Music is vital to children's education

Music activates neurons in more regions of the brain than almost anything else scientists know of and causes the release of neurochemicals in our brai

2012-01-08T14:49:00.000-08:00

Daniel Levitin is the author of This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs, and professor of psychology and music at McGill University of Montreal. Dr. Levitin said that music activates neurons in more regions of the brain than almost anything else scientists know of. He said that music causes the release of neurochemicals in our brain.

We know that the brain is musical because there are specific neural circuits. And by that, I mean specific regions of the brain dedicated to processing music and nothing else. Our brain structure changes every time we learn something new.

For example, listening to music you like causes the release of dopamine, the so called “feel good” hormone, and on the opposite side, listening to music you hate, will activate the amygdala, the brain’s fight or flight center, and that will cause a release of adrenaline.

Dr. Levitin said that we are all musical experts, because we know the kind of music that resonates with us on an emotional level.

We see this, in fact, in the way people incorporate music into their lives. A lot of people use a certain kind of music to get going in the morning, to get out of bed, to get them through an exercise workout, to calm themselves down at the end of the day. We’re using music in the same way we use drugs, really, for emotional regulation, partly because of the way it can modulate our neurochemistry, affecting our moods.

Dr. Levitin said humans are a musical species and that our brains co-evolved with music as a means of communicating with each other. He said:

I think that for many of us, music is an alternative way of communicating. There are things that music can do for us that language can’t. I know for example, if you’re feeling really uptight or stressed, you’ve had a bad day, you had a fight with somebody – words sometimes aren’t as soothing as the right piece of music. As another example, look at love songs – I think the reason they exist is that they’re able to communicate in an emotional way that words alone just can’t.
Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin is director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University and associate professor and James McGill chair in Psychology, Department of Psychology, McGill University. He is the author of two New York Times bestseller books, “This is your Brain on Music” and “The World in Six Songs.”

How can jazz make us better listeners?

2011-12-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

Better listening skills enable
a richer experience of life.

Studies confirm what we all suspect: attention spans are shrinking, and while most have cell phones to their ears or headphones on, no one's listening.

BETTER LISTENING: Musicians learn to discriminate between different pitch and tone quality, and improvising jazz musicians, in particular, must be intensely engaged to anticipate what comes next, when having a musical conversation with another.

BETTER FOCUS: Musicians have 40% less hearing loss as they age, because of their acquired listening skills. "If you spend a lot of your life interacting with sound in an active manner, then your nervous system has made lots of sound-to-meaning connections that can strengthen your auditory system." Nina Kraus, Director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University.

BETTER COMPREHENSION: Jazz is a complex musical form that engages the listeners and, like all great art, is enjoyed even more deeply with greater understanding. Understanding complexity increases intelligence.

Please feel free to dontate to Judy Carmichael's "Jazz Listening For Life" project. Let's make a difference!

There is everyday magic in music

2011-11-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

I was listening to talk radio the other weekend and they had a piece on United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her long road to recovery.

Giffords was shot last January during a speaking event in Arizona. The bullet that hit Giffords entered her left eye, passed through the left hemisphere of her brain and exited.

Part of her remarkable recovery has now included speech therapy because the wound caused brain injury to the part of the brain responsible for speech. She has been working to re-learn how to talk, but through the use of song.

Although Giffords can't speak the words because the damage caused by the bullet prevents her from finding the words, she can sing them.

The speech therapist featured on the radio program said it was because the brain receptors related to music and melody are located throughout the brain, so the brain rewires itself to find the words through song.

It's amazing how song can be used it such an inspiring way.

Recently I listened to an album while driving that I have not listened to in years. The album is Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson's live appearance on VH1's Storytellers program. It was a show they had years back when musicians/songwriters would perform their songs and tell the stories behind the song. There are a lot of familiar offerings from Cash and Nelson on that album, but a few gems that are a lot less known.

If you walked up to me on the street and asked me to tell you the lyrics from Worried Man or Family Bible, the two less known songs featured on the CD, I wouldn't be able to do it very well.

But when those songs came over the speakers the lyrics came pouring back.

Also recently I have had to rely on my musical memory to retrieve songs that were written down but are now lost.

I play guitar, not real well, but enough to be able to write goofy songs about my life and my family.

Several of these little home-spun diddies, including two about my two daughters were written out and chords transpired on my laptop at home. Recently that laptop went kaput and everything on it was lost.

The funny thing about music is it seems to never leave you. The written form of those songs may be gone, but they still exist in my head and I can rewrite them, a few words changed perhaps, but for most part in their entirety.

This time I'll back up the files.

It's a cliché, but the brain is an amazing thing, but so too is music.

By Vince Burke

Can The Study Of Music Impact How Our Brain Works?

2011-10-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

Can The Study Of Music Impact How Our Brain Works?

Kids Verbal IQ increased by music training

2011-10-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

Canadian scientists say that pre-schoolers can improve their verbal intelligence within 20 days of classroom instruction using interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons.

In the study, 48 pre-schoolers four to six years of age participated in computer-based, cognitive training programs that were projected on a large classroom wall and featured colorful, animated cartoon characters delivering the lessons.

The children were divided into two groups. One group received music-based, cognitive training that involved a combination of motor, perceptual and cognitive tasks, and included training on rhythm, pitch, melody, voice and basic musical concepts.

The other group received visual art training that emphasized the development of visuo-spatial skills relating to concepts such as shape, color, line, dimension and perspective.

Each group received two training sessions of one-hour duration each day in classroom, over four weeks, led by instructors at The Royal Conservatory in Toronto.

The verbal IQ tests assessed the children's attention, word recall and ability to analyze information and solve problems using language-based reasoning. Brain imaging enabled researchers to detect if functional brain changes had occurred related to the cognitive training.

When the children were re-tested five to 20 days after the end of the training programs, researchers did not find any significant increase in verbal intelligence or brain changes for the children who participated in the visual art training module.

However, they found quite a different result in the children who took the music-based, cognitive training. Ninety percent of those children exhibited intelligence improvements - five times larger than the other group - on a measure of vocabulary knowledge, as well as increased accuracy and reaction time. The music group also showed brain changes that co-related to their enhanced cognitive performance.

Our data have confirmed a rapid transfer of cognitive benefits in young children after only 20 days of training on an interactive, music-based cognitive training program. The strength of this effect in almost all of the children was remarkable," said lead researcher Dr. Sylvain Moreno, a world expert on neuroeducation.
Related Links

The findings have exciting implications for conceptualizing and improving neuroeducation programs for children of all ages, and potentially for older adults.

The study has been published online in the journal Psychological Science.

Read more: Kids' Verbal IQ Increased by Musical Training - Page 2 | MedIndia http://www.medindia.net/news/Kids-Verbal-IQ-Increased-by-Musical-Training-91706-2.htm#ixzz1aKcLq5m6

Harmony pleases our brains

2011-09-19T22:21:00.000-07:00

Why harmony pleases the brain

10:52 19 September 2011 by Lisa Grossman
For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

The key to pleasant music may be that it pleases our neurons. A new model suggests that harmonious musical intervals trigger a rhythmically consistent firing pattern in certain auditory neurons, and that sweet sounds carry more information than harsh ones.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have known that two tones whose frequencies were related by a simple ratio like 2:1 (an octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth) produce the most pleasing, or consonant, musical intervals. This effect doesn't depend on musical training – infants and even monkeys can hear the difference. But it was unclear whether consonant chords are easier on the ears because of the way the sound waves combine in the air, or the way our brains convert them to electrical impulses. A new mathematical model presents a strong case for the brain.

"We have found that the reason for this difference is somewhere at the level of neurons," says Yuriy Ushakov at the N. I. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhniy Novgorod in Russia.

Ushakov and colleagues considered a simple mathematical model of the way sound travels from the ear to the brain. In their model, two sensory neurons react to different tones. Each sends an electrical signal to a third neuron, called an interneuron, which sends a final signal to the brain. The model's interneuron fires when it receives input from either or both sensory neurons.

However, the signals from the sensory neurons arrive at the same time if the tone is consonant, and so the interneuron still fires just once, then waits until it "recharges" before it fires again. The result is a regular train of pulses.

By contrast, the signals from dissonant tones arrive at different times and so generate an irregularly spaced train of pulses in the interneuron.

The researchers took their analysis one step further, and calculated the amount of information each signal carries. In the terms of information theory, a random signal carries very little information; a signal with a discernable pattern carries more. So naturally, the consonant notes carry more information than dissonant ones. They then used this to calculate the information content of the pulse trains generated by consonant and dissonant tones.

That makes the model experimentally testable. Neurophysiologists can study living neurons to see if they find the same information content in pulse trains.

"To me the beauty of their work is that they have an analytical technique to calculate the intervals between the firing times, which is a highly non-trivial problem," says André Longtin of the University of Ottawa in Canada. "It remains to be seen whether this work, and in particular the info measure, can be picked up by neurophysiologists."

Music proves to be anti-depressant

2011-08-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

Making music might help lift more depressed people out of the dumps than common antidepressant medications do, the results of a new study suggest.

That's not to say the people with depression should toss out their meds and pick up a guitar. The music therapy administered to patients in the new study was in addition to regular therapy, and the patients continued their regular medication routines. But about one out of four depression sufferers is likely to respond to music therapy, Finnish researchers reported in August in the British Journal of Psychiatry. In comparison, a 2009 review of research published in the journal Cochrane Database Systemic Review found that doctors must treat between seven and 16 people with tricyclic antidepressant drugs for one person to see improvement.

For selective serotonin uptake reinhibitors (SSRIs), another common type of antidepressant, one person's symptoms improve for every seven or eight treated.

Getting musical may enable people to get in touch with their emotions without words, said Jaakko Erkkilä, the head of the music department at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and his study co-researchers.

Your brain on music

Music is known to have a strong effect on the human psyche. Learning to play an instrument boosts the brain's auditory ability and even makes it easier to learn foreign languages, studies show. Music can also trigger memories by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the brain just behind the forehead. This region is one of the last areas of the brain to atrophy during Alzheimer's, explaining why many Alzheimer's patients can recall songs from the distant past.

These emotional and communicative effects may explain the mood-boosted effect found in the new study.

The researchers recruited 79 people with a diagnosis of depression. Thirty-three were randomly assigned to three months of regular therapy plus up to 20 biweekly sessions with a music therapist. The rest of the participants attended regular therapy alone.

Improv sessions

In music therapy sessions, patients improvised on African drums and a digital mallet instrument, the synthesized version of something like a vibraphone or marimba.

After three months of therapy, patients who had gone to music sessions showed fewer depression and anxiety symptoms and higher functioning in their daily lives than people who went to talk therapy alone.

The researchers followed up again three months after the study ended, and found that the benefits persisted, although the music therapy group was no longer statistically different than the talk-therapy-only group.

In an accompanying editorial by researchers not involved in the study, music therapist Anna Maratos of the Central and North West London Foundation Trust and her colleagues wrote that composing tunes may help depressed people on several levels. First, there's the aesthetic pleasure of music, they wrote. Making music also requires rhythm and attention, helping to tune depressed people into their own bodies.

Finally, the researchers wrote, music may provide people with a way of connecting with another person (their therapist) without words.

Stephanie Pappas

How newborns solve problems, use moral reasoning and amaze scientists

2011-06-30T05:07:00.000-07:00

Baby Newborn Nela listens to music with headphones at the Saca hospital in Kosice, Slovakia, Tuesday, May 10, 2011. The hospital uses music therapy to help newborn babies that have to be separated from theirs moms for treatment. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
Human infants are proving to have abilities far beyond what researchers have long assumed. Newborns grasp abstract numbers well enough to link matching numbers of objects and sounds, they understand musical rhythm well enough to detect a missed downbeat in a percussion line, and they consistently apply moral judgment.

As early as 3 months, newborns show a preference for puppets or animated characters that help others over those that hinder.

"They are the most powerful learners in the universe," Laura Schulz, a professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told The Oregonian last year during the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Portland.

Schulz and MIT graduate student Hyowon Gweon presented a study in which 16-month-olds quickly and accurately deduced whether a toy that failed to make music needed to be replaced or that they needed to ask for help because they did something wrong. Their study made it into the journal Science today.

Efforts to better understand the infant brain have important practical applications for helping children facing development hurdles, such as autism.

Within three months of birth, babies show a strong preference for eye contact. They spend more time looking at eyes than any other part of a person's face or body. But in children with autism, this behavior falters early and seems to contribute to the difficulties they have relating to others. Researchers at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Conn., used eye-tracking equipment to compare viewing preferences of 15 2-year-olds with autism spectrum disorders and 36 typically developing toddlers. Both groups watched videos with actresses engaging them in games like pat-a-cake.

Toddlers with autism gave scant attention to eyes and spent more time focusing on mouths. The researchers found a strong correlation between eye contact and autism severity: The lower the level of eye fixation, the greater the child's social impairment in everyday life. With less experience observing and reacting to the eyes of others, the researchers said in a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, children lose the chance to develop expertise in social cues, and in years of development, this could intensify the socially crippling effects of autism.

Other researchers have shown how television programming aimed at babies less than 2 years old may undermine rather than promote early brain development.

In one recent study, having a television within ear shot was enough to significantly reduce an infant's exposure to the spoken words of parents and other adults, and to reduce an infant's vocalizations and verbal exchanges. Hundreds of babies wore digital recorders that logged everything they heard or said on random days over several months in their homes. Researchers at Seattle Children's Hospital analyzed the recordings using speech-recognition software capable of distinguishing and counting words spoken by babies and adults in the presence or absence of television noise. Parents uttered about 770 fewer words around their babies for each additional hour of audible television. Babies, in turn, engaged in fewer vocal exchanges.

"A major goal of brain research is to find out how to build a strong, healthy brain architecture, one that will give children a strong foundation for future growth and development," says Helen Neville, a University of Oregon psychology and neuroscience professor, in a movie produced by UO's Brain Development Lab. The documentary, aimed at parents and parents-to-be, explores brain development from birth through adolescence. The program includes practical advice to parents, teachers and political leaders about ways to improve home and school environments to maximize the potential of young minds. A free, streaming version is available online.

– Joe Rojas-Burke

Grow a Better Brain

2011-04-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

Oz and Roizen: Growing a Better Brain
Prepare your child for success by encouraging healthy brain development.

Mehmet Oz Michael Roizen April 15, 2011

Our basic premise is: Your body is amazing. You get a do-over; it doesn’t take that long and isn’t that hard if you know what to do.

In these columns, we give you a short course in what to do so it becomes easy for you. Then you can teach others. We want you to know how much control you have over your quality and length of life.

Today we want to talk to you about one of the most important relationships in your life: your relationship with your child. Specifically, we want to talk to you about helping your child develop a healthy brain.

As a parent, you play the primary role in helping your child develop, even in areas you may think are innate, like how his brain functions and grows. But brain development isn’t preprogrammed. To understand what to do, let’s take a look at an edited excerpt on how your child’s brain develops from our new book, YOU: Raising Your Child, the Owner’s Manual from First Breath to First Grade.

The pace at which a baby’s neural network is built is truly mind boggling. In utero, brains build 250,000 neurons a minute to result in about 100 billion by the time the baby is born. To work efficiently, the brain needs to be able to adapt, to learn new things, to forget old things. Fortunately, it can be molded and shaped, and because of this plasticity, the brain can adapt to its environment, learning things it needs to and not spending resources on things that are irrelevant. You help your baby decide which those are.

During early development, the job of the brain is to grow like a forest. The goal is for it to become a thick, lush, rich and powerful network of neurological redwoods. At term (40 weeks, on average), most of the neurons that will ever exist are in their correct locations, even though the baby’s brain is only about one-fourth the size of the adult brain. Most of the synaptic connections (connections between brain cells that convey information) form during the first year of life, a period during which the brain rapidly expands to near-adult size, and the total number of synapses approaches twice that seen in adults.

Interestingly, synaptic connections are formed in a particular order. First come the primary sensory synapses so Baby can sense the world around him, followed by those synapses that control gross motor skills so that he can escape from any threats he senses, then fine motor skills so he can write about what he just did. Last come the synapses that control higher brain functions, such as motivation, judgment and reasoning, so that he learns what he may have done right and wrong in any given situation. These final pathways aren’t fully functional until the late teens or even early 20s. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Starting at about 1 year of age, as Baby is exposed to his new environment, the emphasis shifts from growth to pruning. Think of it as forest management. To encourage growth of the strongest, healthiest trees, the underbrush needs to be cleared away. The brain does this by eliminating redundant and underused synaptic connections. If a baby hears both Chinese and English in the home, the language connections are strengthened. But, if a baby is left to watch videos all day, the synaptic connections look kind of sparse. (Think Charlie Brown’s scrawny Christmas tree.) By age 3, the number of synaptic connections is cut in half. This is why it’s so crucial for a child to have appropriate stimulation from birth to age 3 so that he prunes neurons wisely.

