Music making does you good, eh? So prove it.

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.

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Feeling stressed? Try making music!

If you’re not used to it, making music may seem like an odd way to combat stress. You might imagine the nerves of performance and the risks of getting it wrong. Yet there’s plenty of evidence that, appropriately tailored, programmes of music making can be a really effective route to reducing the everyday episodes of stress that we are all subject to, treating the symptoms of chronic stress, and even effective as part of a range of therapies for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And you don’t need to be a highly accomplished musician to get these benefits. We think of stress in many ways, but from a biological viewpoint stress is a source of changes to the way the brain regulates hormonal activity in the body, i.e. between the nervous system and the endocrine system via the neuroendocrine system . This system regulates many processes in the body including the immune system. In particular, secretion of neurohormones regulates the hypothalamus , which is altered by physical an...

Study says learning a musical instrument increases your IQ by 10 percent (?)

A study of more than 4,600 volunteers has been reported recently . The volunteers chose a new hobby from a list including knitting, exercising and learning an instrument. Apparently the "highest IQ increase came from the music-makers, averaging a score increase of 9.71 percent." and this was achieved after just six months. I'll be digging into the details of this study to establish its robustness.

Want a bigger motor cortex? Play violin for one side, piano for both sides now...

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...

Music Making Does You Good

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