. Song helps babies start separating speech sounds from noise and decode the sounds within speech, building their internal "iTunes library" of language sounds.

Music fosters empathy and agency. Landmark studies show that singing or moving to a beat with an infant can form a trusting bond with an unfamiliar adult. This bond later correlates with the infant's willingness to help that adult. Singing to babies isn't just soothing; it may be building the foundation for prosocial behavior, empathy, and the drive to help others.

3. Beat-Keeping Wires the Reading Brain

Children need to be able to keep a beat to be ready to learn how to read.

Beat connects brain and body. When a toddler bobs or claps to music, their brain is undergoing a complex process of extracting, examining, and reassembling musical elements like the beat. This isn't just cute; it's the brain using beat to teach the body controlled, intentional movement. This body movement may also enhance auditory processing synchronicity.

Predicting the beat builds patterns. Finding the beat involves predicting when the next sound will occur, a skill vital for identifying patterns. This ability to predict sequences is fundamental to early schooling, from math patterns to language structure. Research suggests that mastering beat prediction as a toddler may lay the groundwork for complex adult cognitive processes like problem-solving.

Beat indicates reading readiness. Research shows a strong correlation between a child's ability to keep a steady beat and their readiness to learn to read. Children who struggle with reading often also struggle with beat-keeping, indicating potential underlying issues with auditory timing and neural synchronisation. Simple activities like clapping games can help children develop this crucial pre-literacy skill.

4. Music Boosts Attention and Working Memory

Musically trained children have been found to have exceptionally agile memory systems because learning music wires the brain for effective storage and retrieval of memory.

Attention is a learned skill. Attention, the ability to choose what to focus on and ignore, is crucial for learning and develops over time. While influenced by predisposition, it's significantly shaped by modeling and direct instruction. In our increasingly noisy world, the ability to maintain attention despite auditory distractions is more challenging than ever.

Music hones auditory attention. The auditory processing system is our primary information gatherer, constantly processing sound. Music learning acts as a "boot camp" for attention, requiring hyper-focus across multiple senses simultaneously. Structured music activities, even short ones, demand rapid shifts in attention, training the brain to adjust quickly to new tasks and expectations.

Music enhances working memory. Music learning is linked to improved verbal memory and working memory, the ability to temporarily hold and process information. This is vital for following instructions and learning in school. Music training enhances auditory temporal-order processing, helping the brain better understand and remember sequences of sounds, which transfers to language and academic tasks.

5. Embracing Discomfort Builds Persistence

The difference is having experience with the feeling of frustration, because being comfortable with discomfort makes it less daunting and difficult to manage.

Learning involves discomfort. Learning anything new inherently involves moments of frustration, failure, and uncertainty. This is particularly true when learning a musical instrument, where getting it wrong is far more common than getting it right, especially in the beginning. This constant "microdosing" on discomfort is a built-in feature of music learning.

Frustration fuels reward. Successfully overcoming a challenging musical passage triggers a rush of dopamine, activating the brain's reward network. This links the effort and frustration with a feeling of pleasure, motivating the student to repeat the behavior. This process helps children connect persistence with intrinsic rewards and measurable progress towards goals.

Music builds resilience. Persistence is sticking with a task despite difficulty, while resilience is recovering from setbacks and learning from them. Music learning, with its cycle of trial, error, frustration, and eventual success, provides a consistent environment to practice both. This experience helps children become more comfortable with the feeling of discomfort, a crucial skill for lifelong learning and navigating life's challenges.

6. Music Develops Executive Control & Balance

Early teenagerhood is when children are getting a glimpse, physically, cognitively and emotionally, of their adult selves, and this is where the executive function skills that inform the decisions we make for ourselves and others really start to develop.

Executive functions are key skills. Executive functions are higher-level cognitive skills like inhibitory control (managing impulses), planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. These skills are crucial for navigating social situations, managing academic tasks, and making good choices, especially during the complex transition of adolescence. Music learning provides a unique training ground for these skills.

Inhibitory control in action. Learning music requires constant inhibitory control, from waiting your turn to play in an ensemble to resisting the urge to play too loudly or too fast. Group music activities, like passing a beat or playing in time, demand that children override natural impulses for the good of the team. Studies show musically trained children have higher levels of inhibitory control.

Music balances cognitive processes. Music learning, particularly improvisation, challenges rigid thinking by requiring students to find multiple "right" answers in the moment. This helps balance cognitive processes, moving beyond a single-solution mindset. Research suggests music training, even starting later in childhood, can enhance decision-making skills by helping individuals balance cognitive and emotional factors.

7. Ensembles Teach Teamwork & Leadership

Finding the inner or born leader in every child often means knowing when to lead from the front, when to follow another leader and, possibly most importantly, how to lead in many different and probably not so obvious ways.