Neurons are encased in a tough myelin sheath. This protective coating prevents the branches from tangling—thus, mixing up messages and disrupting connections—and ensures that messages travel fast. Because myelin is made up of 80 percent fat and 20 percent protein, healthy fats are important for growing and maintaining a healthy brain. That’s why we recommend that moms-to-be take a DHA supplement during pregnancy. DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid, comprises as much as 97 percent of the omega-3 healthy fats in brains. You should also try to incorporate healthy fats such as avocadoes, olive oil and DHA-fortified milk into your child’s diet from an early age. By the way, healthy fats are also important in maintaining your healthy brain function.

Now we want to give you some tips you can use to help your child’s brain-building.

Make conversation. The best way to talk to your child is by pretending that she can converse. Do you need a nap? These yams are pretty nasty looking, aren’t they? Talk to her as if she were filling in the gaps. That will help him recognize language and word patterns. Speak slowly and use short phrases, gestures and facial expressions to reinforce the meaning of your words.

Show and tell. Whenever you’re out, be one of those pointer-outer parents. Point to things you see, hear and smell; teach your child about the world. This applies wherever you are, whether in nature or at the mall. It’s also really helpful to show your child how things change: Leaves change color, flowers bloom, batter turns into cookies and so on.

As a parent, you play the primary role in helping your child develop, even in areas you may think are innate.

Read it loud and proud. We can’t say it often enough: Read aloud. Read aloud. Read aloud. Besides serving as wonderful one-on-one time, reading to your child will do amazing things for his vocabulary. In fact, the vocabulary a child has at 2 years old is proportional to the number of words he’s heard spoken. Even if he can’t respond verbally to you, he’s processing what he’s hearing. Remember those neurons: With every sentence, you build stronger language connections.

Sign up for music lessons. The advantages of music lessons go way beyond learning to play a little Mozart (or Metallica). Kids who study a musical instrument for three years do better than nonmusical kids with skills not associated with music, such as verbal ability and manual dexterity. Other research shows that music also improves overall memory.

Skip disembodied videos. Many baby videos on the market purport to help turn your child into a genius. The problem is, some research shows that children who watch videos using disembodied voices rather than visible speakers may actually end up with a smaller vocabulary than those who don’t watch them. Why? Babies learn language not only through sounds but also by watching faces (kids on the autism spectrum tend to watch lips) and tracking how words begin and end. With just audio, the words sound more like gibberish than real language.

At every age, you can help your child or grandchild develop and maintain healthy brain function by helping her make proper food choices (including those good-for-you fats), reading and talking to her, and by encouraging her to continually learn and try new things.

Jazz and the Brain

2010-10-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

From Tots to Teens, Music helps children grow

2010-10-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

Decades of research confirms what many mothers and fathers already know: music can play a significant role in a child’s development. Music promotes children’s overall growth and aptitude for learning. Music education can help children become more successful in school and grow up to be more productive adults. From the time a baby sings the “ABC song” and claps along with “Sesame Street,” music is already an essential part of our education. Most youngsters naturally have a love for music. It can stimulate creativity and alter a child’s mood. Research has proven the powerful connection between practicing music and successful children.

“Piano is thought to enhance the brain’s hardwiring for spatial-temporal reasoning,” explained Gordon Shaw, Ph.D. in a recent interview by Lauren Slater of Parenting. The professor emeritus of physics continued, “Music involves ratios, fractions, proportions, and thinking in time and space.”

Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein all have one important thing in common: they grew up playing musical instruments. Studies are revealing fascinating insights into music’s impact stimulating a child’s overall intelligence and emotional development. Dozens of schools and labs, such as the International Foundation of Music Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio, have reported on the benefits of music on early brain development. Referred to as the Mozart Effect, there is a positive effect that passive listening to certain classical music has on one’s cognitive abilities, reasoning and motor skills.

Study after study, like Dr. James Catterall’s ten years of work performed at UCLA, indicate that children who learn music do better all around in academic testing. Music training was found to jump start certain inherent patterns in parts of the brain responsible for spatial-temporal reasoning. As a result, playing a certain piece of music forces children to think ahead and visualize notes in their heads.

In 2009, Social Science Quarterly reported on a study that showed that a child’s music lessons and attending concerts has a beneficial effect on his or her reading and mathematics in early adolescence. Possessing the skills to create complex rhythms makes for better planning and coordinating in a student’s educational and professional careers. He or she can make faster and more precise corrections in many situations. Musicians have even demonstrated less test and performance anxiety than non-music students.

In a Scottish study, elementary students achieved a significant increase in reading test scores after receiving musical training for six months. The Texas Commission on Drug and Alcohol Abuse indicates that students who took an active part in band or orchestra have the lowest use alcohol, drugs and tobacco.

Studies by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, based at Brown University, concluded that music education can help build intellectual and emotional skills, as well as strengthen reading and math. These results are seen in academic and professional scenarios for people of all ages.

The research results of music’s effects of adults in not much different. “Music making makes the elderly healthier,” reported Dr. Frederick Tims of Michigan State University. “There were significant decreases in anxiety, depression, and loneliness following keyboard lessons. These are factors that are critical in coping with stress, stimulating the immune system, and in improved health.”

The marketplace is full of inventive toys, videos and baby equipment that play popular nursery rhymes or classical music for newborns. Who knows, you may have the next Hendrix or Einstein living in your house?

Todd McFliker is an award-winning reporter, photographer, and the author of All You Need is Love to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. He earned his Masters in Communication from Lynn University.

Music brings our brains to life.

2010-05-31T16:24:00.000-07:00

NOVA: Musical Minds
Airs Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 8 p.m. on KPBS TV
Dr. Oliver Sacks sits on a piano bench holding a replica of a human brain. Through the remarkable case studies from neurologist Dr. Sacks’ latest book, "Musicophilia," NOVA investigates the extraordinary impact music can have on the human brain.

Can the power of music make the brain come alive? Throughout his career Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and acclaimed author, whose book "Awakenings" was made into a Oscar-nominated feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, has encountered myriad patients who are struggling to cope with debilitating medical conditions. While their ailments vary, many have one thing in common: an appreciation for the therapeutic effects of music. "NOVA: Musical Minds" follows four individuals—two of whom are Sacks's case studies—and even peers into Sacks's own brain, to investigate music's strange, surprising, and still unexplained power over the human mind.

According to Sacks's latest book, "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain," anatomists cannot identify the brain of a visual artist, writer, or mathematician—but they can recognize the brain of a professional musician. Music affects more parts of our brains than language does—clearly humans are musical animals. What can music tell us about our minds? And what can our minds tell us about music? Finally, can music aid people battling severe neurological disorders? To find out, NOVA follows the BBC's Alan Yentob on an intercontinental quest—from New York to England and Ireland—to meet individuals like those chronicled in "Musicophilia," bringing Sacks's latest work to life through their intimate and phenomenal stories.

Three of the four case studies cope with neurological disorders: Tourette's syndrome, autism, and amusia, the musical equivalent of color-blindness, which results in deafness to certain elements of music. The last subject is a surgeon and rock 'n' roll lover who, after being struck by lightning, became obsessed with playing classical piano. Three of the four—all but the patient with amusia—have somehow, almost magically, unlocked a part of their minds to develop musical talents that were otherwise unimaginable.

Music is both invented and biologically transformative.

2010-05-27T18:37:00.001-07:00

Dr. Patel: Linking Neurobiology and Music

First, Charles Darwin argued that our ability to love music was innate and biologically powerful. Then, Steven Pinker decided that was wrong; instead, music is the exact opposite in that it is invented and biologically superficial. Now, Dr. Aniruddh Patel of the San Diego-based Neurosciences Institute believes that music is a type of transformative technology, a mix between the two theories. It is invented and it is biologically powerful.

Standing in front of a packed crowd of people that included various prominent doctors and psychologists at the Irvine Barclay Theater last Tuesday, May 18, Patel began his lecture on how music, evolution and the human mind correlate. Speaking at the 16th UCI Distinguished Lecture Series on Brain, Learning and Memory, his lecture covered his search for how the brain processes music. This, he argued, will tell scientists more about how the brain actually functions.

Patel received his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. He played the clarinet since he was young, but it wasn’t until the end of his college years that he chose to combine neurobiology and music to find clues as to how the brain processes music and language. He claims that the similarities and differences between the two will provide a much better understanding about the brain itself.

Dressed in a classic brown suit, Patel is rather laid back and surprisingly funny. He knows how to command a crowd and interacts with the audience, showing YouTube clips of parrots and chimps. His anecdotes cause an eruption of laughter and many listeners are already quoting him in the post-reception. He is the kind of lecturer that many organizations invite to speak because he engages the audience and his words linger in your mind even after you leave the room.

“Mr. Patel is the perfect lecturer to assist in the CNLM’s primary goal of public outreach. He learns from the brain and that is why we all do science – to study the fundamental operation of the brain and then go about learning how to fix it,” said Craig Stark from the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the organization that co-sponsored the event with UCI MIND.

Using a variety of techniques such as theoretical analyses, acoustic research, comparative studies of nonhuman animals and neuroimaging, Patel began to prove his theory that music is what he calls “transformative technology.” This term refers to the idea that our capacity to love music was nurtured, not selected for by evolution, and it is biologically fundamental, with lasting effects on nonmusical brain systems.

According to Patel, while there is music-specific knowledge, growing evidence suggests that music processing is built from nonmusical brain functions. So then why is music ancient and universal, so pervasive in human life? The answer to this lies in the fact that music is an emotional power.

“Music is like the controlling of fire. Humans invented it way back when, but it is a thing that has become so wildly popular that it seems innate,” Patel said.

Listening to music gives rise to emotion in multiple ways, including episodic memory, visual imagery, emotional contagion, expectancy, evaluative conditions and brainstem reflexes. It is unique in the way it mixes all of these together in a way that no other aspect of life can.

Patel then provided an in-depth look into the two factors he feels are the most important in studying the reactions between the brain and music – tonality and synchronization.

Tonality is a uniquely musical system for organizing pitches that has scales and intervals, puts a differential emphasis on certain pitches and gives various pitches unique perceptual qualities. For example, the last note may be exactly the same in two different cases, but depending on the context of the entire series, one will be a resolve pitch and the other is a leading pitch. A resolve pitch indicates that the audience feels as if the music has a sense of finality, while a leading pitch leaves one to anticipate a further note later to complete the sound.

In healthy brains, it is found through neuroimaging that tonal or harmonic processing overlaps with linguistic grammatical processing. This is because tonality involves discrete elements, principles of combination, hierarchically organized sequences and abstract structural categories of sounds, all of which are the same features of language syntax.

“Tonality does involve domain-specific representations, but it shares processing resources with language,” Patel said. “Tonality processing also shares some of the same mechanisms with language, which may explain why tonal music is so ‘sticky’.”

Synchronization to a musical beat emerges spontaneously and is a special rhythmic entrainment. It is involves stimulus complexity, tempo flexibility and cross-modality, which, means that we move as a response to a beat, rather than uttering another random sound.

But it is not just the musical mind that can rise to sync to a beat; a nonmusical brain system can do it as well through vocal learning (VL). Besides humans, it is very rare in nature since it involves specialized brain circuits linking auditory and motor brain centers.

Thus the vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis was born. It predicted that only VL species are capable of learning to sync to a musical beat; dogs, cats and chimps, among others, are unable to. A recent study used monkeys to test this theory. Using a metronome, they attempted to get the monkeys to bang a drum to the sound for a year, but they found that the best they could do was hit the note a fraction behind the metronome. They displayed a form of reactive behavior, where they respond after the initial sound, whereas humans exhibit anticipative behavior since we will inevitably hit either exactly on the beat or slightly ahead.

This is where YouTube meets neuroscience. Snowball, a parrot that became the YouTube sensation “avian dancing,” was shown to dance in sync with human music. This raised an abundance of questions among the scientific community; for instance, was the bird given timing cues from humans and, if not, can she adjust to different tempi?

Using a controlled experiment, Snowball underwent a series of tests by dancing to 11 different tempi, where human movement was suppressed. After quantitative analyses of the videos, the result was that there was a true sync to a musical beat, but it occurred in bouts, similar to the actions of a human child.

The result then prompted Harvard researches to ask if there are more VL animals and they turned to, once again, YouTube. They analyzed over one thousand videos of animals and music, but only found 14 other cases similar to Snowball’s. Of these 14, 13 were parrots. The other was a circus elephant.

“Parrots are incredibly social and that may be why they enjoy music and have the ability to sync to a beat,” Patel said. “But this ability is far from innate; it is not shaped by natural selection and it is definitely not part of their natural behavior.”

Patel also studies the effects of music within an individual lifetime, which is a growing research area that examines nonmusicians and compares persistent versus transient effects. This focus is a crucial part of studies on cognitive recovery and verbal fluency after a stroke.

Basically put, music builds on brain systems that evolved for other purposes. While our draw toward music is an invention, it can shape those systems within the lifetime of an individual. Empirical studies on kids, mammals and birds are headlining the study of music as a kind of transformative technology.

“In essence,” Patel said, “studying music will help reveal how both the mind and memory work.”

Learning Music Builds Brain Power

2010-04-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

Robertson was impressed, but not surprised. He told the students that in all his worldly travels, he's never seen a public music program as good as the one in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where he sang in first grade, began studying trumpet in fourth grade and played in an orchestra by 6th grade.

"No other program compares," Robertson said.

In the audience, teachers and parents told me about students of all income levels who have prospered in the program and gone on to great universities, some studying music and some not. Also in the audience was a friend of mine, L.A. Philharmonic violinist Robert Gupta, a New Yorker, who, amazingly, joined the orchestra in 2007 at the age of 19. And here's where the brainpower angle comes in.

High school music instruction isn't threatened in Santa Monica just yet, but the elementary school program could take a big hit, which reminded me of Gupta's theory on how studying music at an early age can develop the brain.And by the way, he's no slouch on the subject. Gupta graduated from college with a pre-med biology degree at 17 and two years later also had a master's in music.

"The corpus callosum is enlarged" when you study music, he explained to me at Santa Monica High, saying the expansion of that pathway increases communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.

We were backstage by then and Robertson chimed in, saying the visual, audio and motor skills learned in music build brainpower.

"Any time you learn, what you're doing is building a network that will fire automatically," said the conductor, explaining how a musician travels along a C-major scale without rethinking every step in the process.

This kind of development is particularly helpful at an early age, said Gupta, because a child's brain has many more neurons and is far more active than an adult's. That's why it's easier to learn music, or language, as a kid, particularly if the brain gets lots of exercise.

UCLA professor James Catterall, whose specialty is the connection between artistic learning and academic and social development, suggests that learning music, in addition to developing the parts of the brain that are tied to emotion and empathy, can activate neuro-pathways and facilitate learning in other areas.

More specifically, said Catterall, who happens to be a cellist, singing and playing instruments over the course of several years "can lead to better spatial reasoning skills," and the benefits can "spill over somewhat to things like mathematics and language.

And yet across the country, if not on L.A.'s Westside, music and other arts instruction are often whacked or cut disproportionately when budgets are squeezed. They're seen as appropriate luxuries in good times, but otherwise superfluous and expendable, despite evidence to the contrary.

In Santa Monica and Malibu, lots of kids will have access to private music lessons regardless of what happens in the public schools. But many others won't. And when you chip away at the foundation of a great community tradition, Robertson said, you diminish the experience for everyone at every level.

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy," Beethoven said.

But I think I'll give the last words to Nietzsche:

"Without music, the world would be a mistake."

steve.lopez@latimes.com

When language is blocked, music may offer a detour.

2010-04-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

Lee and Mary-Helen Black had nearly given up hope their son would speak.

Physically, Tripp was fine, crawling, standing, and walking on schedule. But language eluded him. Lee Black vividly recalled when Tripp, nearly 2, sat in his highchair and tried to sing a children’s song. He started to say “head,’’ then faltered, as if the word had crumbled out of his grasp.

