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HOW LEARNING HAPPENS
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This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On
Music
by CORY TURNER
September 10, 2014
4:28 PM ET
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http://www.npr.org/...-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app[9/26/2014 2:00:14 PM]
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music : NPR Ed : NPR
Amir Pinkney-Jengkens, 8, is learning trombone through Harmony Project, a
nonprofit that provides musical instruments and instruction to children in lowincome communities. Recent research suggests that such musical education
may help improve kids' ability to process speech.
Annie Tritt for NPR
Musical training doesn't just improve your ear for music — it also helps
your ear for speech. That's the takeaway from an unusual new study
published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers found that
kids who took music lessons for two years didn't just get better at
playing the trombone or violin; they found that playing music also
helped kids' brains process language.
And here's something else unusual about the study: where it took
place. It wasn't a laboratory, but in the offices of Harmony Project in
Los Angeles. It's a nonprofit after-school program that teaches music
to children in low-income communities.
Two nights a week, neuroscience and musical learning meet at
Harmony's Hollywood headquarters, where some two-dozen children
gather to learn how to play flutes, oboes, trombones and trumpets.
The program also includes on-site instruction at many public schools
across Los Angeles County.
Harmony Project is the brainchild of Margaret Martin, whose life path
includes parenting two kids while homeless before earning a doctorate
in public health. A few years ago, she noticed something remarkable
about the kids who had gone through her program.
"Since 2008, 93 percent of our high school seniors have graduated in
four years and have gone on to colleges like Dartmouth, Tulane,
NYU," Martin says, "despite dropout rates of 50 percent or more in the
neighborhoods where they live and where we intentionally site our
programs."
A Harmonic Haven For L.A. Kids
http://www.npr.org/...-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app[9/26/2014 2:00:14 PM]
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music : NPR Ed : NPR
A class for beginning flutists, crammed into an office building boardroom, labor over "Hot Cross Buns." It's part of Harmon
Project, a nonprofit program offering music lessons in a wide range of instruments — flute, trombone, trumpet, oboe, violi
cello, drums — to kids from some of Los Angeles' poorest neighborhoods. The instruments are provided, and the lessons
are free.
1 OF 8
i
Annie Tri
There are plenty of possible explanations for that success. Some of the
kids and parents the program attracts are clearly driven. Then there's
access to instruments the kids couldn't otherwise afford, and the
lessons, of course. Perhaps more importantly, Harmony Project gives
kids a place to go after the bell rings, and access to adults who will
challenge and nurture them. Keep in mind, many of these students
come from families or neighborhoods that have been ravaged by
substance abuse or violence — or both.
Still, Martin suspected there was something else, too — something
about actually playing music — that was helping these kids.
Enter neurobiologist Nina Kraus, who runs the Auditory Neuroscience
Laboratory at Northwestern University. When a mutual acquaintance
at the National Institutes of Health introduced her to Martin, Kraus
jumped at the chance to explore Martin's hunch and to study the
Harmony Project kids and their brains.
http://www.npr.org/...-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app[9/26/2014 2:00:14 PM]
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music : NPR Ed : NPR
Breaking Down Brainwaves
Before we get to what, exactly, Kraus' team did or how they did it,
here's a quick primer on how the brain works:
The brain depends on neurons. Whenever we take in new information
— through our ears, eyes or skin — those neurons talk to each other
by firing off electrical pulses. We call these brainwaves. With scalp
electrodes, Kraus and her team can both see and hear these
brainwaves.
Using some relatively new, expensive and complicated technology,
Kraus can also break these brainwaves down into their component
parts — to better understand how kids process not only music but
speech, too. That's because the two aren't that different. They have
three common denominators — pitch, timing and timbre — and the
brain uses the same circuitry to make sense of them all.
In other research, Kraus had noticed something about the brains of
kids who come from poverty, like many in the Harmony Project. These
children often hear fewer words by age 5 than other kids do.
And that's a problem, Kraus says, because "in the absence of
stimulation, the nervous system ... hungry for stimulation ... will make
things up. So, in the absence of sound, what we saw is that there was
just more random background activity, which you might think of as
static."
In addition to that "neural noise," as Kraus calls it, ability to process
sound — like telling the difference between someone saying "ba" and
"ga" — requires microsecond precision in the brain. And many kids
raised in poverty, Kraus says, simply have a harder time doing it;
individual sounds can seem "blurry" to the brain. (To hear an analogy
of this, using an iconic Mister Rogers monologue — giving you some
sense of what the brain of a child raised in poverty might hear — be
sure to listen to the audio version of this story.)
Improving Your Ear For Music, And Speech
Learning to play an instrument appears to strengthen the brain's ability to capture the
depth and richness of speech sounds. These heat maps of brainwaves show how
much music lessons improved kids' neurophysiological distinction of consonants.
http://www.npr.org/...-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app[9/26/2014 2:00:14 PM]
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music : NPR Ed : NPR
Credit: LA Johnson and Alyson Hurt/NPR
Working with Harmony Project, Kraus randomly assigned several
dozen kids from the program's waitlist into two groups: those who
would be studied after one year of music lessons and those who would
be studied after two years.
And what she found was that in the two-year kids, the static didn't go
away. But their brains got better — more precise — at processing
sound. In short: less blur.
Why The Improvement?
It goes back to pitch, timing and timbre. Kraus argues that learning
music improves the brain's ability to process all three, which helps kids
pick up language, too. Consonants and vowels become clearer, and
the brain can make sense of them more quickly.
That's also likely to make life easier at school, not just in music class
but in math class, too — and everywhere else.
To be clear, the study has its limits. It was small — roughly 50 kids,
ranging in age from 6 to 9. It wasn't conducted in a lab. And it's hard to
know if kids doing some other activity could have experienced similar
benefits.
But 10th-grader Monica Miranda doesn't need proof that playing violin
has helped her. She's one of the first students in the door at a recent
Harmony Project re-enrollment event in the auditorium of a nearby
elementary school.
"I feel like music really connects with education," she says. "It helps
you concentrate more."
http://www.npr.org/...-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app[9/26/2014 2:00:14 PM]
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music : NPR Ed : NPR
Miranda is in her third year with Harmony Project.
"When I do my homework or I'm studying for something and I feel
overwhelmed, I usually go to my violin, to start playing it," Miranda
says. "I feel like it relaxes my mind. And coming here to play with an
orchestra, it's just amazing. I love it."
And, the science says, her brain loves it, too.
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http://www.npr.org/...-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app[9/26/2014 2:00:14 PM]