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 .