Music Making Does You Good

Here are some of the best books on how making music affects us. Some of these are well worth a read in themselves. I'll be drawing on them as sources for some of these posts. Often books like these don't give great references to the detailed science, but they're a good place to start. I've also listed some books on general aspects of how the brain works, which are important references and often have useful snippets on music. (Note: Links are to bookshop.org rather than to certain other hyperscale online booksellers. If you do choose to buy one of these, bookshop.org allows you to nominate a local bookshop to benefit from the sale. The world needs local bookshops.)  Books on how music affects us This is your brain on music ,  Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 2019. Music Advantage: How learning music helps your child's brain and wellbeing , Dr Anita Collins, Allen& Unwin, September 2021. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain , Dr Oliver Sacks, Pan Macmillan, 2018.

Struggling to pick up your instrument to practice? Not sure if making music is for you?  Here are five good reasons to take the plunge, backed up by sound science: Playing an instrument as a child leads to a sharper mind in old age : those who had played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on tests to measure memory and other cognitive abilities than those with no musical background. 1 Higher intelligence: Children who received music lessons for one year gained an average of 2.7 IQ points more than a control group of children who did not over the same period, with particularly large increases in verbal ability, spatial ability, processing speed and attention. 2 Participating in making music for older people can result in lower mortality rates 3 ; lessen deterioration in physical health 4 and reduce the use of medication. Playing the piano exercises the heart as much as a brisk walk 5 . Making music develops your brain : extensive instrumental music trai

  One of my favourite pieces of music-playing research shows that regularly playing the piano has a direct impact on the size of your corpus callosum , which is a bundle of nerve fibres which connect the two halves - hemispheres  - of your brain.  It all makes good sense: both hands have to make fine movements, which as reported previously grows your motor cortex. But more importantly here, those movements, involving nerves in both hemispheres, have to be tightly coordinated. That requires the rapid exchange of information between both hemispheres, and a big chunky  corpus callosum  is the superhighway for that information. The original work is from a paper by Sara Bengtsson at the University of East Anglia [Bengtsson,05] I particularly love the nice clear graph which shows the cumulative effect of the piano practice which subjects put in throughout their lives: The x-axis shows the hours of practice in thousands  (no-one said it would be easy! This TED-ed video based on the same pape

  New Scientist  ( 15/5/21 ) reports on the work of Stanford Uni's David Eagleman, a neuroscientist seeking to build new senses - such as helping deaf people develop a new sense of 'hearing' via a wrist band which vibrates in time with sounds. Eagleman's work rests on the way the brain has been found in recent years to develop physically, building new connections and capabilities in response to repeated activity. This is usually known as neuroplasticity , where the synapses between the brain's neurons develop. Eagleman argues that this is too narrow a term as even the wiring within (rather than just between) neurons can develop, and prefers the term "livewired" to represent the way in which billions of neurons can reconfigure their circuitry every second. So what has this to do with making music? As a stark example of neuroplasticity Eagleman reports that when the brain of a violinist is viewed via a brain scan, one side of the motor cortex  is larger, be

Making music regularly and purposefully does you good. As a Trustee of the rather wonderful charity Music for All ,  I want to help as many people as possible get the benefits of music-making, which we often summarise as follows. Making music... Keeps you younger... Makes you smarter... Keeps you healthy... Keeps you sociable. Sounds good, right? But it's important not just to make those claims, but to demonstrate them using high quality research. I hope that will help more people see the benefits of music-making which really matter to them. It might also help all of us understand exactly what sort of music-making we need to do to have the desired effect. And we could all do with practicing a more regularly, so a little extra motivation won't hurt. So in this occasional blog I hope to uncover and share research which makes good on our claim: making music changes lives .