Giving children piano or violin lessons — or any other musical training — does not improve their memory or other cognitive skills. Nor does it boost their academic performance in math, reading or writing. That’s the (rather disappointing) finding from new research — a meta-analysis of more than four dozen previous studies — published recently in the journal Memory & Cognition.
“Our study shows that the common idea that ‘music makes children smarter’ is incorrect,” says Giovanni Sala, the lead author of the meta-analysis and a psychologist at Japan’s Fujita Health University, in a released statement. “On the practical side, this means that teaching music with the sole intent of enhancing a child’s cognitive or academic skills may be pointless.”
Some previous studies have suggested that the cognitive skills children learn during music training — such as recognizing pitches and keeping a beat — are transferred to other cognitive skills, such as performing better at math or reading. Other studies, however, have found that studying music has little or no effect on these other skills.
Indeed, as background information in the current meta-analysis notes, the transfer of skills across distant cognitive domains (known as “far transfer”) “is rare or possibly inexistent,” whether the skills involve music or something else.
“While the brain can be trained in such a way that if you play music, you get better at music, these benefits do not generalize in such a way that if you learn music, you also get better at maths,” Sala explains. “Researchers’ optimism about the benefits of music training appears to be unjustified and may stem from misinterpretation of previous empirical data.”
How the study was done
For the meta-analysis, Sala and his co-author, Fernand Gobet, a cognitive psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, re-analyzed data from 54 previous studies conducted between 1986 and 2019. These studies included almost 7,000 children between the ages of 3 and 16 with no previous formal music experience.
Less than half of the studies — 23 — were randomized controlled trials, considered the “gold standard” of research.
The meta-analysis revealed that musical training had essentially no effect on cognitive and academic outcomes, no matter what type of skill was investigated (such as verbal, non-verbal or speed-related). The children’s ages and the length of the music training also made no difference.
What did make a difference was the quality of the studies. “There is an inverse relationship between the studies’ design quality and magnitude of the effect sizes,” Sala and Gobet point out in their paper. Specifically, they found that the randomized studies, as well as ones with active controls (children who did not learn music but who received other training, such as for a sport) showed that music had essentially no effect on cognitive outcomes, while the less rigorously designed studies described a small effect.
These findings confirm an earlier meta-analysis by the same two authors that came to the same conclusion. “We can thus conclude that these findings convincingly refute all the theories claiming that music training causes improvement in any domain-general cognitive skill or academic achievement,” Sala and Gobet write.
The results also confirm the that far transfer is an extremely rare occurrence, they add.
Beneficial for other reasons
This meta-analysis comes with caveats. As its authors acknowledge, the number of studies conducted on this topic is too small to completely rule out possible positive effects of music training on children’s cognitive skills. Other avenues involving music activities may be worth further scientific investigation.
“Music training may nonetheless be beneficial for children, for example by improving social skills or self-esteem,” says Gobet, the co-author of the meta-analysis and a cognitive psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in a released statement. “Certain elements of music instruction, such as arithmetical music notation, could be used to facilitate learning in other disciplines.”
FMI: Memory & Cognition is an open-access journal, so you can read the full study online.
Defund music!
It is also possible that children who take music lessons have parents who are more generally involved in their children’s education If they care enough to pay for lessons and make the kids practice, they are more likely to be the kind of parents who make sure that homework is done and that screen time is limited (by the necessity of practicing).
This fits my experience. Western music (as in “Western Civilization,” not “western” movies or fiction or TV) is mathematical, as even a cursory study of the music itself will illustrate. Alas, I have zero talent for math. Though I’m competent enough with arithmetic, algebra and other forms of “higher” mathematics have never made sense to me. I can add, subtract, multiply and divide pretty quickly, even at my advanced age, but I had to change career plans in elementary school when I realized that what I had in mind (engineering) required far more than arithmetic, and I’d already demonstrated that I didn’t understand the higher forms (and still don’t). The only academic tests I’ve ever failed were math tests.
