Music and Musical Ability Health Article

Music and Musical Ability

Exposure to music and active participation in music making can enrich a child's life both immediately and over the long term, fostering creativity and self-expression, transmitting cultural values, and contributing to physical, intellectual, and social development. After years of cutbacks, school districts throughout the country are restoring programs in music and the other arts. In 1980 only two states mandated instruction in the arts as a requirement for graduation; now 28 do. Research has shown that listening to music has beneficial short- and long-term effects on abstract reasoning ability. The most publicized study is the one associated with the so-called "Mozart effect," in which college students who had listened to a Mozart piano sonata scored eight points higher than a control group on portions of an IQ test. In other research, the cognitive skills of preschool and elementary school-age children have shown improvement in response to music instruction. The renewed interest in integrating music into the school curriculum has also been influenced by the work of psychologist Howard Gardner, who, in his groundbreaking study Frames of Mind, challenged the limitations of traditional concepts of intelligence, listing musical ability as one of seven basic types of intelligence that need to be nurtured and exercised.

Development of musical aptitude

A child's involvement with music begins even before birth. Studies have shown that the behavior of newborns changes when they are exposed to melodies sung or played to them during the third trimester of pregnancy. Newborns are sensitive to both the pitch and volume of sounds, and they even react differently to different styles of music. In the first months of life, infants already have an impressive ability to discriminate among different pitches, and by the age of three months a baby can repeat specific pitches with a high degree of accuracy. An infant's sense of pitch also plays a role in speech development by making adult speech patterns more readily understandable, beginning with the exaggerated pitches and rhythms of baby talk, or "motherese," and extending to the pitch characteristics of ordinary adult speech, such as the tendency for voices to rise at the end of a question. An appreciation and understanding of the musical structures that predominate in one's own culture also begin in infancy. Six-month-olds can discriminate tonal relationships in a wide variety of musical scales, including those used in cultures vastly different from their own. By the age of one year, however, this openness has begun to disappear as infants' musical expectations become shaped by the acoustic intervals that characterize the music of their own culture.

Infants make their first rudimentary attempts at singing as early as eight months of age with musical babbling and show the ability to repeat distinct pitch patterns by 12 months. Coordination of movement and rhythm develops by the age of 18 months, as does the ability to repeat specific melodic intervals (as opposed to single pitches). When actual singing does begin, usually between the second and third years, words are learned first, followed by rhythm, and then pitch. By the age of five, a child has acquired a repertoire of songs. Kindergartners can typically recognize musical phrases and understand the concepts of tempo (whether music is fast and slow) and dynamics (loud and soft). Seven-year-olds can identify pitch differences as small as a quarter tone. A sensitivity to the concept of tonality (what key a piece is in) develops between the ages of five and eight, together with the ability to recognize harmonic changes, and is manifested in the ability to differentiate major from minor keys, recognize when a melody has been transposed into a different key, or identify an incomplete cadence (one that fails to resolve to the tonic, or "home tone").

A special musical talent that is now thought to be influenced by both heredity and environment is perfect pitch, the ability to recognize the exact pitch of any sound and, in return, to accurately produce any pitch without being given a starting pitch as a reference point. (Someone who can sing a given pitch with the aid of such a referencec point—also a special and valuable skill—is said to have relative pitch.) Although many trained musicians do not have perfect pitch, musical training does foster the development of this talent, which is much more prevalent among trained musicians than among the general population. Recent studies have found that perfect pitch tends to run in families. Researchers plan on studying the DNA of some of these families in hopes of isolating the specific gene that carries this gift.