Unleash Your Inner Musician: The Multifaceted Benefits of Learning Music at Any Age
We often hear about the importance of early music education for children, citing accelerated learning and skill enhancement. But does this mean adults are excluded from the transformative power of music? Absolutely not! Learning music at any age offers a wealth of benefits, impacting your brain, body, and social life in profound ways.
Exercising Your Brain: A Symphony of Cognitive Benefits
Just like your body, your brain needs exercise to stay sharp. Music is a powerful workout for your brain, activating multiple areas simultaneously. This activation strengthens brain pathways and networks, boosting memory, sharpening problem-solving skills, and improving concentration and overall brain function. When you haven’t practiced something in a long time, the pathways for that deteriorate, and the neurons will be used for something else.
Music and Cognitive Function in Later Life
It turns out that learning music at an older age can do wonders for your mind as well. In a study at the University of South Florida, adults aged between 60 and 85 were given piano lessons. Six months later, they exhibited improved memory, verbal fluency, information processing skills, and other cognitive functions.
Stress Relief and Emotional Well-being: Finding Harmony Within
Taking the time to learn something new may seem stressful, but did you know learning an instrument can actually decrease your anxiety and depression? A study comparing a group undergoing piano training with a non-playing group indicated that individuals engaged in piano playing exhibited a reduction in psychological distress, depression, and fatigue. Playing an instrument allows you to make time for yourself and to escape from the outside world for a little bit. As adults, it's already hard enough to make time for yourself, so making time to see your friends or making new connections is maybe non-existent.
Music as Therapy
The impact of music on children with physical, intellectual, or learning disabilities is astounding. Music education is especially beneficial for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) children.
Read also: Understanding Music Notation
Building Confidence and a Sense of Achievement: A Crescendo of Self-Belief
Although it may seem like picking up an instrument is a long road, there are many wins along the way that build your confidence and sense of achievement. No matter who you are, it takes a lot of self-confidence and strength to get up onstage and bare your soul for an audience. Sometimes even great musicians suffer from performance anxiety! Learning music gives you opportunities to put yourself in potentially uncomfortable performance situations and learn to overcome the anxiety. The audience does not have to be massive; you could be performing for just one person or your partner, but when you pull off a performance, you'll feel a whole lot better about yourself! And the best thing is, you will bring that confidence into other areas of your life.
Cultivating a Growth Mindset and Discipline: The Rhythm of Progress
If you’re not growing, you’re staying in the same spot, and that can’t be helpful or healthy in any situation. Pushing ourselves outside our comfort zones is key to cultivating a growth mindset, and a growth mindset is applicable even outside of music. No one said learning an instrument was easy. You might be frustrated at first; you might even decide music lessons aren’t for you, but that moment is when you really test your self discipline. Your schedule is probably already hectic, and you can barely find time for yourself. Learning an instrument requires you to set some time aside to practice. Even if it’s just 10 minutes everyday, you have to hold yourself accountable and make the time. This routine you create for yourself of making time, showing up, and pushing yourself enhances your time management skills and self discipline.
Patience and Perseverance
Learning to play music requires us to work consistently for a good amount of time. It requires commitment and perseverance, and a resilience to the natural ebb and flow of our day-to-day enthusiasm. But there are few things as satisfying as knowing that you've successfully mastered a piece that you've been dying to learn, and that it was your patience and discipline with the musical training process that allowed you to do it.
Social Connection and Teamwork: A Harmonious Ensemble
As adults, it's already hard enough to make time for yourself, so making time to see your friends or making new connections is maybe non-existent. The great thing about group lessons? You get to make new connections, see them every week, and learn about something you’re all interested in together! It also means you’re surrounded by a group of people going through the same thing you are, so they understand what it’s like to pick up something new amidst everything else that goes on in life and can support you through it. When you're playing with other musicians, it's important to always listen to your team-mates and watch their facial and body language. Only then can you decide how you want to play your instrument to blend in seamlessly with the song. This ability to listen to what everyone is playing and find a good solution translates to other areas in your life and can make you a great team-player.
Boosting Your Social Life
When you learn to play an instrument, you're also learning how to create something beautiful for your loved ones to enjoy, which can bring you closer to them and help to forge deeper connections. Should you decide to play music in public, you might make some new friends. Musicians who play together often develop a sense of fellowship, one common among collaborators who can collectively produce so much more than an individual can. Nothing beats a good old-fashioned jamming/hangout session with other musicians, and the bonds and friendships you can develop during them are priceless.