“I watched him freeze,’’ his father said. “That was the ultimate moment.’’

Tripp was later diagnosed with autism, a disorder that can impair children’s ability to speak. Despite years of therapy, he did not talk.

Then last fall, at age 8, he began an experimental program that coaxes speech using singing, movement, and imitation. After 10 weeks, he could say “mama,’’ “dada,’’ “bubbles,’’ and “bye.’’

One evening, his brother, Luke, was having trouble getting the family dog onto his bed. “Journey, up!’’ he called.

“Up, up, up!’’ Tripp chimed in.

For his mother, that simple exchange was huge — Tripp had spontaneously used his voice, joining in a bedtime ritual.

“That’s what a family is supposed to feel like; when you’re putting your kids to bed, everybody’s supposed to be participating,’’ she said later. “A little thing like that can carry me for a month.’’

The language gains from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center therapy may seem small to an outsider. Tripp, now 9, is learning words and short phrases, and his pronunciation is inexact: “All done!’’ sounds more like “Ah-duh!’’, pizza more like “bee-dah.’’ He still uses sign language and cards with pictures on them to communicate. But for such children to begin to say words is immensely gratifying for parents and a critical step for the children to be able to benefit from traditional speech therapy.

“There’s very little available for these kids. A lot of things have basically failed so far,’’ said Gottfried Schlaug, director of the music and neuroimaging laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess.

Estimates vary, but as many as a quarter of children with autism are nonverbal. Children with autism tend to have superior auditory skills and have a particular attraction to music, Schlaug said, so “music-making may provide an alternative entry into a broken or dysfunctional brain system.’’

The therapy is built on two threads of research. One has found that music-making can change the brains of healthy normal people and plays a role in engaging and strengthening connections between the auditory and motor regions of the right side of the brain. The intervention also draws on a treatment that helps stroke patients regain speech after suffering damage to the speech centers in their brain, by singing words and phrases and using a coordinated movement of one hand.

Schlaug’s team adapted the stroke therapy for children. Researchers sing words or phrases to the children while showing them a picture of the action or object, and guide their hands to play two pitched drums.

Supported by a grant from the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, Schlaug and colleagues have tested the eight-week, daily therapy in about 10 children, and they have measured improved speech production and increased speech output. The results have yet to be published, but the researchers hope these findings will help them raise money to expand the study.

The theory behind the therapy is that the combination of sound and movement can activate a network of brain regions that overlap with brain areas thought to be abnormal in children with autism. Researchers think the intensive, repetitive training on sound paired with motion will help strengthen those abnormal areas.

Earlier this month, at a two-month follow-up session, Tripp hung up his sweatshirt and sat down at a table. Patient, but exhausted from a day at school and an earlier testing session, he tapped his fingernails on the table as if to say, let’s get started.

Postdoctoral fellow Catherine Wan sat across from him and sang “Hello,’’ guiding Tripp’s hands to the drums. “Heh-wo,’’ he responded, hitting the drums at the same time.

She showed him a jar of bubbles, one of his favorite rewards. “Bub-buh,’’ he said.

To researchers who specialize in autism, the approach is exciting.

“I was just really very impressed with what I saw,’’ Boston University psychology professor Helen Tager-Flusberg said after watching videos of the therapy sessions. She has agreed to collaborate with the Beth Israel Deaconess group on future research.

“Obviously that’s not a full-fledged controlled experiment at this point . . . but I don’t know of other approaches that have been particularly effective in getting children beyond the age of 5 or 6 to start speaking. I think the idea of using this rhythmic motor approach . . . makes an enormous amount of sense from a neurological perspective,’’ she said.

Ruth Grossman, assistant professor of communication disorders at Emerson College, said she was intrigued by the approach, which was informed by the work with stroke patients.

“I don’t think it happens enough. If we stop thinking of patients as groups but think of deficits as the common denominators, I think we might find a lot more fertile ground for interesting things to do with different populations,’’ Grossman said.

For the Blacks, who live in Allston, the therapy has offered a new perspective on what is possible.

Tripp’s father helps him stretch before bedtime — a nightly ritual that has been getting louder. Lee Black usually counts during the exercise, and now Tripp joins in.

He’s got “eight’’ and “nine,’’ and he’s started working on “ten.’’

“What we feel now is he can get this stuff,’’ Tripp’s father said. “We understand he’s capable of a wider breadth than where we’ve been with him.’’

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.

You must read Anna Goldsworthy's book "Piano Lessons"

2010-04-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

I've just read and re-read Anna Goldsworthy's book PIANO LESSONS......a real Australian story about a young girl having piano lessons from an accomplished Russian concert pianist, Mrs Eleonara Sivan.

Here is the link to her publisher's interview.

http://theincblot.blogspot.com/2009/11/anna-goldsworthy-on-music-and-writing.html

I'm sure you'll love it.

Feeding the hungry brain with music

2010-03-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Music is an amazing communication tool. No matter what language you speak or whether you can communicate verbally at all, music is a fundamental way through which to reach out and to be reached out to. That is pretty powerful. And for me personally, it’s proved to be a primary connection resource.

Music was how I was able to connect with my mother, even when she was in the throws of a manic episode. It was a way to reach the part of her that was calm. I turned to music when times were too tough to face and it pulled me through to a more positive perspective. And now, with my daughter Jaimie, I used it as a way to calm her, to organize her or to reach her when her world is too overwhelming for her. And now it’s become a central part of her therapy.

We’ve tried many methods over the years to teach Jaimie how to cope with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) but one of the things that seems to have had the most success is music in conjunction with movement. Jaimie has experienced three sorts of therapy using music, each having its own specific goals and focus:

(a) Music Therapy: These sessions are conducted by a Certified Music Therapist whose focus ranges from helping children through emotional, behavioral or mental issues to dealing with sensory sensitivities. A variety of music is used with a mix of instruments, movement/dance and/or singing depending on the needs of the child. Music Therapy helps introduce tones, rhythm as well as an interactive way for sensitive children to experience sound in their own way and comfort level.

(b) Listening Therapy: Similar to Music Therapy except that the child is listening to a carefully planned program on headphones while doing calming activities. As the title indicates, the child is listening to the music which often ranges in terms of pitch and tempo. The goal of Listening Therapy is to teach the child to recognize, interpret and process different types of sounds in a way they can control the volume. Children who have auditory discrimination often hear sounds but aren’t able to understand what they’re hearing so they are unable to process the sounds properly. Reducing the other distractions around them and giving them the control of how loud the input is can make experiencing sounds feel less scary. Listening Therapy is a great way for the child to pay attention to different music (pitches) and eventually be able to tolerate them.

(c) Integrated Listening Systems (iLs). This is a powerful system created by Dr. Alfred Tomatis. Interestingly, many of these technical devices were created to help musicians and singers with speaking and/or vocal issues. But when Dr. Tomatis began using these same devices on children, he noted a significant difference in terms of memory, attention span, ability to focus as well as posture, coordination and balance. He knew that by targeting specific areas of the brain using “filtered” music and music with different pitches and tones, it was possible to retrain and improve sensory, motor and learning processing. Most specifically, he realized music helped the functioning of the brain stem and cortex. We don’t realize it but we use the visual, auditory and vestibular systems together in order to successfully interact with and understand the world around us. And by using movement in conjunction with the music, Dr. Tomatis discovered how to help integrate sensory information much more effectively.

The idea behind iLs is similar to that of Listening therapy except that the headphones for iLs are specially equipped with a tiny piece called a ‘bone conductor.’ The purpose of this bone conductor was explained to me that, for example, the way we hear our own voice is very different than how others hear it or how it sounds on a tape recorder. (How many of us absolutely detest the sound of our own recorded voice?) Essentially, the bone conductor gives us a ‘3-D’ effect of sounds and experiencing those sounds in a more pure form. Not only that, but the person participates in activities while listening to the iLs program as a way to get their visual, auditory and vestibular systems working in sync. For people, especially children, whose sensory systems have never been integrated, or working together, the world can be a terrifying place.

Jaimie used to be a child who covered her ears and screamed with the slightest noise. She startled easily, she shrieked whenever a siren went off, she freaked out when voices were too quiet or shrill or gravelly. It never dawned on me back then that the reason for her severe reactions wasn’t because she necessarily feared the sound but more because she didn’t understand them. Her brain simply didn’t recognize it, couldn’t process it so, therefore, never made that neural connection that “Oh. Okay. That is my Mama’s voice. That’s fine.” or “I hear the ambulance and it’s really loud.” To her, both noises registered the same and triggered the same level of confusion resulting in fear. That’s where the different music therapies helped us.

Music therapy introduced Jaimie to various musical tones and sounds. She banged on drums when she needed LOUD and tapped on sticks or mini-xylophones when she needed more quiet tones. It also helped prepare her for the more direct interaction with Listening Therapy. She was able to tolerate the headphones and realized that she could turn up the volume of the music LOUD when she needed it or when there was music she liked and turned it back down when noises weren’t as fun for her. It also forced her to actively listen to sounds and music and not avoid or run away from it. It prepared her for the next step, which was the iLs.

ILs has been a true blessing for us. Until she was fully assessed recently we didn’t truly understand how much Jaimie struggled with areas such as motor-planning, vestibular coordination and how much she needed visual stimulation and visual cues. She now does OT with the iLs system and we are saving to purchase a system for at-home use. Watching her move her body in ways I never thought would and to tolerate people, sound and activities she never could brings me such joy.

Not every child will need to go the step-by-step approach that Jaimie had to. Her sensitivities are on the severe side and so we’ve always had to approach each therapy with baby steps. Jaimie still has a way to go but music has given us a gift of hope.

The most important thing I’ve witnessed music do is help a little girl who feared her world so much, she literally sat on our couch, curled up in a ball with her hands over her ears most of the time. Music fed her hungry brain and now I can finally see glimpses of the little girl Jaimie keeps hidden away.

And for that I am so grateful.
Chynna Tanara Laird

For more information, please refer to the following resources:

www.integratedlisteningsystems.com - Official iLs Website

http://www.musictherapy.org/ - America Music Therapy Association

www.creativedance.org - BrainDance Website (A GREAT way to use music and movement together in a less therapeutic way.)

Courtesy of Parenting Special Needs Magazine

Read more: http://www.autismsupportnetwork.com/news/feeding-hungry-brain-music-autism-2321452#ixzz0isFvx35y

Let the Music Play On

2010-03-06T13:34:00.000-08:00

When Shakespeare said “If music be the food of love then play on” he probably also meant that music can heal and soothe you during difficult times, writes Tshidi Mametsa

For many centuries music has been a powerful means of communication and of self and group expression.

In traditional cultures, music has been used for thousands of years to promote the healing of the body, mind and spirit.

Music therapy and sound healing are two modern methods of scientifically applying these ancient practices.

Here at home music played a key role in mobilising the oppressed and was used by them to express their views and feelings during the struggle against apartheid.

Today there are many forms of informal music sessions, particularly jazz, where individuals tend to wind down and attain a calmer state.

It is common at live music performances, to spot people reacting to the music with a smile and expressing their joy and state of tranquility in various ways.

Medunsa researcher Refilwe Galane Masokoane

says music therapists are able to tell what’s going on in a person’s world by observing their reaction to music.

“Music therapy, which is prescribed by board-certified music therapists, uses primarily western European classical music and live performance to effect positive psychological, physical, cognitive or social changes.

“Sound healing, on the other hand, relies on rhythmic drumming, chanting and recordings composed specifically to bring about a higher level of balance and self-healing,” says Masokoane.

“Therapeutic use of music and sound is quite simple. These techniques use certain sounds to induce a state of deep relaxation called the relaxation response.

“While you are in that state your breathing becomes deeper and slower. Your heartbeat slows, your brain waves shift in frequency, your muscles relax and your circulation works more efficiently. This is the exact opposite of the response to stress.

“Music therapy and sound healing help the body resist stress-related health conditions,” he says.

Certain sounds and types of music stimulate the relaxation response because of a scientific phenomenon known as rhythm entrainment. What happens is that your heart spontaneously changes its rhythm to correspond with the rhythm of the music or sounds you are listening to. This is why fast music is generally not therapeutic.

Because they promote deep relaxation, these therapies can be useful for stress-related conditions, including muscle pain, tension headaches, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, anxiety and fatigue, Masokoane says.

“Music therapy is good for those with learning disabilities, the developmentally delayed, those who have been abused, individuals who suffer from mental illness, the mentally and physically handicapped.

“Also the elderly (including those suffering from Alzheimer’s and senile dementia), the terminally ill, the traumatically brain injured and those who have suffered trauma.”

Music therapy can also help individuals on their journey of self-growth and understanding.

Now you know – so let the music play on.

7 Insane Ways Music Helps Your Brain

2010-02-10T11:08:00.001-08:00

Repair Brain Damage

Slapping neuroscience right across the face, music is able to take stroke, lesion or other brain-damaged patients who have lost the partial ability to see or speak and return it to them. The Kenny Rogers Effect--not named because it deals with gorging yourself on chicken or replacing your old, grandfatherly face with a shiny new rubber one--takes patients with visual neglect, the inability to recognize half of what they see, and lightens the effects of the damage. Patients who only shave half their face or grab for the right boob at a strip club can now put that dollar bill in the left or right side of her thong. The Gambler never stops being awesome.

As long as she's dancing to Kenny Rogers...

Patients with left-side brain damage who can no longer speak can find they are able to sing words, often without trouble or training. After that, it's just a matter of time before they're able to speak simple sentences with practice. That may not sound like much, but if you've ever tried to order a side of fries with left-hand only charades you'll understand what a blessing this can be.

How Does it Work?

Melodic intonation therapy, or singing until you can talk, takes advantage of the fact that language functions are located in the left brain, but music lives over on the right side of the brain. So, when that asshole stroke robs you of your ability to speak, you can train your brain to move those functions to the other side by associating music with language. This essentially rewires a lifetime of growth and an entire history of evolution into meaninglessness interpretations of random head noises from a guy who hasn't shaved his beard since the 70s.

Listening to actual non-terrible music has an additional effect, since pleasurable music releases dopamine that simply makes certain parts of your brain function better (particularly if they were damaged before).

Dopamine is your brain's natural crack

In a nutshell, music gives your brain a massage and fills it with happy chemicals, turning you from a one-eyed mute into an Island in the Stream.
#6.
Kick an Addiction

As it turns out, performing music can be relaxing and can create a distraction from withdrawal symptoms; songwriting can help patients confront impulse control and self-deception and allows an output for negative emotions; hence the entire songbook of Raffi.

It has even been found that listening to music can help aid the detox stage of recovery from drug addiction, and if applied frequently could cut down on the number of pain-killers patients need. Indeed, it turns out GWAR may be just as helpful as Percocet.

How Does it Work?

Music directly affects chemicals called neurotransmitters which relay information in our head. Drugs work in a similar way, except they make your brain lazy and convince it to stop making its own chemicals, because why do work when sweet China White is there to making everything all better? But when you stop taking drugs, your brain isn't making enough chemicals and it doesn't know why because it relies on those drugs to get enough, so your body fails to function correctly and you turn into Joaquin Phoenix.

Introducing music can increase levels of some chemicals associated with heavy addictions, like dopamine and norepinephrine, but significantly cuts back on suzziness and the willingness to give blowjobs for your next fix. In addition, certain music lowers things like heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, etc., that make you feel like killing everybody around you.

Apparently the fact that half of the world's rock stars still wind up dead from overdoses despite music's addiction-breaking qualities is a testament to just how much those guys fucking love doing drugs.
#5.
Boost Your Immune System

It may come as no surprise to all the Cracked readers who are also neuroscientists that music helps boost your immune system. For the rest of you, word is that intangible plinking noises can create a noticeable increase in recovery from a wide range of conditions, including heart disease, lung ailments and even the common cold. While the field of study is still young compared to fancy "real medicine" like "pharmaceuticals" and "penis phrenology" it turns out that sometimes all you need to overcome your horribly debilitating illness is AC/DC.

How Does it Work?

Music, like Jurassic Park's raptors, doesn't just attack from one side. That shit brings out a multi-pronged assault. To start, music reduces stress by reducing cortisol levels, a chemical in your brain that causes you to feel stress in the first place. Jazz, bluegrass and soft rock have been found to be especially effective at reducing stress and increasing health because of their similar musical qualities (that quality being that you don't listen to any of them).