Fortunately, music uses more than mathematical abilities, and though I suffered through 3 years of completely wasted piano lessons, my ears still worked afterward. The guitar caught my attention in the 1960s, as it did many thousands of others, and I’ve been able to teach myself guitar to some degree (I make no claims to being a real musician) by listening to a lot of music, and learning a few of the basic skills necessary to play the instrument. As far as I can tell, there’s never been any sort of “transfer” from my rudimentary music skills to any of my other intellectual interests, and I still have no idea about music theory beyond knowing that its basis is, at least in this culture, mathematical.
There are many notable musicians who were largely self-taught, and I wonder if you might also have plenty of “mathematical aptitude” (or did earlier, as you mention you are much older these days, than when you were thinking of an engineering major!), but the teaching approaches, and the individual teachers, tend to be so unevenly competent in the schools, i.e., having the assistant football coach “double” as an algebra teacher, and other less than optimal arrangements I have observed in my own educational history.
Short of some actual identified cognitive deficits, I doubt if children’s math aptitudes (male, female, however classified) when they are grade school age really are as much of a stumbling block as the way math is taught. Add to that possibility a systematic attack on public school funding from ‘the usual suspects’ over many decades, and we see the result: American kids lag behind their peers from a host of other countries.
Even if it has no effect on the almighty test scores or grades, music can be a wonderful emotional and creative outlet for children and teenagers. They’re not little Spocks and Datas; they have emotional lives, too.
When I was a teenager going through a typical teenage stage of hating everyone in my family, I used to sit down at the piano and play for hours. Even though I never got to be very good, it made me feel better and was far healthier for everyone involved than resorting to violence. In ninth grade, when I hated all my classes, choir was the my best respite from physical science (ugh), algebra (ugh), civics with a burned-out teacher (ugh), and phy. ed. (ugh), although my English class was often tolerable.
Emotional fulfillment is not the only benefit. Performing in an instrumental or vocal ensemble teaches teamwork (the performance works only if everyone is on task), responsibility (students need to learn their parts), and when to shine and when to step back into the background, (solos versus group performance), These are all part of the supposed benefits of sports. Participants form friendships with other performers, and as adults moving into a new community, they can usually find a new group to perform with. Good musical training also puts participants in touch with some of humanity’s greatest creative achievements. It’s especially worthwhile to introduce children to classical, jazz, and world music before the pop culture and peer pressure tell them that these genres are “boring” and that cool people “aren’t supposed to” like them.
After a sports event, especially if it’s a team sport, half the participants and half the spectators go home unhappy. If a musical performance is successful, everyone, both performers and audience, goes home happy.
That’s worth a lot.
Let them evaluate the research studies on the relationship between teaching chess to children — as is done extensively in the schools in various European nations and in Russia — and academic subjects. That’s a much more plausible direct venue for cultivating cognitive skills that transfer to mathematics and logical thinking.
“Music produces a kind of happiness without which humans cannot live,” the ancient Chinese sage opined, and Nietzsche, characteristically hyperbolic, went even further, “Without music life would be a mistake.”
See “More Than Just a Game: The Educational Value of Chess” at thegrowingroom.org, which links chess instruction in classroom settings to a number of positive academic and social outcomes, citing “Smith, J. P. and Cage, B. N. (2000). The effects of chess instruction on the mathematics achievements of southern, rural, black secondary students. Research in the Schools, 7, 19-26.”
Learning music doesn’t make you better at math but so what?
Is there any carry over of learning between other areas of instruction. Does learning geometry help master French or English. Does learning history have anything to do with making you a better dancer or speller.
Can’t learning of a discipline be enough, in and of itself?
Curious what the relationship of this debunking study (about “learning” music) would be to the idea that “Mozart makes your Kid smarter” or “Baby loves Beethoven”, which always seemed dubious to me and rather beside the point. At best that was a device to try to get Americans to return to having some classical music in the house, because naturally most Americans would never want to listen to the unbearable stuff for its pure aesthetic value, there had to be some “practical” benefit!
Does everything on earth have to advance some “skill set” now? Engaging with serious art doesn’t make a person more intelligent, but intelligent people engage with serious art.