Read also: Understanding PLCs
Unleashing Creativity and Self-Expression: Composing Your Own Path
According to Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, music lets you “look beyond what currently exists and express yourself in a new way.” Music is all about understanding basic rules and then expressing yourself in the form of sound. Writing your own songs, improvising solos, and re-performing existing songs are all ways that musicians create something out of nothing. It should come as no surprise then that numerous successful people studied music at some point in their lives.
Music Theory: Unlocking the Language of Music
Music theory is the theoretical and practical study of music as a framework of concepts, language and principles that inform music creation and performance. Musical traditions are cultural and regional, to a large degree, as are ideas about music theory and the relationships between notes and rhythms. People also hear or comprehend music in different ways. However, at its root, music comprises sounds and relationships between those sounds. “Sounds” are auditory-level frequency vibrations, and the speed of those vibrations (sound waves) causes what we hear as differences in pitch, broadly speaking. In terms of physics, musical harmonies are purely mathematical relationships between sound waves. Rhythms are time-based mathematical relationships. Music theory is philosophical, theoretical and practical - it helps students understand how music works. When students learn music theory, they can understand and appreciate how to write, interpret and perform music. Now, add in the intersection of music and culture, history, emotions, brain development and more. Music theory explores the basic elements of music and integrates the topics of composition, performance, history, philosophy and ear training. Eventually, music students must perform from memory. Learning music theory allows musicians to recognize patterns in music and become fluent readers of notated music. While learning to play written notes is essential for a musician, knowing how to improvise is a learned skill that additional knowledge and experience can build on. Students become literate musicians when they understand the inner workings of a piece of music. Understanding the language of music creates a deeper grasp and appreciation of various genres of music, whether it be a string quartet, a pop song, an opera aria or a scene from a Broadway musical. Studying music theory is critical for aspiring music educators who want to teach the subject to students. Yet, music theory is much more than math and memorization. It is the culmination of traditions, cultures, languages, rituals, physics and more. Music theory is also extremely complex, and much of it can be intangible to those new to musical study. An online Master of Music in Music Education degree from EWU can prepare educators to understand diverse populations and cultures in teaching music, exemplify creative and critical-thinking skills as they relate to music education, and apply different approaches to teaching music in a classroom setting. This music education degree offers seven start dates per year and convenient online six-week courses for the working professional.
Stress Relief and Emotional Well-being: Finding Harmony Within
We all have busy lives, and there will be times when we feel like our heads are going to explode from everything that’s happening. As a result, we seek some form of stress relief. Watching shows, playing games, socializing with others, eating, drinking, smoking - these and many other activities fall within the commonly defined boundaries of stress relief. Not all of them (as you may have noticed) are entirely healthy, and relatively few of them successfully manage to combine actual stress relief with any form of achievement. Here's a thought: How about going for a jamming session and letting it all that stress out with your instrument instead? Playing music is an amazing way to get your mind off things. It doesn’t hurt your health, it allows you to release your frustrations, it costs nothing, and you probably will gain a bunch of close musician friends while you do it!
Music and Health
Music Does Wonders for Your Health Research has shown that playing music lowers your blood pressure, reduces stress and anxiety levels. It can even strengthen your immunological response, making you more resistant to viruses (a trait we could all benefit from in recent times…). Most importantly, music can be learned and played even at an old age, and is a social activity that can keep our minds active.
Connecting with Others Through Music: A Universal Language
Music is appreciated across the world. Think of how many of us can enjoy songs in languages we don’t speak or barely understand. You may be surprised at how music can bring you closer to people, especially if you need to socialize with people from other cultures. If you ever find yourself lacking a topic to talk about, ask the other person what his/her favorite song is, and if you're knowledgeable in music, you may just have the start of a great conversation.
Read also: Learning Resources Near You
The Sheer Joy of Music: A Symphony of Fun
Last but definitely not least: Playing music is fun! Learning to play music can take some effort, but it’s rarely easy to learn something with so much beneficial potential. And when you reach that level of being able to play the music you've always wanted to, it can be totally awesome. It starts with a sense of achievement, and then it becomes a whole confidence thing when you play for others. Then it becomes utter enjoyment when you play with others. It's a healthy addiction that's loads of fun, and I promise that you will not regret making that decision to start learning music. At Liberty Park Music we teach music lovers like you the ability to create beautiful music. But the benefits extend beyond just learning music. You'll also experience the advantages listed above first-hand.