If you're wondering if your favorite music is helping your health, a good question to ask is, "Does this music make me want to riot?" If you answered yes, it's not an optimal medicine. Likewise, if your favorite musician's last name is Cyrus you're probably dooming yourself to a life of erectile dysfunction and diabetes.

In addition to simply lowering stress levels, music also raises immune markers in your system, creating more antibodies to fight disease. Ironically, listening to Amy Winehouse could make you immune to all the potential diseases you'd be exposed to if you met Amy Winehouse. This effect is compounding: Over time, the body can learn to recognize certain types of music (particularly choir or classical music) as immune boosting, continuing the improvement of the immune system. As an added bonus, if you listen to choir music on a regular basis you're almost guaranteed to be immune to STDs as the odds of you ever having sex are quite slim.
#4.
Prevent Seizures

Good news: If you're not one of those 150 suckers who get seizures from music, you may be one of the luckier ones who benefit from decreased seizure activity as a result of listening to music. This effect has even been observed in coma patients. Bet you feel better about being in a coma now.

It's been shown that music by Mozart played on the piano reduces seizure-causing activity in the brain within five minutes of exposure, with many cases showing immediate results in what scientists should called Seizure Wolfgang-banging. Experimentation with other forms of music has been minimal, but for some reason there appears to be a connection between our brains and piano music.

How Does it Work?

It's theorized that "the superorganization of the cerebral cortex . . . may resonate with the superior architecture of Mozart's music" which is a sciencey way of saying that probably Mozart gets all up in your brain in ways the Hamburger Helper jingle only wishes it could. Really though, this is another one of those medical shrug moments, as scientists really haven't figured it out yet. Kind of unfulfilling, isn't it?

Return Lost Memories

If you want music to help you but refuse to stop smoking pot, perhaps you can at least remember where you put your car keys. Or, more applicably, if you have Alzheimer's it could help you remember pieces of your past.

Medical practitioners have found that music shows the potential to unearth memories associated with music for patients, even ones in late stages of dementia. So if you had your first kiss to the dulcet tones of Jefferson Starship, their terrible, terrible music could bring that memory right back for you.

How Does it Work?

Listening to music engages many areas of the brain in both hemispheres, which is why it can create brain activity other methods, like conversation, can't. Another area it engages is the hippocampus, which would be a hilarious name for a school for aquatic mammals but in reality is the less impressive region of the brain which handles long-term memory storage.

When you listen to music you know, feelings associated with the song are returned by the hippocampus. Sometimes the memories even manage to come along with the relevant feelings, so hopefully no music was playing the first time anyone ever kicked you in the junk. Even if memories aren't recovered, emotions and attitudes are, allowing people who can't even remember who they are from day to day or why they loathe the FOX network so much to at least laugh and sing along with off key hopefuls on American Idol.
#2.
Increase Spatial Reasoning

If only there were some way to make yourself seem smarter without working. Oh, wait, there is. Mozart music, especially piano music, can raise your spatial reasoning the equivalent of nine IQ points. And that's an average, meaning there are people who get even more of a boost from it. That's over half a standard deviation or the difference between being Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape or Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Sure, you're not winning a Nobel Prize either way, but it's still a noticeable difference.

How Does it Work?

There are a lot of theories, but some claim that Mozart's music focuses the listener more, like how if you're in the midst of your sixth hour of questing in World of Warcraft you can still rain holy hell down on Hogger as long as you're listening to Ace of Spades. Others say it increases activity in crucial regions of the brain and a few industrious types say "who cares why it works, how can we make money off of this?"

#1.
Cure Parkinson's

At this point, you may be asking, "Sure, music can fix my brain, but can it fix my body?" which would indicate you expect entirely too much from iTunes. No amount of power ballads is going to cure your heartburn or trim a few pounds off anyone's overly-gelatinous ass. However, if you have Parkinson's disease, it just might be able to help. Victims of Parkinson's suffer from muscle spasms, locking muscles, balance problems and sketchy scientists with kick ass time machines. As it turns out, applying music can instantly resolve the physical issues of Parkinson's in many victims.

Take Rande Gedaliah, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2003 and found she had muscle spasms, balance problems and difficulty walking. The disease eventually led to a serious fall in the shower. Things were looking pretty grim until one day she found out she could listen to music and suddenly be able to move with ease, the type of music determining the speed she walks at. We Are the Champions let her walk a slow clip and Born in the USA made her move faster still. Anything by Nickelback sent her spiraling into a rage.

Ancient warriors listened to their Nickelback equivalent, thrashing and scraping bones on rocks,
to produce a similar effect before combat.

How Does it Work?

When you're locked in your room, listening to your old N'Sync CDs, have you ever noticed your foot tapping on its own? That's not just because you have terrible taste in music. It's because the portions of the brain which deal with rhythm and movement are so automated that it requires no conscious attention to move to a beat. It's like your brain going behind your back to get things done because it knows it can't rely on you to bust an appropriate move when you hear "Bye Bye Bye."

This movement isn't handled by the same process as walking up the stairs or hilariously farting with your armpit. Suddenly, patients with bradykinesia--an inability to initiate movement--can move instantly as their brain interprets the music and sends movement signals to their legs, essentially tricking their bodies into moving. We'll say that again for you: Music can trick your broken, unresponsive body into obedience. Think about it: How many times have you thrown your hands in the air? When that happened, did you just not care? Science says that's because you had no control.

Music also helps other Parkinson's-related issues, including loss of balance and spasms. It's also been found that playing music creates an improvement in people with the disease, and drum circles are being used as treatment in music therapy groups, presumably because drums are cheaper than fancy-ass medical equipment, anyway.

Mayor says musical instruments are the best Christmas presents....

2010-01-14T14:31:00.000-08:00

Gov. Mike Huckabee Lists Musical Instruments Among His Favorite Christmas Gifts in NY Times Magazine

Gov. Mike Huckabee Lists Musical Instruments Among His Favorite Christmas Gifts in NY Times Magazine thumbnail Dec 22, 2009

Showing his passion for music making yet again, Former Gov. of Arkansas and FOX Television host, Mike Huckabee, talked about why musical instruments make perfect holiday gifts. (pdf download).
Attachment Size
Gov. Mike Huckabee - Making His List.pdf

Music can help children sleep

2009-12-08T00:16:00.001-08:00

New Hope For Sleepless Parents: NeuroPop Releases RealSleep #1

RealSleep uses nearly-inaudible sounds embedded in music to help 77% of people get to sleep faster and stay asleep longer.

Dobbs Ferry, NY (PRWEB) December 7, 2009 --NeuroPop Inc. releases sound technology that helps even problem sleepers go to sleep faster and stay asleep longer.

“Everybody asks parents of newborns how they’re sleeping and sympathizes with the tales of sleepless nights. But once the baby’s getting close to a year old and sleep deprivation is still the norm for the parents, sympathy doesn’t really help,” said Seth Horowitz, Ph.D., co-founder of NeuroPop Inc. “The reality is that many children never really learn to go to sleep and have trouble both going to and staying asleep, leaving a lot of kids and their parents sleep deprived for years.”

The sounds work directly on the brain to help children unwind. It products the same effect as rocking a baby sleep.
NeuroPop Inc.’s just-released RealSleep #1 may be the answer many new parents have lain awake dreaming of.

RealSleep #1, a CD that plays in any normal player, uses three types of nearly-inaudible sounds that, when embedded in music, work directly on the brain’s arousal centers, allowing children to slow down from the day and fully relax their minds so they can go to sleep more quickly and stay asleep longer.

RealSleep is the product of 15 years of research on hearing, balance, and sleep by Horowitz, an Assistant Research Professor in the departments of neuroscience and psychology at Brown University. “The sounds work directly on the brain to help children unwind. It produces the same effect as rocking a baby to sleep.”

Created with award-winning musician Lance Massey, designer of the world's first commercially viable audio morphing program, RealSleep uses computer algorithms to produce the sounds that help children – and adults - sleep. In the first clinical trial, conducted among children and adult patients with active sleeping problems, 77% of people between ages 1 and 62 who used the product went to sleep faster and stayed asleep longer.

According to one mother in the trial, none of the common methods had worked for her three year old daughter. “We’ve tried Ferberizing her, the Rye Method but nothing has worked. She refuses to go to sleep and then wakes up throughout the night. The first night we tried RealSleep she fell asleep almost immediately. She woke up once at 11, I soothed her but kept her in the crib, turned the CD back on, and she went right back to sleep. And she slept straight till the morning.”

The Musical Brain

2009-12-08T00:10:00.001-08:00

The Musical Brain - A Brief Introduction
7-Aug-2009

In the first of a new five part series, Chris Davies looks at the the musical brain...

The Musical Brain
Opening the door to the Musical Brain....
Picture courtesy of Simon Bosch
http://www.digital-illustration.com.au/fsetcont.html

As trained musicians who’ve spent years perfecting our art, we’re not used to thinking about exactly how we do what we do; we just do it.

We tend to take everything we do while we play for granted: reading the dots, pushing down the right valves, taking a breath here and there, and so on.

Billions

Yet every single thing we do while we play is supported by a vast and complex neural network, comprising billions of components throughout the brain and nervous system.

Although it may seem strange to try and think about our minds as the product of cells and tissue in our heads, much has been learned about music and the brain in recent years.

Complex research

In this article I’m going to explore a few fascinating facts about our musical brains, and try and make some of the more complex research that’s been carried out recently a little more reader-friendly.

The adult brain is a complex organ, made up of around 100,000,000,000 neurons . Neurons are tiny cells that operate in various components of the nervous system, and are charged with the responsibility of sending messages from our sensory organs (like our eyes and ears) to our brains for processing.

These ‘sensory’ neurons are not the only type of neuron that exists – there are also ‘motor’ neurons, which are responsible for our movement, and ‘interneurons’ that connect nearby neurons to each other.

The brain

The brain consists of four ‘lobes’ spread over two hemispheres (i.e. the right and left sides of the brain), and is constructed in layers. The outermost layer (the crinkly part that we usually see in pictures of the brain) is known as the ‘cortex’, which is Latin for ‘bark’ (the bark of a tree trunk is on the outside).

The brain
Now for the science bit... The brain and all its parts...

Goldfish

The cortex has evolved over millions of years to give us the facility of higher-thought, however most of the other animals on the planet are unable to hear music in the way that we do. Whereas we might hear 2 consecutive notes as related, a goldfish would probably hear them as 2 completely separate events with no connection .

Thankfully, modern science has moved on a little since the days of ‘phrenology’ (the study of bumps on the head), which attempted to find parts of the brain responsible for things like ‘cautiousness’ and ‘jealousy’.

Thanks to the most advanced kinds of scanning techniques (like MRI, fMRI, or PET), scientists have been able to figure out exactly which bits of the brain spring into action when we carry out different behaviours.

This has meant that it has become possible to determine which parts of the brain are responsible for the pushing down of valves, the reading of dots, and the differentiation between a crotchet and a hatchet.

Complex musicians

However, things are a little more complex for us musicians, as we shall see.

When we listen to, play, or even compose music, we draw on a number of skills that are not necessarily music-specific.

Primary

For example, we need the use of our eyes to read the music, and therefore call into play the primary visual cortex (or ‘V1’). This is located in the rearmost ‘lobe’ of the brain: the ‘occipital’ lobe, located at the back of the head. It is here that everything we see is processed.

Similarly, when we listen to music we call into the play the auditory cortices. These are divided into the primary and secondary auditory cortices, so-called because incoming signals from the ear go to the primary cortex before the secondary. These parts of the brain are located on what is known as the ‘temporal lobe’ (which is sort of just around your ears).

The primary auditory cortex (or ‘A1’) is responsible for the most basic processing of musical sounds, and plots all the notes we hear on what’s called a ‘tonotopic map’ (which basically means that sounds are ordered according to their frequencies – this enables us to tell a low sound from a high one).

Secondary

The secondary auditory cortex (or ‘A2’) is where the really complicated stuff goes on: there are loads of neural maps here that deal with relationships between the notes we hear. This is where simultaneous notes are processed into harmony, and consecutive notes are processed into some kind of melody.

Relationships between the various notes we hear are plotted, and as a result we can tell whether we’re playing the third of the chord or whether we’re playing a melody or not. As a result of the auditory cortices, the vibrations in air produced by musical instruments become music.

We also need to move when we play, and this calls on the primary motor cortex. Interestingly, movement, like many other bodily functions, is controlled ‘contralaterally’, which means that the left side of your brain is responsible for movements on the right side of your body.

So when you push down your first valve to play a B-flat, that action is actually being controlled by motor circuitry on the left side of your brain (i.e. in the left hemisphere). Movement is a little more difficult to pin down, since other areas, like the cerebellum (which means ‘little brain’ and controls balance) are also involved.

Not straight forward

As I said earlier, things are not quite as straight-forward for us musicians, since musical training and practice actually changes the way in which the brain develops, leading to some rather unusual results.

It is generally believed that for your bog-standard concert attendee, who may not play anything but appreciates a nice night of music, the right hemisphere of the brain is involved in processing melody.

However, for those of us who have received musical training over a long period of time, this processing tends to shift to the left hemisphere, which is normally considered the seat of language-processing.

This is not the only change that occurs as a result of musical training and practice. It has been proven that children who start learning to play the piano at an early age tend to have an enlarged ‘corpus callosum’ .

This is the bridge between the 2 sides of the brain, and it allows the two sides to communicate with one another and share the fruits of their labours. There have also been cases of enlarged cerebellums in pianists who started playing at an early age.

X Ray
Looking inside the brain: The brain going about its work...

Motor programming

The cerebellum is very much involved in motor programming in the brain – the ability that we have to simply play a scale without having to think too much about it is due to the fact that the particular sequence of movements needed has been stored. Such changes in brain development are often caused by environmental factors.

For example, in 2000 Eleanor McGuire and her research team found that experienced taxi drivers had a ‘large posterior post-hippocampal volume’ when compared to non-taxi drivers.

This basically means that the part of the brain that is responsible for navigation and spatial skills actually got larger over time in response to the demands of the job: everyone needs a taxi driver who knows his way around!

In short, the brain is what we call a model of ‘neuro-plasticity’, which means quite simply that not only can brain development be affected by environmental forces, but also that if one part of the brain is damaged another part can simply take over the damaged part’s task.

Playing an instrument

Starting to play an instrument at an early age is enough to cause significant changes in the organisation of your brain, so that it becomes more adapted to musical behaviours as you get older. Of course some people are born with very unusual brains – the Rain Man, for example, was born without a corpus callosum and as a result has a stunning memory.

One particular researcher, Isabelle Peretz, who does a great deal of research into music and the brain at Montreal University in Canada, has recently suggested that there is in fact a unique musical system in the brain; a series of neural pathways that are dedicated specifically to musical behaviours.

Wired for music

This goes hand in hand with some other theories that suggest that we are, in fact, born with the ability to develop musical skills; the idea that we are ‘wired’ for music.

However, a lot of recent research points to the likelihood that our music and language pathways share a great deal in common with one another, and that they are, on many occasions, one and the same. So do we, as trained musicians, tend to process music as a language?

Is it true that as we develop greater musical expertise we start to process music a little more analytically (the left brain is very good at analysis)? This may be partly true, but the analogy between music and language is often difficult to draw.

In built

There is evidence to suggest that non-musicians are able to process musical stimuli in a similar way to musicians, suggesting the possibility that musical processing of some kind is in-built.

For example, even though a musician may be able to name the interval of a perfect forth on hearing it at the start of Wagner’s Bridal Chorus, non-musicians may be equally able to identify the interval when they hear it elsewhere, even if they have to call it the ‘hear comes the bride’ interval.

Loudness

In 2001, Caroline Palmer and her research team at Ohio State University found that both musicians and non-musicians were just as good at identifying changes in musical sequences as long as those changes involved the loudness or length of certain notes.

The fact that people without musical training were able to make discriminations to a similar standard as musicians again provides Peretz with evidence for her theory. There’s also a lot of evidence to suggest that infants possess some musical processing skills, and that the fetus can respond to musical sounds during the last 3 months of pregnancy (and that listening experiences in the womb actually influence musical behaviour after birth) .

Many researchers have found that musical phenomena are processed by the same neural equipment that is involved in the processing of language.

Unexpected musical events

In 2002, Gunter Koelsch, a German researcher, discovered that upon hearing ‘unexpected musical events’, his subjects showed neural activity at specific points in the brain.

These included some complex-sounding locations like the ‘Heschl’s gyrus’ (involved in processing speech sounds) and the ‘planum temporale’ (central to language processing).

