CAN MUSIC LEARNING REALLY MAKE YOU SMARTER?
Here are some facts, statistics and thought on the subject.
* Music is a cross between logic/emotions, math/language. Participation in music is acknowledged by the scientific and educational worlds as being the single best activity to improve success in and out of school, on tests and throughout life.
* " I studied the lives of great men ...& women: and I found that...
Those who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand,
With everything they had of energy, enthusiasm and hard work."
- Harry S. Truman, 33rd U.S. President
* Childhood music lessons actually enlarge portions of the brain. German researchers found that the brain area used to analyze musical pitch is an average of 25% larger in musicians.
"The younger the musical training begins, the larger the area. "
- Nature, April 23, 1998
* Skills learned through music carries over into study skills, communications skills and cognitive skills useful to all parts of life. For example, research supports that music helps prepare the mind for specific disciplines of learning. One such study referenced in a 1997 article in Neurological Research indicated that music training is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children’s abstract reasoning skills, the skills necessary for learning math and science.
* "After learning eight, quarter, half and whole notes, second and third graders scored 100% higher than their peers who were taught fractions using traditional methods.”
- Neurological Research, March 15, 1999
* “College-bound seniors with school music experience scored 57 points higher on the verbal portion of the SATs and 41 points higher in math than those without arts instruction."
- Profiles of SAT & Achievement Test Takers.” The College Board
* “Music…makes a tremendous impact on the developmental growth of every child and has proven to help level the learning field across socio- economic boundaries.”
- US Department of Justice, National Endowment for the Arts
* "MUSIC IS inspiration…. It influences the very fiber of our culture.
It can soothe, enlighten, educate, and of course entertain. It is the soundtrack to our lives."
- Anonymous
* “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation=s purpose - and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization”...
- John F. Kennedy
* “There is Geometry in the humming of the strings; there is MUSIC in the spacing of the spheres.”
- Pythagoras
* “MUSIC... gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind,
Flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”
- Plato
* “It occurred to me by intuition, and MUSIC was the driving force behind that intuition.
My discovery was the result of musical perception”.
- In speaking about his renowned Theory of Relativity: - Albert Einstein
* "MUSIC is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
- Anonymous
- "MUSIC is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents."
- Ludwig van Beethoven