Five good reasons to make music

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 rates3; lessen deterioration in physical health4 and reduce the use of medication.

• Playing the piano exercises the heart as much as a brisk walk5.

• Making music develops your brain: extensive instrumental music training affects the anatomy of the brain with greater grey matter volumes in motor-related areas6 and greater white matter volumes in motor tracts7 with differences emerging after one year of music training8. The thickness of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres of the brain, is found to increase directly with the hours spent practising the piano9.

1 From https://www.nammfoundation.org/why-music-matters/music-research-seniors “Playing an instrument as a kid leads to a sharper mind in old age, according to a new study conducted by Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a clinical neuropsychologist in Emory’s Department of neurology, and her colleagues.  The researchers gave 70 people between the ages of 60 and 83 a battery of tests to measure memory and other cognitive abilities.  The researchers found that those who had played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on the tests than those with no musical background.- Quoted in Diane Cole, "Your Aging Brain Will Be in Better Shape If You've Taken Music Lessons," National Geographic, January 3, 2014” Full reference: “The Relation Between Instrumental Musical Activity and Cognitive Aging”, Brenda Hanna-Pladdy & Alicia MacKay, Neuropsychology. 2011 May ; 25(3): 378–386. doi:10.1037/a0021895.  paper

2From [Hallam,2015]  “Schellenberg (2004) randomly assigned a large sample of children to four different groups, two of which received music lessons (standard keyboard, Kodaly voice) for a year, the control groups receiving instruction in a non-musical artistic activity (drama) or no lessons. All four groups exhibited increases in IQ as would be expected over the time period but the music groups had reliably larger increases in full scale IQ with an effect size of .35. Children in the control groups had average increases of 4.3 points while the music groups had increases of seven points. On all but two of the 12 subtests the music group had larger increases than control groups. Notably, the music groups had larger increases on the four indexes that measured more specific abilities (verbal ability, spatial ability, processing speed, and attention).”

3From [Hallam,2015] ; ; )

4From [Hallam,2015]  ; ; )

5 From [Hallam,2015] )

6From [Hallam,2015] ; ; )

7From [Hallam,2015] )

8From [Hallam,2015] (Hyde et al., 2009; )

9Extensive piano practicing has regionally specific effects on white matter development 7.8.05 Sara L Bengtsson, Zoltán Nagy, Stefan Skare, Lea Forsman, Hans Forssberg & Fredrik Ullén Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 1148–1150 (2005) https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1516