The major finding here was that the specific sequence of places in the brain that were activated were originally thought to form a language-specific pathway (i.e. used primarily for the processing of language and its components, and very little else).

The fact that they were activated during listening to music suggests that music and language are processed by the same neural pathways (or at the very least that they share some).

Sharing functions

In addition to this, the ‘planum temporale’ is generally larger in musicians than non-musicians, suggesting that it has adapted to sharing both musical and linguistic functions.

Further evidence for the music/language connection comes from the case of William’s Syndrome. This rare genetic disorder tends to cause moderate retardation, as well as certain facial characteristics and cardiovascular problems.

The interesting thing about it is that while certain abilities (like maths, for example) are impaired, the sufferer’s language and musical skills tend to be unusually well-developed.

Linked to the brain

The fact that music and language skills are much more developed than other skills that are impaired as a result of the condition suggests the possibility that music and language are indeed linked in some way in the brain.

There are, however, cases where musical and linguistic abilities seem completely separated; cases where one is substantially impaired and the other completely normal.

Whistle stop tour

Our whistle-stop tour of music and the brain has revealed a number of interesting facts. Musical behaviours are complex and spread out widely in the brain, calling on a number of processes.

Our brains also have the ability to adapt to whatever we are doing, and the earlier
musical training is started, the more pronounced these changes are. We’ve also
noted that there are many debates currently raging about whether or not we have an in-built ‘music processor’, or music is simply another form of language.

But does this understanding of the brain’s musical functions unravel the musical mystery for us?

It seems that despite the fact that scientists are unravelling the mysteries of musical processing, music is far more than merely neurons and lobes; we experience it in our minds as much as we do in our brains.

Chris Davies

Footnotes:
Levitin, D., This is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), 85.
Jourdain, R., Music, the Brain and Ecstasy (Avon, 1997), 4.
Schlaug, G., ‘The Brain of Musicians’, in Peretz, I. and Zatorre, R. (eds), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003), 368.
Hodges, D., ‘The Musical Brain’ in McPherson, G. (ed.), The Child as Musician (Oxford University Press, 2006), 58.

A Brief CV

Chris Davies is a postgraduate at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and is currently 1st horn with the Cory Band. He graduated from Oxford University in 2009 with a First Class Honour Degree in music, is an Associate of Trinity College London, and a Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music.

He’s currently involved in a research project at the Biosciences Department at Cardiff University with Dr. Alan Watson and Kevin Price (Head of Brass at the RWCMD), studying breathing strategies in music performance. He studies tenor horn with Owen Farr, is a composer and a conductor.

Pre-preschool: Can you Influence development before a child is born?

2009-11-18T14:58:00.000-08:00

Lorna Kellogg was eight months' pregnant, in the audience at the University of Colorado's holiday concert. The brass band came on stage.

Suddenly, she could feel the beat inside her body. Literally. Her son began kicking in time to the song. Kellogg, a child development expert of Boulder, says she smiled. What an adorable coincidence.

But the perfectly timed bumps against her uterus continued. In disbelief, she looked at her watch. Two minutes, three, four, five. Then the band stopped. And so did her son.

"I don't think it could have been a coincidence -- kicking on beat for that number of minutes, statistically," Kellogg says.

The experience got her thinking: How much can you influence you child's environment, and subsequently development, before they're born? And can a fetus not only absorb, but also learn to reciprocate -- as her son's seeming addition to the brass band inplied?

"Babies understand a thousand times more than we think they do, from the time they're born, from the time they're conceived," says Kellogg, who has been a child development expert for 20 years. "And the explosion of research in the past five to 10 years is proving my personal theory is correct."

She's referring to a myriad of studies about fetal brain development; the impact of a mother's emotions, particularly stress; and prenatal communication.

Research has shown that newborns favor their mothers' voices, and they prefer their native tongue. Similarly, some research notes infants can distinguish music they heard in utero. Even furthermore, a study posted in "Current Biology" this month found that newborns also cry in the phonetic patterns of their native language; French cries sound different than German.

The new info has reinforced the attitudes of researchers, businesses and even mothers, with their various theories about how to enhance prenatal development -- beyond eating healthy -- to the baby's brain and the spirit.

Some believe that playing classical music or different speeds of heartbeats can stimulate intelligence and give the baby a mental head start. Other books teach how to "channel" the unborn spirit to discover its purpose and destiny ("Bond With Your Baby Before Birth," by Kim O'Neill).

Four months ago, Denver-based Lullabelly released a "prenatal music belt," which allows expecting moms to fill their womb with their favorite tunes. The premise: Music, along with other forms of prenatal stimulation, can stimulate growth of the brain and synapses.

"If you're building brain cells and synaptic structure, it helps lay the foundation for later learning and enhances language and learning skills," says co-founder Michael Godart.

Trying to push little Johnny on the fast track -- before he can even open his eyes -- has some parents and experts rolling theirs. They say overstimulation can actually interfere with development. Others say there's no way to prove whether a special book or song can have any real effect. After all, a child exposed to prenatal tunes who later shows advanced speech development might have developed that way without the headphones.

Fetal reaction

Still, research backs up Kellogg's in utero "little drummer boy" experience. Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences found that 2- and 3-day-old newborns can recognize musical patterns and even notice when the drummer misses a beat.

After the sixth month of pregnancy, a fetus moves to the rhythm of the mother's speech, according to Henry Truby, emeritus professor of pediatrics and linguistics at the University of Miami.

And New Zealand fetologist, William Liley, found that from at least 25 weeks on, the fetus can jump in rhythm with an orchestra performance.

Some of this response could be independent -- or even inborn -- Kellogg says, but it's also hard to separate it from the mother, her physical responses and the hormones she releases with different emotions. When Kellogg listened to music that made her happy while she was pregnant, she says her baby grew excited and threw some extra kicks.

"There's a huge education push for pregnant mothers right now around teaching them the importance of remaining calm and reducing stress," Kellogg says.

Studies have found maternal stress can increase the likelihood of the child having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, depression, autism, cognitive delay, a depressed immune system and raised blood pressure. It's also associated with lower birth weight, according to a study at the Imperial College London.

Another study found the hormones released by a highly stressed mother can cross into the placenta and alter the development of the baby's kidney and heart.

When Daena Ross, of Boulder, was pregnant with her third child, her second child suffered a severe fall and cracked his head. She worried about him throughout the pregnancy. To this day, she says her third child shows great concern for his older brother's physical well being.

On the other hand, when she was pregnant with her first child, she played the piano several times a day. Her daughter ended up being drawn to the piano, even composing her own songs by age 5.

"One was a passion; one was a trauma," says Ross, who is the resource director at the Shining Mountain Waldorf School. "The passions of the mother, for better or for worse, are shared with the fetus."

Her explanation goes beyond hormones and mom's physiological responses. Ross believes that memories are stored in a person's "life body," or etheric life force. This is shared with the fetus via the amniotic fluid, she says. Water carries vibrations.

"Everything fluid in our body has to do with this life force, which is part of why the fetus is wrapped in this fluid," Ross says.

Welcome to the machine

Whether you consider it etheric or rhythmic, the vibration from music stands behind most arguments in favor of prenatal jam sessions. The benefits of music -- regardless of the listener's age -- has long been proven to stimulate the nervous system.

Some reports have found that fetal sound stimulation leads to higher levels of brain function; that it can help in the development of sound, babbling, visual tracking and motor control. Even Harvard University professor, Howard Gardner, says there are "multiple intelligences," including words and music, linguistic intelligence and musical intelligence -- which he asserts can be stimulated in utero.

But it's those very musical vibrations that led Boulder mom Ross to steer clear of machines, like the Lullabelly. The vibrations from instruments or mommy's voice are different than the vibrations from a machine.

"Machines are not harmonious with life forces," Ross says.

Instead of strapping headphones to your stomach, she says sing to your baby or play an instrument. Our voice boxes are already equipped with all of the stimulation the fetus needs to develop healthily, she says.

She thinks back on one Boulder mom who signed up for a teach-your-fetus-to-read program several years ago. After birth, the mother felt guilty, fearing she had overstimulated her child's nervous system.

"It calls on the nervous system to do something that is not naturally done at that developmental stage," Ross says. "Repeating the alphabet 100 times a day can transfer to the child, but there's no life to doing that."

As Boulder mom Kellogg sees it, parents should expose their children to everything in a balanced way, in utero and in life.

"If you expose children to a little it of everything in a mindful way, their nature will kick in," she says. "I think nature has deep wisdom that we should consider respecting. Thing in nature happen perfectly."

Contact Staff Writer Aimee Heckel at 303-473-1359 or heckela@dailycamera.com.

Bad vibrations

Some people believe exposure to aggressive and discordant music can negatively affect a fetus's brain structure, based on the premise that even plants don't thrive when exposed to such music. The 1973 research by Dorothy Retallack, of the Colorado Woman's College in Denver, found that plants were more likely to die when surrounded by rock music. Plants "listening" to more soothing music grew abundantly.

Keith Whiting, the founder of a baby lullaby and song CD series, "Dreams and Lullabies," (dreamsandlullabies.com) advises pregnant mothers avoid rap, grunge and hard rock.

By the numbers

18 weeks -- The age a fetus can hear.

88 percent -- Of fetuses in one study responded to musical stimulation with a change in heartbeat, producing a state of attentiveness, according to Sheila Woodward with the University of Cape Town, South Afrrica.

On the shelves

Here are some products designed to communicate with baby in utero:

BabyPlus, babyplus.com, $149 -- An egg-shaped device to wear around the stomach. Plays 16 different "audio lessons" in the form of heartbeat tones. Claims: To teach the fetus to recognize patterns and differentiate sounds.

Lullabelly, lullabelly.com, $49 -- Prenatal music belt that you can connect with your iPod or iPhone to play music to your womb. Claims: Babies remember music they hear in utero. Music is considered a "pre-linguistic" language that can stimulate, nourish and calm the fetus.

Bellysonic, bellysonic.com, $105 on Amazon.com -- Baby's first set of headphones. Bellysonic also makes prenatal CDs. Claims: The right tunes can reduce stress and enhance learning. The amniotic fluid in the womb also can enhance some frequencies.

Ritmo, nuvo-group.com, -- The "ultimate prenatal auditory stimulation system" that can play anything recorded on an mp3 to the baby before and after birth. Claims: Playing music and flowing sounds helps pregnant moms bond with their babies and advance their development.
By Aimee Heckel

Are Mobile Phones the New Cigarettes?

2009-11-18T14:45:00.000-08:00

Cell phones have become ubiquitous in society, especially in California, where 30 percent of the population relies exclusively on cell phones for communication, double the national average. California teenagers are notoriously hooked on them, using them to talk, type, take photos, record videos and listen to music. Like cigarettes, unfortunately, there may be a dark side to cell phones.

As many as 9 million people in the United States - 3 percent of the population - may have severe reactions to electromagnetic fields (EMF), an invisible force that some scientists claim will greatly shorten life spans. Consider these startling recent findings: Young people who start using cell phones before they turn 20 years of age could have a fivefold increase in brain cancer risk and could exhibit symptoms usually associated with aging - dementia and Alzheimer's disease - by the age of 30, according to Canadian researcher Magda Havas.

As much as a third of the total population - 100 million people - may suffer from "electrical hypersensitivity," enduring moderate to severe health consequences from EMF exposures. And just like second-hand smoke, you or your kids may be at risk, even if you don't rely on wireless devices.

With the Obama administration sinking billions into "smart grids," the EMF levels will only increase due to its reliance on the same kinds of wireless signals and systems that enable cell phone technology. Smart grids - which will make our power supply interactive like the Internet - may help boost reliability and reduce pollution, but they could increase cancer rates if precautions are not taken.

Before the wireless revolution is programmed into all of our lives with phones and power systems for decades to come, a sustained independent research program, overseen by an independent expert advisory panel, should be established by the Obama administration. Lawmakers in the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Russia, Finland, Sweden and Thailand are already seeking to limit use of cell phones by children and teens until all of the science is sorted out.

The good news is that much can be done to reduce a person's exposure if they are aware of what is generating EMF frequencies. This is where public education is critical to ensure public health. A major public health education program on safer cell phone practices - and how to detect and avoid EMF hazards in general - should be initiated by our public health agencies.

The challenge associated with the smart grid is more complex. Still, Europe isn't doing its smart grid upgrades on the cheap, like the United States, but is instead deploying filters that minimize the amount of EMF emanating from inverters and other components necessary for solar and wind power conversions into electricity. Yet most European nations have also yet to adopt lower exposure EMF standards as Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Belgium and Liechtenstein have all done. The sooner we get a better handle on the risks of EMF exposure, the better.

Peter Asmus is author of "Introduction to Energy in California," (University of California Press, 2009). www.peterasmus.com.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/17/EDG91AM0PF.DTL#ixzz0XFnlHtRz

Music Prompts Memory in Alzheimer's Patients

2009-11-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

Therapists and doctors who treat Alzheimer's are now using music not only to soothe and entertain their patients but to restore some cognitive function. For decades it's been recognized that Alzheimer's patients can still remember and sing songs long after they've stopped recognizing names and faces. Now it's thought that those tunes can provide a pathway back to memories otherwise lost. One claims intensive music therapy can lead to an increase of 50% on cognitive-function tests.

“By engaging very basic mechanisms of emotions and listening,” one caregiver tells the Wall Street Journal, “music is stimulating dormant areas of the brain that haven't been accessible due to degenerative disease.” Another therapist says by singing along patients “are exercising their cognitive function—just like they are exercising in physical therapy.” They can even learn new songs, he adds, citing a colleague's success with “Who Let the Dogs Out?” “I know they had never heard that one, but it became an anthem.”

Harry Kimball NEWSR.

Read about how MUSIC can change your life!

2009-11-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

How chamber music changed my life

After a decade of mouldering in the back of the wardrobe, the violin is now once again part of my life. And I can't imagine going back...

A year or so ago, I started to play chamber music. I'd been a schoolgirl music nerd: the rhythm of each week had been played out in a familiar round of music, music, and more music. If it was Monday lunchtime, it was choir; if the evening, school orchestra. The weekly violin lesson happened on a Tuesday evening; chamber group on Wednesday evening; youth orchestra on Friday evening; local orchestra on Saturday morning. But it wasn't an intensity I wanted to continue at university; other things (such as a student paper) commanded attention. When I started work in my early 20s I briefly took violin lessons. Then there was a long gap: about 10 years. I occasionally thought guiltily of the violin sitting in the back of the wardrobe. The curse of the fiddle, though, is just how bad the thing can sound if you don't practise. I decided I'd rather remember the musician I was at 18 than the incompetent I'd become in my 30s.

Then something happened. People started to badger me. A close girlfriend, a terrific viola player, steadily chipped away at my resistance. At the same time, I started a relationship with someone who plays the piano and viola. Suddenly I found myself playing Bartok and Mozart duos with my two viola pals. Then someone invited me round for a bit of chamber music. Because these kind people were not immediately out to sneer at how rubbish I was (which I undoubtedly was/am) this was, while utterly terrifying, also lovely, as my stiff fingers gradually habituated themselves to the old acrobatics. So on a whim my viola-playing girlfriend and I decided to put a quartet together. We found a cellist (who's also a fantastic pianist) and someone to play first violin, and we played one weekend afternoon in my flat, with cups of tea and a cake for after.

In fact, we are rarely now a quartet. We most often meet with another friend, a cellist. Tea and cake has extended into what seems a necessary dinner, with playing relationships transformed into friendships. On Sunday, we played some of the Schubert Quintet in C; the Schumann Piano Quintet; and the first movement of the Brahms Piano Quintet. With an extra viola or clarinet, we've expanded into Mozart quintets, Brahms sextets, and the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets. We harbour ambitions of putting together a group for the Mendelssohn Octet.

What I feel now is a sense of bafflement: why did I deprive myself the pleasure of chamber music for so long? I can think of almost nothing that gives me so much – OK, I'm going to use the word – joy as our Sunday evenings of quartets and quintets.

We are, by the way, pretty awful. Occasionally, to my shame, someone hears us. "Such enthusiasm!" sweetly remarked our cellist's wife yesterday. The poor woman was trying to write an article in another room; I have no idea how she managed it to the crazy accompaniment we provided (no one could claim we don't play vigorously). I struggle to keep up with the others: I feel rather like the weakest of four players in a tennis doubles match, the one who has the good luck to be able to play beyond their natural ability because they are keeping good company.

