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Music Study linked to higher educational and financial attainment Research confirms that music education at an early age greatly increases the likelihood that a child will grow up to seek higher education and ultimately earn a higher salary. If you want to be a CEO, college president, or even a rock star, the message from this survey is: take music. As with reading, writing, and arithmetic, music should be a core academic focus because it is so vital to a well rounded education and will pay dividends later in life, no matter the career path taken. Respondents of the Harris Poll cite skills they learned in music as helping
them in their careers today. Seventy-two percent of adults with music
education agree that it equips people to be better team players in their
career, and nearly six in ten agree that music education has influenced
their creative problem-solving skills. Many also agree music education
provides a disciplined approach to problem solving, a sense of organization
and prepares someone to manage the tasks of their job more successfully.
“The musician is constantly adjusting decisions on tempo, tone,
style, rhythm, phrasing, and feeling--training the brain to become incredibly
good at organizing and conducting numerous activities at once. Dedicated
practice of this orchestration can have a great payoff for lifelong attentional
skills, intelligence, and an ability for self-knowledge and expression.”
Three experiments revealed that music lessons promote sensitivity to
emotions conveyed by speech prosody. After hearing semantically neutral
utterances spoken with emotional (i.e., happy, sad, fearful, or angry)
prosody, or tone sequences that mimicked the utterances' prosody, participants
identified the emotion conveyed. In Experiment 1 (n=20), musically trained
adults performed better than untrained adults. In Experiment 2 (n=56),
musically trained adults outperformed untrained adults at identifying
sadness, fear, or neutral emotion. In Experiment 3 (n=43), 6-year-olds
were tested after being randomly assigned to 1 year of keyboard, vocal,
drama, or no lessons. The keyboard group performed equivalently to the
drama group and better than the no-lessons group at identifying anger
or fear. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
When a child learns, by experience, that music forges direct links between
self and world, self-expression becomes more fluent; the music helps interpret
"who I am." The child who is taught how to create music is also
learning something significant about his or her innate creativity. As
a child begins to understand the connection between hours of practice
and the quality of a performance, self-discipline becomes self-reinforcing.
It is only a short jump from that realization to making the connection
between self-discipline and performance in life.
We examined the relations among phonological awareness, music perception
skills, and early reading skills in a population of 100 4- and 5-year-old
children. Music skills were found to correlate significantly with both
phonological awareness and reading development. Regression analyses indicated
that music perception skills contributed unique variance in predicting
reading ability, even when variance due to phonological awareness and
other cognitive abilities (math, digit span, and vocabulary) had been
accounted for. Thus, music perception appears to tap auditory mechanisms
related to reading that only partially overlap with those related to phonological
awareness, suggesting that both linguistic and nonlinguistic general auditory
mechanisms are involved in reading. |
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