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...

You don’t need perfect pitch to benefit from music making

Music making does you good at any level, from beginner to pro. A recent study (Leipold et al., 2021) examined a large (n=151) group of both musicians and non-musicians. They confirmed previous results that making music strengthens the connectivity between the hemispheres of the brain (see Practice that piano for a collosal callosum ). Interestingly these effects were consistent between the groups of musicians and non-musicians. Even better news, while half of the musicians studied had absolute pitch (commonly known as perfect pitch), there was no significant difference in the effects of music making on the brain functional and structural networks between the two groups. Incidentally, did you know that most birds only have absolute pitch? This sounds like a good thing, but in fact it means that if you train them to recognise a tune, and then play the same tune in a different key, they no longer recognise it. By contrast, primates (humans are primates) have been shown to have specialist...

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 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 ...

Music Making Does You Good

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