Why is it, then, so wonderful? Well, once in a while, we just click into place: there comes a fleeting moment when each of us, playing highly individuated and often wildly complicated parts, actually become an ensemble. We … blend. This is a tremendously intense feeling, and hard to describe. There's a kind of "whoosh" to it – the sensation that you are part of something immensely powerful, something bigger than your own individual capability. The idea that you are part of not only what you yourself are making, but also what the others are creating. Out of our normal human isolation, we make a single, complex voice. This is strangely emotional, and when it happens, I think we all feel it.

Second, I there's the pure joy of getting to know a piece of music from the inside. Play these pieces enough and the texture of them is graven on the inside of your brain. (In fact, after an evening of chamber music, the difficulty is often letting the sounds go. As I write, my head is still full of the fugue at the end of the last movement of the Schumann.) All this makes the hearing "our" music played by others (by people who are actually good at playing) so much richer. I had good personal evidence of this last week watching Mark Morris's faultless dance piece V, performed to the Schumann, an experience that made me indescribably happy. I love learning, too, from my chamber music partners. Our cellist/pianist in particular is an encylopedia of the repertoire with a bafflingly good memory for opus numbers and "how things go" – and indeed of YouTube clips. I've always been a hopeless analyst of music. I don't think my chamber music partners know how much they are teaching me when they make a chance remark about the fugue picking up this or that theme from earlier in the movement. They help me navigate the music.

Why am I telling you this? Partly because after an evening of playing, it's hard to get my mind back on anything else. Partly because if you've got an instrument lurking at the back of the wardrobe, neglected since your schooldays, I think you should take a deep breath, dust it off, and start playing.

Music is Instrumental to Brain Health

2009-10-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

Health News - Chicago Sun
Research: Playing music is instrumental to brain health
Comments
October 31, 2009

There's growing evidence that playing a musical instrument is good for your brain, a review of research by a Swiss psychologist has found.

And that's true not just for kids, Lutz Jancke of the University of Zurich tells London's Daily Mail: "We found that, even in people over the age of 65, after four or five months of playing for an hour a week, there were strong changes in the brain."

"When you play a musical instrument, you have to learn about tone and about scores, and your ability to store audio information becomes better," says Jancke, who reported his findings in the journal Faculty of 1000 Biology Reports. "Not only does this make it easier to pick up other languages, musicians are able to pick out exactly what others are feeling just on the tone of their voices."

Music changes your brain and behaviour

2009-09-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

Music maestro please!
It's not just your mood a good tune uplifts

Writer: By BUNDIT UNGRANGSEE
Published: 10/09/2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: Mylife

Music is like food. Some food types make us fat, thin, healthy - or not. Even the types of books that our brain receives, consumes rather, also have a great influence in shaping the way we think.

Hence, the type of music that enters our ears and brain has a direct effect on our emotions, thinking, brain activity and potential.

Music can enhance or decrease our intelligence. It can also create both good and bad emotions by making us calm or aggressive.

1. Fast learning

Classical music in the baroque period enhances learning.

Georgi Lozanov, a world-renowned clinical researcher in psychiatric studies from Bulgaria, discovered through his research that classical music belonging to the masters dating back to the baroque period such as Handel and Bach, if played in language classes, enables students to absorb the material at a faster rate. The type of music preferred should be 60 beats per minute so that it is in harmony with one's heart rate. It helps one to relax.

A couple of interesting books have been published on this topic. Superlearning, a compilation of Dr Lozanov's research, and Accelerated Learning by Colin Rose who took great pains to detail the importance of using classical music by Mozart in aiding learning.

2. Improving concentration and focus

Certain types of classical music help improve concentration.

Soft and slow classical music helps in the following:

Relaxation of the body, slows down the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, enhances alertness of the mind, rids the mind of exterior noises, prolongs one's attention span and develops one's ability to recall past events.

The title of most classical compositions will not be recognised by the younger generation. The titles are long and in foreign languages. The name of the composer and the score itself is also difficult to remember.

The important aspects of classical music is its ability to improve concentration and the slow beat - this has nothing to do with the "name" or "title" of the composition. All you need to know is that you can listen to any song composed by Bach, Vivaldi, Handel or anyone belonging to the baroque period. And it could be any song as long as it contains the following words - largo (slow), larghetto (almost slow) and adagio (slightly faster than larghetto).

3. Enhancing creativity and inspiration

Good music helps to improve one's creativity. Music goes through a delicate process in both sides of the brain.

Listening to music leads to development of both left and right sides of the brain. Music coordinates the work process of the right side (imagination) and the left side (analytical capability) which are used in solving problems in a creative manner.

Albert Einstein was described by his teacher as a child who had no future. Einstein's mother vehemently disagreed.

His parents bought the young genius a violin. He played the instrument until he achieved a level of proficiency. This was the key that opened up the young Einstein and shaped him into one of the most intelligent physicists in history.

Einstein himself confessed that his intelligence had something to do with playing the violin. His favourites were Mozart and Bach.

The manner in which Einstein tackled scientific problems was likened to improvisation on his violin.

4. Increasing productivity

The music of Mozart and Bach increases productivity by 48%.

Researcher Frances Rauscher experimented on two test groups by asking them to perform paper-folding tasks. One group did it in quiet conditions. The other group performed the tasks while listening to Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major by Mozart. After 10 minutes, the group listening to Mozart showed a higher production rate of 48%.

Other researchers attempted similar experiments with compositions by Bach and the results were similar.

Relate Search: Georgi Lozanov, Accelerated Learning, Colin Rose, Mozart

Music and Medicine Magazine launched

2009-08-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

SAGE launches Music and Medicine
Publishing research integrating the 2 disciplines

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (August 6, 2009) – In response to a recent surge in studies that integrate medicine and music, SAGE, the world's leading independent academic and professional publisher, is pleased to launch Music and Medicine in July, a new interdisciplinary journal that will incorporate the research that combines the two disciplines.

This new official Journal of the International Association for Music and Medicine is peer reviewed and edited by Joanne Loewy, DA, LCAT, MT-BC, Director of the distinguished Louis Armstrong Center for Music & Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, and David Aldridge, PhD, FRSM, Director of the notable Nordoff-Robbins Zentrum, Witten, for applied music in health care practice and research, Germany. With the goal of bringing together information that is currently scattered across many disciplines and throughout many publications, Music and Medicine will focus on studies that integrate the science of medicine with the art of music, and the art of medicine with the science of music.

The journal covers a number of subjects about how music and medicine interact, including:

* Analgesia and music sedation
* Cancer care: active and receptive music approaches
* Cardiology and rhythm
* Dementia, stroke and music memory
* Infant stimulation
* Music during surgery
* Stress response and music relaxation

"Our intention is to provide a venue for the development of theory based on practice, and we will draw on specific research in music and medicine," said co-editor Loewy.

"We invite participation through dialogue about the impact that music has upon the brain, for human physiology, and in developing unique clinical areas, such as sleep investigations and pain management," said co-editor Aldridge.

Music and Medicine will be published bi-annually in 2009 and quarterly beginning in 2010 with an innovative journal launch strategy — free online access for the first three years for individuals through December 2011. For more information, visit http://mmd.sagepub.com.

###

Music and Medicine, a new interdisciplinary journal, is a forum for research related to music interventions and music strategies in medicine. Each peer-reviewed issue offers articles, case studies, commentaries, and interviews from clinical medicine, the neurosciences, behavioral sciences, and social work that translate music, and the psychology, cognition, neurology, and therapy of music into scientifically valid clinical applications, with the goal of bringing together information from many disciplines and publications into one key resource. http://mmd.sagepub.com

SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. A privately owned corporation, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. www.sagepublications.com

Introducing children to music is important

2009-07-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

I've probably said it a thousand times aleady but I just thought about how many times music crops up in our language. How are you going to get your kids to strike the right chord, or be on the same wavelength, or enjoy the vibe, or be in harmony, or skip a beat. Without a doubt, these are all musical terms. We are in fact musical beings. Introducing a child to music is giving them a chance to be human. Somewhere in our past, we must have already known this as it's already embedded in our language.
Something to think about......

Learning Music really does grow your brain

2009-06-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Connection between Arts and the Brain in Education

Recent research demonstrates that artistic activities light up parts of the brain that nothing else does. Waldorf educators use a curriculum that is long-premised on this knowledge: Artistic activity encourages motivation; highly motivated children stay engaged in activities; through working with artistic activities, both hemispheres of children's developing brains are stimulated and their learning is deepened.

Ghent, NY (PRWEB) June 19, 2009 -- Recently, Johns Hopkins University sponsored a one-day Roundtable on Arts and the Brain, based on a report released by the Dana Foundation that demonstrates how the arts light up parts of the brain like nothing else does. This was followed in Washington, DC by the tenth annual conference on Learning and the Brain. The Roundtable was an invitation-only event and included 200 researchers, teachers, educational leaders, superintendents, principals, and policy makers.

According to Patrice Maynard, leader for Outreach and Development for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, who attended both events, one particularly moving presentation described the effects of music on the ability of the brains of children to receive and comprehend math concepts, offered by Dr. Elizabeth Spelke, from Harvard University. "Dr. Spelke stated that she has demonstrable evidence that in babies and young children the making of music (not the listening, but the singing, composing, playing an instrument) illuminates parts of the brain, as visible in fMRI imaging, that helps the comprehension of math to accelerate. She emphasized that the use of the playing of instruments should not be a substitute for the teaching of math, but rather, that understanding math concepts is easier for children who play a musical instrument."

The Dana Foundation research report shows how arts activities influence cognition. The results demonstrate levels of brain activity that reflect engagement or attentiveness during learning, including the kinds of arts activities (music, dance, painting, etc.) that hold children's attention.

The report validates scientifically what Waldorf educators observe on a daily basis in their classrooms: Artistic activity encourages motivation. Highly motivated children stay engaged in activities. Artistic activity stimulates both hemispheres of the human brain and deepens learning. The language of Waldorf teachers differs from that employed in the Dana report, but the report supports Rudolf Steiner's statements, made in the early part of the twentieth century, that modern science would catch up with his view of education and confirm the remarkable benefits it provides.

The difference between the approach of the Dana Foundation and Waldorf education is the difference between materialistic science and a spiritual - or anthroposophical - view of human beings. The first proceeds from cause to effect; the second begins with the wholeness of the child, which it allows to develop at its own pace, knowing that all learning must be digested artistically, and that the engagement of a child in education is essential.

Dr. Jerome Kagan, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, "made an impassioned plea for wholeness in human beings, ethical standards in child rearing and in the world, a remembrance of what real play was like, and less dependence on external things," states Ms. Maynard.

The Dana report includes suggestions for to how to improve test scores and increase brain capacity through use of the arts, supporting a current "outcomes based" approach to education. Waldorf educators might also use the report as scientific verification of their practices and continue the important task of enthusiastically approaching the human being as a mystery to unfold, not a product to generate. The arts are among the best educational means to assist in just that task.

For more information on Waldorf Education or to read more about the Dana Research Report, visit www.whywaldorfworks.org.

Is it really worth the effort getting your kids to practice?

2009-04-08T22:34:00.001-07:00

Are those struggles getting your child to practise her instrument every day worth your trouble? The simple answer: Yes! Not only is your child developing her ability to make beautiful music, but she is also strengthening her mind for mathematical thinking.

Keith Devlin in his book, The Math Gene, points out that musicians and mathematicians alike both use abstract notation to describe on paper the patterns that exist in their mind. A trained musician reading musical symbols moves straight to “hearing” in his mind the sounds that the symbols represent. Similarly, a trained mathematician reading mathematical symbols moves directly to think about the patterns that the symbols represent. It’s not surprising then that medical imaging shows the brains of professional musicians when listening to music are similar to the images of brain activity of professional mathematicians solving a mathematical problem. Although the imaging of amateur musicians and mathematicians has not always shown the use of similar circuits in the brain, the potential for mathematical and musical neural pathways to complement each other exists if your child keeps practising that guitar!

Whether your child practises and composes music daily, or just enjoys dancing around the house to music, providing the right music for the right purpose can help your child learn in general but potentially excel at mathematics.

Play music in the background during a lesson or homework session. Music can activate us emotionally, mentally and physically to help us remember the learning experience and information. Music can also create a highly focused learning state in which large amounts of content information can be processed and learned. Baroque music, such as that composed by Bach or Handel that is 50 to 80 beats per minute creates an atmosphere of focus that leads students into deep concentration in the alpha brain wave state. Learning vocabulary, memorizing facts or reading to this music is highly effective. On the other hand, energizing Mozart music assists in holding attention during sleepy times of day and helps students stay alert while reading or working on projects.

When helping your child with memorizing facts or figures, be they mathematical or not, try putting the information to rhythm or rhyme. These catchy, musical elements will provide a hook to help her recall those important details in stressful situations. These songs, chants, poems, and raps will improve the memory of content facts and details.

Dr. Arvind Gupta
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Want to rewire your brain? Study Music

2009-03-12T02:35:00.000-07:00

All Those Hours at the Piano Paid Off: A Musician's Brain Recognizes Sound That Carries Emotion

All those hours practicing the piano pay off big time by biologically enhancing a person's ability to quickly recognize and mentally process sounds that carry emotion, according to a new study.

The study, from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., offers a new line of evidence that the brain we end up with is not necessarily the same brain we started out with.

"We are measuring what the nervous system has become, based on an individual's experience with sound," Nina Kraus, director of the university's groundbreaking Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, said in a telephone interview.

Kraus and a team of researchers attached electrodes to the heads of 30 people, half of whom were serious musicians and half of whom had no significant musical training. The electrodes measure electricity, "which is, of course, the currency of the nervous system," Kraus said. The study revealed two major differences between the musicians and the nonmusicians.

Musicians heard an emotion-packed, complex sound with an enhanced sensitivity, and they also were less distracted by simple sounds, according to the study, published in the current issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience.

"What we found in this study is both an enhancement and an economy of resources varies as a function of the extent of musical experience," Kraus said. "The more years the person has been playing an instrument, and the earlier the person began musical training, the larger the effect."

Although many other studies have tried to show the beneficial effects of musical training, the researchers said their findings "provide the first biological evidence for behavioral observations indicating that musical training enhances the perception of vocally expressed emotion." The findings have implications far beyond the world of music.

"The same neural transcription process that is enhanced in musicians is found to be deficient in some children with language disorders such as dyslexia and autism," Kraus noted.

The research suggests that something as basic as musical training may be a useful therapeutic device, along with other more traditional techniques.

Emotional ID

"Quickly and accurately identifying emotion in sound is a skill that translates across all arenas, whether in the predator-infested jungle or in the classroom, boardroom or bedroom," said Dana Strait, a doctoral candidate in the music department and lead author of the study.

The researchers relied on an emotion-packed sound that has been used for many years by scientists around the world who have studied auditory processes -- the sound of an infant crying. That sound carries an enormous emotional load, but it is also a surprisingly complex sound.

Sound waves measured during the experiment show periods of relatively mild emotional content in the sounds from the baby -- almost a straight line on a chart -- punctuated with brief bursts of complex sounds that vary in intensity, frequency and strength.

The participants, wearing earphones, sat in front of a monitor showing nature films with subtitles. Every now and then, they heard the sound of a baby crying through the earphones. The electrodes measured the stimulus -- the baby crying -- and the response of each participant.

As expected, the musicians had an enhanced ability to pick up on the emotional cues of the sound. But the researchers were a little surprised to learn that the musicians were more attuned to the complex sounds -- those carrying the most emotion -- than to the less significant "periodic" sounds of crying. That allowed them to devote more resources to the important sounds and virtually ignore the sounds that carried little emotion.

Who We Are, What We Have Done

That reflects an increased economy of resources -- don't waste energy listening to something that says nothing.

"Enhancements, reflected by larger time -- and frequency -- domain response magnitudes, were most evident in musicians' responses to the most complex portions of the sound, with economy (smaller amplitudes) seen in their responses to the periodic portion," the researchers report.

The findings might seem open to the chicken-and-egg debate. Did the musicians perform better because they are naturally more sensitive to sounds, and thus more likely to study music? Or did their nervous systems change because they were exposed to music for more than a decade?

The researchers feel confident the correct answer is the latter.

"With musician studies you always wonder if the person was just born with a more accurate sensor," Kraus said. "And there's probably an element of that. We're all a combination of nature and nurture."