Performance is high-stakes teamwork. Performing music in an ensemble is a public, high-pressure activity that demands intense teamwork and communication, often non-verbally. Musicians must constantly adjust to each other, the conductor, and unexpected events, making split-second decisions for the collective good. This trains intuitive, in-the-moment problem-solving.

Roles are fluid. In an ensemble, leadership and followership roles constantly shift depending on the musical part. Musicians learn when to step forward with a melody and when to support others with accompaniment. This teaches children how to contribute effectively from different positions within a team, valuing both leading and following.

Music fosters collective problem-solving. Unexpected events during performance, like a musician getting off track, require the ensemble to collectively problem-solve and adapt instantly. This builds trust and reliance on teammates. Music ensembles teach children to work together towards a shared goal, developing skills like:

• Non-verbal communication
• Conflict resolution (cognitive vs. emotional desires)
• Planning and spatial awareness (in performance)
• Adapting to change

8. Music Fosters Creativity & Innovation

But to break the rules you probably need to know the rules first, and in our current Western education system there are a lot of these to learn and there is a very tricky line between teaching students the rules and teaching students how to think about, question and effectively break the rules.

Music balances discipline and openness. Music has many rules (harmony, rhythm, form), and learning an instrument requires mastering these rules through disciplined practice. However, music also thrives on breaking expectations and introducing novelty. This balance of conscientiousness (discipline) and openness to experience (seeking change) is linked to creativity and innovation.

Innovation in performance. While composition is overt creativity, innovation in music often happens in the moment during performance. Musicians make subtle adjustments or collective decisions to enhance the music or recover from errors. This teaches children to do new things (innovate) within a structured environment, contributing to the whole.

Seeking out difference. Music, like a "Where's Wally?" picture, is full of patterns and variations. Our brains enjoy identifying patterns and then seeking out deviations. Music learning hones this ability to spot differences and appreciate novelty. This can transfer to valuing diversity and managing change, seeing difference not as good or bad, but simply as different.

9. Music Learning Rewires the Brain for Efficiency

Musicians in a large number of studies have been found to use less cognitive energy—which means less of the brain is being activated—to complete the same task when compared with non-musicians.

Brain development is dynamic. The brain is highly plastic, constantly forming, strengthening, and pruning neural connections throughout life. Significant "synaptic pruning" occurs in childhood, clearing out less-used pathways to make others more efficient. This process can sometimes lead to temporary plateaus or dips in learning.

Music promotes neural connectivity. Learning music, especially an instrument, is a complex task that demands high levels of connectivity between multiple brain areas (auditory, motor, visual, cognitive, emotional). This intense workout enhances neuroplasticity, helping the brain build stronger, more efficient pathways. This is beneficial during both growth and pruning phases.

Efficiency over quantity. Counterintuitively, studies show musicians often use less brain activity than non-musicians to complete the same cognitive tasks, while performing them faster and more accurately. This suggests music training promotes neural efficiency. Music learning acts like a quality assurance process, refining brain pathways for optimal performance.

10. Music Aids Study and Stress Management

The use of music, or sound environments in general, to either promote or hinder productivity is not solely a teenager’s domain.

Music listening impacts focus. The effect of listening to music while studying is complex and depends on many factors, including the individual, the task, and the music genre. Music with lyrics or complex structures can distract when the task involves language. Consistent, non-lyrical background sound, like cafe noise, can sometimes aid focus by providing a predictable auditory environment.

Music learning manages stress. Music performance is a high-pressure situation that triggers the body's stress response. Regularly navigating this environment helps children become more comfortable with stress and develop coping mechanisms. The reward network activation during successful performance can also counteract stress hormones like cortisol.

Music as a therapeutic tool. Beyond cognitive benefits, music can serve a therapeutic purpose, helping children process emotions and trauma. For some students, music learning may initially function as therapy, providing a safe space and consistent adult connection. This emotional regulation is a crucial foundation before significant cognitive development can occur.

11. Music Builds Lifelong Confidence

The first sign that this shift from therapy to educational outcomes is happening is the confidence of the students, confidence to stick at a task, to speak up in class, to try, to fail and to try again.

Confidence stems from capability. Music learning provides consistent, tangible opportunities for achievement, even in small increments. Mastering a note, playing a rhythm correctly, or performing a piece builds a sense of capability. This accumulation of small successes, especially after overcoming frustration, directly contributes to a child's self-confidence.

Performance builds self-belief. Public performance, while daunting, is a powerful confidence builder. Successfully navigating the nerves and executing a performance, even with imperfections, proves to children they can handle pressure and achieve goals. Doing this in a supportive group reinforces their belief in themselves and their team.

Music counteracts negative experiences. For children from challenging backgrounds, music programs can provide a stable, reliable environment where they experience consistent adult support and personal success. This can counteract the negative effects of trauma or instability, fostering a belief in themselves and their ability to rely on others. This newfound confidence often transfers to academic and social spheres.

Last updated: May 15, 2025