Why Start Young? The Benefits of Early Music Education
Musical experience promotes brain development Findings in a 2009 study featured in the journal of Neuroscience showed for the first time that musical experience for as little as 15 months in early childhood leads to structural brain changes and results in improvements in motor and auditory skills (Hyde et al. A Harvard-based study found that children who receive instrument music training for three years or more outperform their control counterparts in areas such as fine motor skills and superior discrimination in melodic/tonal and rhythmic discrimination abilities. (Schlaug, G, Norton, A, Overy, K, Winner, E. This research has been compiled by Community School of the Arts (CSA) at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. Musical training has recently gained additional interest in education as increasing neuroscientific research demonstrates its positive effects on brain development. Neuroimaging revealed plastic changes in the brains of adult musicians but it is still unclear to what extent they are the product of intensive music training rather than of other factors, such as preexisting biological markers of musicality. In this review, we synthesize a large body of studies demonstrating that benefits of musical training extend beyond the skills it directly aims to train and last well into adulthood. For example, children who undergo musical training have better verbal memory, second language pronunciation accuracy, reading ability and executive functions. Learning to play an instrument as a child may even predict academic performance and IQ in young adulthood. The degree of observed structural and functional adaptation in the brain correlates with intensity and duration of practice. Importantly, the effects on cognitive development depend on the timing of musical initiation due to sensitive periods during development, as well as on several other modulating variables. Notably, we point to motivation, reward and social context of musical education, which are important yet neglected factors affecting the long-term benefits of musical training. Further, we introduce the notion of rhythmic entrainment and suggest that it may represent a mechanism supporting learning and development of executive functions. It also hones temporal processing and orienting of attention in time that may underlie enhancements observed in reading and verbal memory. Psychological and neuroscientific research demonstrates that musical training in children is associated with heightening of sound sensitivity as well as enhancement in verbal abilities and general reasoning skills. Studies in the domain of auditory cognitive neuroscience have begun revealing the functional and structural brain plasticity underlying these effects. However, the extent to which the intensity and duration of instrumental training or other factors such as family background, extracurricular activities, attention, motivation, or instructional methods contribute to the benefits for brain development is still not clear. Music training correlates with plastic changes in auditory, motor, and sensorimotor integration areas. In this article we briefly review the recent literature on how musical training changes brain structure and function in adult musicians and during development. We next report evidence for near and far transfer effects in various cognitive functions that are unprecedented in comparison to other long-term practice activities in childhood. Finally, we point out the important and overlooked role of other factors that could contribute to the observed cognitive enhancement as well as structural and functional brain differences between musicians and non-musicians. We propose the mechanism of rhythmic entrainment and social synchrony as factors contributing to the plasticity-promoting role of musical training that is unique to music education. The proposed mechanism of rhythmic synchronization by which musical training yields a unique advantage of transferrable skills may provide a promising avenue of research explaining the beneficial effects on a developing brain. The review focuses on studies investigating healthy children's and adults' response to formal musical education (primarily instrumental training) in terms of neuroplasticity observed with neuroimaging techniques, as well as in behavioral effects on cognitive performance in various domains. Although we mention and acknowledge the enormous value of music therapy with the aim of restoring lost function in diseased or disabled individuals, this topic is outside the main focus of this review.
Music and Cognitive Development in Children
According to a study from MIT, learning music, not coding, makes kids smarter. They get higher grades, have improved literacy, and are 24% more likely to graduate. Music students also develop enhanced spatial-temporal skills, priming them for STEM careers requiring advanced problem-solving skills.
Long-Term Benefits
Studies say that 2-3 years of instrument study is when academic benefits start to significantly increase. In other words, even if you’re not sure your child will enjoy piano lessons or stick with voice classes for years, it’s worth giving it a try. Even a short stint in the world of music will have life-long benefits.
Why Now? Seize the Opportunity
Why are you thinking about taking music lessons? Before you read any of the benefits above, you were already thinking about it. If it makes you feel something, if it’s something you’ve always wanted to do, there is no better time to pick up an instrument. Now you’re in charge of your happiness, and if learning an instrument is a part of that, why let that opportunity slip by? Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn an instrument, but someone told you had to focus on other things, or maybe you’ve been on the path you thought you wanted to be on, only to realize it isn't what you really want. From busy schedules to juggling multiple responsibilities, it's easy to see why you’d be hesitant to pick up something new, but a strong brain, decreased psychological distress, and an overall escape sound pretty good.
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