But the fact that all the musicians performed so much better than the nonmusicians clearly shows that the study of music -- not an innate musical aptitude -- literally changed the way the musicians' brains processed sounds, the researchers concluded.

"Our results provide evidence for a subcortical role in the processing of emotional cues by showing that auditory brainstem responses to emotionally salient vocal sounds are dynamic, shaped by life-long, multisensory experience with auditory signals," the researchers note. "These responses are not hardwired but malleable with extensive auditory training."

In other words, we aren't just who we are. We're also what we have done.

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Music's Role in Education

2009-02-15T13:15:00.001-08:00

BY NICK JACOBS
For The Tribune-Democrat

February 14, 2009 11:15 pm

— When civilizations are evaluated, there are numerous indicators that are used to demonstrate their relevance, their contributions to the world, and their donations to the future.
I had a college professor who predicted that our culture would begin to decline as a military, economic and artistic world power. He pointed toward what he described as primary indicators of this decay, and he saw the decline of music in our schools as one of those indicators.
Overall, this professor was more than concerned about the role of public education in the future of our country, and he once described our form of public education as an experiment that would eventually prove to be ineffective. He saw the effort as a misguided attempt to squeeze all different shapes, sizes and types of personalities, intellects and skills into a single classroom, which he called a melting pot of mediocrity.
That professor also used to teach us about the writings of Marshall McLuhan, from the University of Toronto, who indicated that television would change the manner in which we lived our lives.
His book, “The Medium Is the Message,” made us all begin to look at the influence of television on society.
McLuhan described the fact that, in visual space, we used to think of things as continuous and connected. In either the auditory senses or the sense of touch, there are only resonances. There is no real continuity in our other senses.
The fact that we have become the visual man, through television, and that the visual has produced a collage that is neither continuous nor connected has resulted in the reality that even our visual perceptions have lost their continuity.
It is well-known that music nurtures the right and left sides of the brain, and that those who study music have intellectual opportunities that literally may not exist for those who don’t.
The challenge is not just one of music as entertainment, but music as part of our intellectual training. So the question is, as in the lyrics of a James Ingram’s song, “How do we keep the music playing?”
What does this all mean?
In 1972, my professor indicated that we were leaning toward a different type of society that would learn, participate and act in a different way.
One of his greatest fears was that, due to this lack of continuous connection, those who would take charge of our educational systems would not recognize the importance of music as part of education and that music would begin to be downgraded, minimized and even dropped from public education.
Thus reading, writing, arithmetic and the arts would become reading, writing and test scores.
If we take a look at the dramatic decline in participation in music education during the past 30 years, my professor was not far from wrong.
The answer to the question of how this has impacted us as a society may not be totally clear for a few decades, but as we look across the overall educational landscape and see these chasms of depravation from exposure to the arts that already exist, it seems relatively obvious that we have and will pay the price for ignoring those subjective, intellectually stimulating programs that spawn creativity and lead to new and better ways to form our futures.
Remember, from science fiction comes science, from dreams come creations, and from fertile minds come our professional careers.
I read that more physicians had studied music as a discipline than any other single concentration in high school and undergraduate work.
Will tomorrow’s physicians be nurtured by music?
And if not, at what cost to society?

Music is the Student's Cureall

2009-01-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

Music can be thought of as art, an enjoyable way to pass the time, or even a form of therapy-but a study aid and brain-booster? Researchers have accumulated substantial evidence that music influences the brain in a way that can improve cognitive function, learning, and memory.

A prime example of brain-influencing music is the Mozart effect, which refers to the alleged improvement of spatial reasoning skills in children exposed to Mozart's music. Students who have not been subjected to a barrage of musical overstimulation by keen parents need not worry; there are still a number of ways that music can benefit the mind later in life.

No one knows this better than Dr. Joaquín Madrenas, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in immunobiology and full professor of microbiology and immunology and medicine at the University of Western Ontario. He uses music to teach his advanced students about infectious diseases and, in doing so, creates the ideal active learning experience.

According to Madrenas, music can engage students and aid in memorization by allowing the brain to make meaningful associations which are not easily forgotten.

"If you can make that connection between a particular piece of music to the actual concept of the learning experience, you seem to sediment that content better and you can retrieve it much better," he says.

In addition to the use of music as a central learning device, background music can also have positive ramifications.

"Music facilitates a focussed learning state," explains Madrenas. Music enhances the ability to concentrate on the task at hand, rather than detracting attention from the problem as might intuitively be assumed.

It is important to note that the benefits of music on learning and attention do not apply to all individuals, but can be observed in most. The reason for this lies in the two different categories of learners. Left brain learners are more analytical and logical and tend to learn most easily by words, while right brain learners are emotional and learn best with visual aids. Most people are a weighted mix of both learning styles and can generally benefit from music, although there are some extreme "left-brain learners that will benefit from 100 per cent quiet environment in the dark corner of the library," according to Madrenas.

To reap all of the learning benefits that music has to offer, one does not need to restrict themselves to a particular type of music.

"In principle, every type of music built into a learning experience can facilitate that learning experience," says Madrenas.

However, the positive effects of Baroque music, such as Bach, have been the most well-documented by the scientific community. Baroque music, which commonly has a tempo of 60 beats per minute, has been found to increase the production of alpha waves in the brain. These alpha waves encourage feelings of calmness and relaxation, which constitute the optimal learning state.

A relaxed state of mind created by music also fosters creativity and problem solving, and leads to accumulation of new knowledge.

"If music can help you relax, music can help some of these areas in the brain involved in creativity to work better and be more active," says Madrenas.

Finally, we have a cure-all for the most significant student syndromes: napping through dull lectures, Grandma's memory, and oh-so-frustrating writer's block. © Copyright 2009 The McGill Tribune

Daniel Levitin writes about music and nature

2009-01-15T17:14:00.000-08:00

The Soundtrack of Civilization: A Neuroscientist Looks at the Impact of Music on Human Nature
Levitin studies the role of music in the evolution of human culture and civilization
By Leslie Fink
Posted January 14, 2009
Content created by National Science Foundation

Daniel Levitin dropped out of college in 1975 to join a rock band. He did it, he says, because it comforted the loneliness he felt being away from his home and friends that first year. He eventually returned to school and ended up with a Ph.D. in psychology, but not before he worked with some of the world’s most-notable rock artists as a session musician, commercial recording engineer, live sound engineer, and record producer—oh, and racking up 17 gold or platinum records along the way.

Now a researcher and professor of neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal, Levitin combines his passion for music and the mind by peering into people’s brains to understand how we perceive and process the information in music, and theorizing about the role it played in the evolution of human culture and civilization.

“Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans, at the way that music and people co-evolved,” he writes in his most-recent book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Dutton).

Levitin bases his argument on the fact that both our bodies and brains adapted from proto-humans over time. While pressures in the environment likely forced physical changes, he says music and art had a heavy hand in cognitive adaptations that allowed social groups to form and civilized behavior to evolve.

Only recently in human history has music become a profession. For the better part of history, music throughout the world has been practiced communally, with all members participating. As such, music is a core element of our species identity, Levitin writes,“ an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.”

The comfort the author sought in music as a young man is but one of the psychological traits that song evokes, according to Levitin. Along with the others—friendship, joy, knowledge, religion, and love—these song types equipped the musician with survival advantages and thereby shaped human nature over the past half-a-million years or so.

Each of the six song types played distinct roles in human evolution, perhaps because our species is the least instinctive of all. With fewer behaviors hardwired into our DNA, we rely more on culture and experience for an adaptive edge.

Of course, perceiving songs and the content they transmit first requires developing the physical equipment necessary to send and hear them. These senses make use of complex systems of muscle and bone, as well as finely tuned neural circuits in the human brain. Levitin elaborated on those aspects of the musical brain in his first book, This Is Your Brain on Music, and in “Six Songs” draws solid lines between the physical acts of making and listening to music and its social and cultural consequences.

Hearing is the logical best sense to bear the responsibility because sound transmits in the dark, around corners, and through visual obstacles, and can be located in space.

“Through a process of co-evolution of brains and music, through the structures throughout our cortex and neocortex, from our brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, from the limbic system to the cerebellum, music uniquely insinuates itself into our heads,” Levitin writes.

Friendship songs—Levitin names a number of modern rock and country tunes—encourage cooperation and synchronization to accomplish tasks, such as work, defense or going to war, and hunting. They also ease tensions that could threaten group cohesion.

Songs of joy are meant to comfort and soothe. They accompany dance and help people get through the work day. Levitin calls the lullaby the classic comfort song, but he says blues tunes, which allow the downtrodden to commiserate with one another, may have become the ultimate comfort song in Western society.

“Sad people are so often made to feel better by sad music,” he says.

The author pays special attention to music and the development of such universal social aspects as religion, ritual and belief. Song is inextricably embedded in religious activities across all cultures, he notes, and probably enabled the uniquely human ability to reflect upon and ponder the great existential questions.

With newly evolving brain structures came self-consciousness, he says, “which brought with it spiritual yearnings and the ability to consider that there might be things more important than one’s own life.”

And what of love? Most love songs speak of joy, devotion, longing, insanity, and despair, for example, regarding romantic love. But it is big love—“the sweeping, selfless commitment to another person, group, or idea”— the author views as the most important cornerstone of a civilized society.

Mostly, love allows us to bond for child-rearing and the passing on of genes. “Whether we see love as a cultural, psychological, spiritual, or neurochemical invention,” Levitin writes, “it functioned evolutionarily as a way to ensure the product of sexual reproduction was well cared for.”

And love songs evoke and sustain strong feelings of comfort, trust and bonding that sustain the emotional attachment.

The music of our rational brain—knowledge songs—may have been the first type to evolve and include rhymes about counting or alphabets, ballads about historical events and oral histories, for example. Levitin says studies show that facts in combination with melody and written as lyrics are easier to recall and more faithfully passed on than spoken words are.

Rhythm provides a consistent hierarchy of temporal units—syllables, words, lines, phrases, verses and stanzas—that uniquely enables recall, he says. That structure creates positions where words must go, and “don’t permit us to omit part of a rhythmic unit, thus conspiring to preserve the integrity of lines and verses.”

Finally, the author suggests that knowledge songs provided the springboard to science: “You can’t have science without the musical brain,” he says. Instead of occupying opposite ends of the cultural and intellectual spectrum, art (and music) and science are born from the same kinds of thinking.

“Knowledge songs are perhaps the crowning triumph of art, science, culture, and mind, encoding important life lessons in an artistic form that is ideally adapted to the structure and function of the human brain,” Levitin writes. “We need to know. And we need to sing about it.”

Levitin’s work on how the brain processes temporal structures in music is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Does Exercise Improve Brain Power?

2008-12-30T00:57:00.000-08:00

Exercise Improves Kids' Academics

By Dan Peterson, LiveScience's Sports Columnist

The end of 2008 brings some discouraging news about our kids' brains and brawn. Recent results from an international math and science test show United States students are performing near the middle of the pack compared to other countries, while their levels of obesity continue to climb.

Historically, these two trends were studied independently with plans of action developed for each. However, several researchers and a new book have been making the case for linking these two problems by showing the effects of aerobic exercise not only on a student's fitness level but also on their test scores.

Earlier this month, the latest (2007) TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) scores were released. They compare fourth grade students from 36 countries and eighth grade students from 48 countries. They were tested on subjects that were common to all of the countries, including algebra, geometry, chemistry and physics. Overall, 425,000 students participated in the test, which is administered every four years.

In math, American fourth graders came in at 11th place of the 36 countries while eighth graders scored ninth out of 48. Hong Kong and Taiwan ranked first for fourth grade and eighth grade, respectively. In science, Singapore topped the list for both fourth grade and eighth grade, with U.S. science students taking eighth place and 11th place.

While the American math scores have improved slightly, the science scores have dropped. In 2003, U.S. fourth graders were in sixth place in the world and eighth graders were in ninth place. Only 6 percent of U.S. eighth-grade students reached the TIMSS "advanced" level in math, compared to 45 percent of students in Chinese Taipei, 40 percent in Korea, 40 percent in Singapore, 31 percent in Hong Kong, 26 percent in Japan and 10 percent in Hungary.

Regarding student fitness, the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the percentage of overweight or obese 6- to 11-year-olds has tripled since 1980, with more than 125 million children at unhealthy levels.

Leaping backward

Ironically, one of the solutions proposed for raising test scores, the federal No Child Left Behind program, encourages schools to focus more of the school day on the core academic subjects while reducing class time in peripheral subjects, like art, music, and physical education. In fact, only 6 percent of American high schools offer a daily gym class. Yet a 2002 Virginia Tech study showed no relationship between reduced class time in those subjects and higher overall standardized tests.

In his latest book, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" (2008, Little, Brown), John Ratey, a Harvard clinical associate professor of psychiatry, argues for more physical fitness for students as a cure for not only their obesity but also their academic performance.

"I cannot underestimate how important regular exercise is in improving the function and performance of the brain." Ratey writes. "Exercise stimulates our gray matter to produce Miracle-Gro for the brain." That "Miracle-Gro" is a brain chemical called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or BDNF. When we exercise, our working muscles send chemicals into our bloodstream, including a protein known as IGF-1.

Once in the brain, IGF-1 orders the production of more BDNF. The additional BDNF helps new neurons and their connections grow. In addition, levels of other neurotransmitters are increased after a strenuous exercise session.

"Dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine — all of these are elevated after exercise," says Ratey. "So having a workout will help focus, calming down, and impulsivity — it's like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin."

Evidence mounts

Research showing a link between fitness and academics is growing.

The California Department of Education (CDE) looked for a correlation between fitness scores and test scores. They found that kids who were deemed fit (by a standard test of aerobic capacity, BMI, abdominal strength, trunk strength, upper body strength and overall flexibility) scored twice as well on academic tests as those that were unfit. In the second year of the study, socio-economic status was taken into account, to possibly eliminate that variable as an explanation. As expected, those in the upper-income brackets scored better overall on the academic tests, but within the lower-income set of students, the same results were observed — kids who were more fit performed better academically.

Charles Hillman, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois, was able to duplicate these findings with 259 third and fifth-grade Illinois students. His team also noticed that two of the tests, BMI and aerobic capacity, were significantly more influential to higher academic scores than the other four fitness factors. Digging deeper, he isolated two groups of 20 students, one fit and the other unfit. They were given cognitive tests of attention, working memory and processing speed while their brain's electrical activity was being measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG) test.

The fit kids' brains showed more activity in the prefrontal cortex, known for its executive function and control over other brain processes.

So, just send the kids on a fast jog and they will ace all of their tests? Not quite.

“The exercise itself doesn't make you smarter, but it puts the brain of the learners in the optimal position for them to learn,” Ratey said. “There's no way to say for sure that improves learning capacity for kids, but it certainly seems to correlate to that."

Do endless hours on the computer harm our children?

2008-12-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

A Generation With More Than Hand-Eye Coordination
AS the father of an 11-year-old son, I often wonder what’s wrong with kids today. With my child as an exception, of course, they do not seem very bright. They appear to be shamelessly narcissistic, apathetic and lacking in social skills.
Skip to next paragraph

And even the best are hopelessly addicted to video games. How can an otherwise healthy boy like mine spend a sunny day playing World of Warcraft for five consecutive hours instead of playing soccer or baseball outdoors?

In “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World” (McGraw-Hill), Don Tapscott tries to shatter the negative stereotypes of the so-called Net Geners, who currently range in age from 11 to 31. His book gives parents from the baby boom generation — like me — reason for optimism.

“As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” he writes. “They care strongly about justice and the problems faced by their society and are typically engaged in some kind of civic activity at school, at work or in their communities.”

Mr. Tapscott, an adjunct professor of management at the University of Toronto, is the author or co-author of 11 books, including, from 1997, “Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.” Its sequel, his new book, is based on interviews with nearly 10,000 people conducted as part of a $4 million project financed by large corporations under the auspices of his research and consulting firm, nGenera Innovation Network.

Mr. Tapscott says the Net Generation, also known as the millennials, is the biggest in history. He notes that more than 81 million people in the United States were born from 1977 to 1997, and that they now make up 27 percent of the population. By comparison, the baby boomers, born 1946 to 1964, were 77 million strong and are now 23 percent of the population.

But what really makes Net Geners different, Mr. Tapscott says, is their lifelong experience in using the Internet. Their parents were a television generation that watched the tube an average of 22.4 hours a week. Net Geners watch TV only 17.4 hours a week on average, but they spend 8 to 33 hours on the Internet. Whereas TV is basically a one-way broadcast medium that requires only passive participation, the Internet is a collaborative medium that invites simultaneous participation from multiple users all over the world.

