If music is the most universal language that people from all over the world can understand and appreciate, it’s also the most ubiquitous one. People listen to music online around the clock on their smartphones, computers, and digital radios. Yet for all of its popularity and success, music has a marginal presence in our educational system.
Our children go through their formative years without formal music education. They rely on what’s trending on the charts to feed their hunger for music and harmony, which hardly qualifies as music education. It limits their exposure to one or two musical genres while denying them the opportunity to savor and appreciate other enduring genres like classical music and opera. But there’s more to music education than teaching students about scales, notes, and rhythm. It can have great benefits for their IQ, language skills, and brain functionality in general.
Language Skills and IQ
Contrary to what many people think, language skills are not an innate ability that everyone is born with. Humans developed languages as they evolved. This is why babies spend months, even years, grasping the basics of the language used in their household before they can talk.
This is more evident when you try your hand at writing. Whether you’re an experienced writer or a novice, chances are your writing will have more grammatical errors than you care to count and your style might start out clunky. You can turn to an online grammar and style checker such as ProWritingAid to get an in-depth analysis and report on your writing, and fix its flaws.
Music education can help students develop their language skills during their formative years. Although some children have an innate ability to decipher sounds and detect patterns and rhythm, the majority of children need a lot of practice and guidance with their listening skills. But it doesn’t stop there. Music education helps students understand how words are formed from sounds, and how the brain interprets sounds and transforms them into words and thoughts.
It’s no wonder that children who grow up in a household where music is played and discussed regularly tend to develop their language skills much faster than their peers who don’t get the same exposure to music at an early age. And since music education takes place both inside the classroom as well as outside it, the benefits to the student’s IQ are immense. When taking part in singing assemblies, choir practice, festive celebrations, and music classes, the student learns to coordinate the muscle groups in their hands and use their ears and eyes simultaneously. This all translates into a more productive learning process and higher IQ.
Brain Functionality and Spatial Intelligence
Recent studies in neuroscience have revealed that the brain of a musician often displays more neural activity than a person who doesn’t play a musical instrument. The secret behind this neural activity is that the musician activates more areas in their brain that correspond to the complex process of interpreting sounds, coordinating their hands and ear muscles, and creating harmony and beauty.
But this increase in brain functionality is not just the privilege of seasoned musicians. Anybody starting their musical education will also experience the same high volume of neural activity which in turn will reflect on other aspects of their lives. When veteran actor Alan Alda learned that he had Parkinson’s disease, he didn’t sit back and hope the medication could slow down the decline in his cognitive abilities. Instead, he started learning to play instruments. Music education with all its benefits to the brain can do wonders in keeping the brain cells active and the synapses healthy.
This brings us to the long-established connection between music and math. Both fields of knowledge have the same effect on spatial intelligence. Whether you’re using math symbols or musical notes, your brain is actively finding a correlation between them and creating a pattern even if it’s not easy for the untrained eye to see. Whether you’re solving a math puzzle or stringing a few notes together to create a bar of music, you’re engaging the full capacity of your brain which gives that important organ much-needed exercise to keep it in shape.
Needless to say, a child with a high IQ and well-developed spatial intelligence will have more options to advance their education in the engineering, architecture, and computer science fields. Even if the student doesn’t pursue these career goals, their current test results will often improve as a result of learning and practicing music. This is why many educators are calling for reinstating music education as an integral part of the education system. Music education promotes an awakening of the latent skills and talents that most children possess, though they may not be aware of them. With music comes art, creativity, better self-expression, and a heightened sense of appreciating beauty in life.
Despite all of those proven benefits, there are some in the education system who treat music education as a frivolous endeavor that wastes the child’s time and the school’s resources. Some even argue it promotes isolation. But all of these false theories have been debunked. Music often promotes healthy social interactions between students and fosters warm connections and friendships that could last a lifetime. It opens doors for students to enter a world of harmony and beauty and get in touch with the creative energies within.