Mr. Tapscott devotes an entire chapter to examining how Net Geners are already using their collective power to transform society — as evidenced by their impact on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Although the book went to press shortly after the Democratic primary season, he makes the longer-term point clearly enough. He documents how Mr. Obama capitalized on interactive social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that inspired the participation of millions of small donors, while Hillary Rodham Clinton relied on relatively old broadcast-style media like television and e-mail to attract much lower numbers of mostly large donors.

Mr. Tapscott identifies eight norms of many members of the Net Generation: they prize freedom; they want to customize things; they enjoy collaboration; they scrutinize everything; they insist on integrity in institutions and corporations; they want to have fun even at school or work; they believe that speed in technology and all else is normal; and they regard constant innovation as a fact of life.

He cites recent brain-imaging and childhood-development studies to buttress his contention that Internet use by Net Geners has fundamentally changed — and improved — the way their brains are wired. Noting that raw I.Q. scores have been climbing by three points a decade since World War II across racial, income and regional boundaries, Mr. Tapscott asserts that Net Geners are also developing valuable skills that do not show up on standard I.Q. tests.

“Not only do video game players notice more, they have highly developed spatial skills that are useful for architects, engineers and surgeons,” he says.

Mr. Tapscott is not uncritical of Net Geners. He reports, for example, that a whopping 77 percent of his survey sample acknowledged having downloaded music without paying for it. “Most don’t view it as stealing, or if they do, they justify it in different ways,” he writes. “They see the music industry as a big business that deserves what it gets, or they think the idea of owning music is over. Some even think they’re doing small bands a favor.”

Mr. Tapscott decries the widening educational gap between the “thriving” and “failing” segments of the Net generation. Although the percentage of young people enrolling in college rose sharply from 1970 to 2003, he says, huge numbers of American teenagers drop out before finishing high school, and the average 15-year-old ranks in the bottom third in math and the midpoint in science relative to peers in other developed countries.

Mr. Tapscott’s most severe criticism of Net Geners is that they are “undermining their future privacy” by giving away vast amounts of personal information along with potentially embarrassing photographs and videos over the Internet. “They tell us they don’t care, that it’s all about sharing,” he writes. “But here I must speak with the voice of experience. Someday that party picture is going to bite them when they seek a senior corporate job or public office.”

THE book has a few flaws. One of them is its tendency to repeat points almost verbatim, like the assertion that Net Geners are “smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” which appears on Page 6 and again, in nearly identical form, on Page 10. Even more annoying is the book’s penchant for cheerleading with unqualified assertions like, “The kids have got it right.”

Even so, “Grown Up Digital” is a must read for baby boomers and virtually anyone else born before 1977. As Mr. Tapscott observes, “The bottom line is this: if you understand the Net Generation, you will understand the future.” And as my son often reminds me, the future is now.

Article by Harry Hurt III

Richard Gill is listened to by the Rudd Government

2008-12-17T14:28:00.000-08:00

Garrett puts music's power and passion on the agenda

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Corrie Perkin | December 18, 2008
Article from: The Australian

MUSIC programs for children in public schools and music training for primary teachers will be part of the 2009 national curriculum debate following the Rudd Government's reconnection with its pre-election arts and education policy.

This follows a series of meetings in recent weeks between federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and Arts Minister Peter Garrett. Gillard has invited her cabinet colleague to address the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs in Adelaide in March.

In Melbourne yesterday one of Gillard's education advisers, Tom Bentley, met conductor Richard Gill, music director of Victorian Opera, to discuss music's role in the proposed national curriculum.

Gill, a long-time advocate of mandatory music education in schools, has had several talks with Garrett since the 2020 summit in April, when arts and music education was acknowledged as a high priority.

This is in line with the Government's September 2007 pre-election policy that declared: "Labor will work with state and territory education authorities, teacher employers and universities to review the provision of music education through the entire education system."

The policy added: "This is the first step in creating a comprehensive music education program in our schools and educational institutions."

In February the Cultural Ministers Council, chaired by Garrett, also agreed "to initiate action to increase access to school music education, with an initial focus on primary schools which have no music programs".

Gill says he is optimistic, following yesterday's meeting with Bentley, that music training for students and teachers will be given attention in national curriculum planning.

"I get the feeling the Government is listening," Gill says. "There's a big job to be done in music education and it has to happen now. If we don't do something quickly we will slip far, far behind the rest of the world and will become a 10th-world backwater."

Gill maintained contact with Garrett's office through the recent debate over the withdrawal of $2.5million in federal funds to the Australian National Academy of Music, a tertiary institution based in Melbourne.

Under a new structure, ANAM will become part of the University of Melbourne's school of music and train about 55 elite classical musicians each year, a concept Gill supports. But he says that music knowledge and participation should be available to all children, not just those whocan afford private tuition or who attended private schools with strong music programs.

"If we have universal music training, places like ANAM will have a much bigger crop from which to pick," he says.

Debate in recent months about the proposed national curriculum has drawn attention to standards of teaching in core skills of literacy and numeracy, not music.

But politicians, and arts and education bureaucrats, were caught off guard by the strong community interest in the ANAM debate.

It reminded them that music, whether experienced through a choir, a concert, a CD or an iPod, is treasured by Australians.

In addition, Gill says, music can enhance a child's capacity for learning.

"Because music is quintessentially an aural art, it requires great focus, listening and concentration, the results of which are transferred to other areas of learning," he says.

"It is one of the few activities that human beings do (that) involves the left and right brain. All children can participate in music on any level, whereas not all children can be in the school play, not all children can play in the school hockey team. But every child can sing, every child can play a percussion instrument."

The MCEETYA agenda has not been finalised but it's likely Garrett will try to convince the nation's education ministers about the critical role of music and the arts.

"I think there is overwhelming evidence that creative learning and experiences assist students develop a range of complementary skills - numeracy, literacy, co-operation and the like - as well as allowing greater opportunities for artistic expression," Garrett says.

"I am looking forward to discussing these matters with the MCEETYA when we meet in March."

Computer learning vs. Real People

2008-12-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

Dr. Gary Small at UCLA, in his newest book (iBrain, by Harper Collins, 2008), says daily exposure to digital technologies such as the Internet and smart phones alter how the brain works in an "as needed" way. If the brain spends more time on quick, responsive, technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, brain circuits involved in face-to-face contact can become weaker. Small says this may lead to social awkwardness, inability to interpret nonverbal messages, isolation and less interest in traditional classroom learning.

Mindless websurfing is a different activity to the brain than, for example, "successful search and find" missions, playing a game or typing a paper. The key ingredients? Time spent and feedback of a reward. Neuroplasticity pioneer Michael Merzenich discovered that unless the brain gets excited, upset, encouraged or discouraged by task feedback, almost NO plasticity (brain changes) occurs.

Music bypasses the language centres of the Brain

2008-12-16T14:01:00.001-08:00

www.capitalnews9.com

Music therapy
12/16/2008 09:50 AM
By: Marcie Fraser

According to reports, one out of every 150 children are born with autism. While treatments vary, one that has been proven very effective is music.

Music, the universal language, reaches everyone, even those who are not able to communicate.

Luke has autism. He can't talk back and forth with you; he can only repeat words he hears. But music is something he understands.

Music Therapist Beth McLaughlin said, "Children with autism in my experience are really drawn to music, the melody. Some children may be drawn to the melody or the form of music. It's a viable option to develop their cognitive skills, their language skills."

McLaughlin has been teaching music to individuals with developmental disabilities for decades. She's been recognized with a national award for her dedication, using music as therapy.

McLaughlin said, "It bypasses the language centers of the brain and they are easily engaged by music so it becomes a way to relate to the child and become a part of their world and enable them as learners."

Many people with autism like predictability and in songs, where lyrics are often repeated, they are naturally drawn to it.

McLaughlin said, "It creates a predictable and structured environment for them. They can very quickly learn to predict when the music is going to change or when it is going to end and they take a great delight in that."

Music helps develop fine motor skills. Luke is working on using more than just one finger on the keys. Language and reading skills are also learned.

McLaughlin said, "The actual process of reading, the left to right sequence of visual tracking."

They use guitars, drums, maracas and bells of all sizes and sounds.

McLaughlin said, "Sensory motor has a lot to do with not just holding on to things but also being able to tolerate new sounds and new textures in the environment."

Most of the children at Wildwood participate in group sessions in music once a week for 30 minutes, but for other children who take to music, they're offered more.

Luke's parents are musicians and he gravitates toward music. Additional sessions are more private and it gives him a chance to communicate with McLaughlin, in her world, the world of music.

McLaughlin said, "Those moments of connection are so important for me and for the child because it is bringing the child one step closer to being a part of the world and music is a really powerful way of facilitating that."

Copyright ©2007 TWEAN News Channel of Albany, L.L.C d.b.a. Capital News 9

MUSIC IS LIFE

2008-11-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Music is the mediator
between the spiritual
and the
sensual life.

Beethoven

There is geometry in the
humming of the strings,
there is music in the
spacing of the spheres.

Pythagoras

Listening to, and
participating in,
music creates new
neural pathways in
your brain that
stimulate creativity.
Studies have shown
that music actually
trains the brain for
higher forms of thinking.

Steve Gillman

Music exists only in the
moments of its performance,
for however skilful one may
be at reading notes and
however lively one's
imagination, it cannot be
denied that it is only in an
unreal sense that the music
exists when read. It exists
really only when it is
performed. This might seem to
be an imperfection in this art
as compared with the others,
whose works constantly endure
because they have their
existence in the sensual.
Yet that is not so. Rather it is
a proof that music is a higher,
more spiritual art.

Soren Kierkegaard

In a world of peace and
love, music would be
the universal language.

Henry D Thoreau

A musician may suddenly
reach a point at which
pleasure in the technique
of the art entirely falls
away, and in some moment
of inspiration, he becomes
the instrument through
which music is played.

Edwin D Starbuck

KINDERJAZZ a huge success at The Sydney Opera House

2008-11-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

We've just finished a fantastic 30 shows at The Sydney Opera House. Parents and children were saying :

"This is the BEST children's show I have ever seen"

"George is just sooooo funny"

"I can't stop singing the songs - they're great"

"Everything about KINDERJAZZ is first class"

"My grandson now has a photo of him with Simon Tedeschi"

"We absoultely LOVED every minute of it"

"It was way too short"

"When's the next one?.......we're coming!!"

"Debra was fabulous - what a voice!"

"Jason's tenor saxophone was the best!"

"PLEASE tell us when you're playing next"

Musicians use both sides of their brains and more frequently than Non-Musicians.

2008-10-06T17:11:00.000-07:00

Musicians use both brain hemispheres to create their masterpieces (Re-issue)
October 5th, 2008 - 3:52 pm ICT by ANI -

Washington, Oct 5 (ANI): Want to know why some people are not musically talented? Well, a new study has revealed that that trained musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people.
The Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ”out of the box”,” said Bradley Folley.
“We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity,” Folley added.
The researchers believe that musicians” ability to use both brain hemispheres might be tied to their use of both hands independently to play their instruments.
“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” Folley said.
“Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”
For the study, research team including Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course.
The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments.
The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test.
The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.
In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.
“When we measured subjects” prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes,” Folley said.
The researchers found that overall the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians.
The study appears in the journal Brain and Cognition. (ANI)

Music education is critical to the product development of this nation's most important resource - our children.

2008-09-25T15:55:00.001-07:00

Music education is essential to development

The return of band and orchestra to fifth graders in Marion City Schools is an important step in making the school system whole.

Music education is not an extra. Music education is essential.

Some will argue that the problem with schools is that they don't spend enough time on the basics and that music is something parents should provide.

Music, we say, provides so many benefits that are applicable to the more traditional academic subjects, that it is a basic.

Consider this:

Studies show that musical training physically develops the left side of the brain. That's the part of the brain that processes language.

Students that study the arts learn to think creatively. That makes them excellent problem-solvers.

Music study teaches the value of sustained effort. Excellence is only achieved through hard work.

Band and orchestra training focuses on doing rather than observing. It develops skills that are necessary in the workplace.

We could go on.

The best part of the addition of band and orchestra for fifth graders is that the school was able to achieve this without adding to the budget.

It took some creative, outside-the-box thinking to get it done. We will bet that some of the folks behind the plan had training in the arts.

We also can't ignore businesses like Colonial Music and One Stop Music that are providing instrument rentals. The U.S. Open Commission has stepped up to offer financial assistance to students that can't afford pay-to-play or rental fees.

It is truly a community effort that goes a long way towards making Marion a better place to live.

John Sykes, who was the force behind VH1's "Save The Music Foundation" said, "in every successful business ... there is one budget line that never gets cut. It's called 'Product Development' - and it's the key to any company's future growth. Music education is critical to the product development of this nation's most important resource - our children."

We could not agree more.

Newborn Babies have innate sense of Rhythm

2008-09-24T02:20:00.000-07:00

Babies have a sense of rhythm, which could be used to help them develop

By Daily Mail
Babies have a sense of rhythm from early on in life

It will be months before they talk, walk or even sit up. But at just a day old, babies have a strong sense of rhythm, say researchers.

Newborns are also sensitive to pitch and melody, they found.

Experts said that introducing a child to music at an early age could enhance these innate musical abilities and also help them learn to talk.

The fledgling musical talent was discovered by Hungarian researchers during a study of more than 100 boys and girls who were only one or two days old.

They played the babies music as they slept and measured their brain activity.

The researchers found that their brains computed changes in beat, tone and melody.

For instance, if a key beat was missed from a rhythmic pattern, the baby's brain registered the change.

A change in pitch, similar to that between male and female voices, also provoked a reaction.

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences study was part of a threeyear European project on how the brain processes music and other sounds, co-ordinated by Dr Susan Denham, of Plymouth University.

She said: 'What is perhaps most significant is that not only do babies' brains register changes in beat, pitch and simple melodic patterns but they do so more or less automatically, as they are fast asleep during these experiments.

'People come into the world with brains that are wired-up to detect patterns'.

Dr Denham added: 'A lot of music reflects the rhythms and contents of speech. If you are listening to music you will also probably be more sensitive to speech rhythm.

Music Grows Neurons in the Brain

2008-09-24T02:00:00.001-07:00

Music Shown to Facilitate the Development of Neurons in the Brain
by Barbara L. Minton (see all articles by this author)

(NaturalNews) Music, the universal language of mood, emotion and desire, connects with us through a wide variety of neural systems. Researchers have discovered evidence that music stimulates specific regions of the brain responsible for memory, language and motor control. They have located specific areas of mental activity linked to the emotional responses elicited by music. Now new research conclusions have identified how the affect of music could replicate the effects of hormone replacement therapy in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

The August 7 issue of Medical Hypotheses reports these conclusions resulting from experience that has shown music to be useful in therapy for neuropsychiatric disorders resulting from both functional and organic origins. However, the mechanisms of the action of music on the brain have remained largely unknown despite an increase in scientific studies on the topic.

The results of past studies have clarified that music influences and affects cranial nerves in humans from fetus to adult. To explain how it works at the cellular level, researchers proposed that the neurogenesis, regeneration and repair of the cerebral nerves are the result of adjustments through the secretion of steroid hormones ultimately leading to cerebral plasticity.

Music affects levels of such steroids as cortisone, testosterone and estrogen, and it is believed that music also affects the receptor genes related to these substances and related proteins. Unlike supplementing the brain through hormone replacement therapy which can have side effects, music is natural, and its existence is universal and mundane. If music can be used in medical care, the application of such a safe and inexpensive therapeutic option is limitless.

It has also been shown that music is able to improve the mood state of people with psychiatric disorders, ameliorate the cognitive deficits in those with dementia, and increase motor functioning in Parkinson patients, as documented in the September 18, 2007 edition of Behavioural Pharmacology. Researchers investigated the effect of music on brain neurotrophin production and behavior.

They exposed young adult mice to music with a slow rhythm for 21 consecutive days. At the end of the treatment period, the mice were tested for passive avoidance learning. The music-exposed mice showed increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus. Music exposure also significantly enhanced learning performance as measured by the passive avoidance test. They concluded that music exposure might be of help in several central nervous system pathologies.

Music influences the neuronal development in children

It was Luciano Pavarotti who said, “If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.” Music affects mood, concentration, creativity, and influences the ability to learn.

Neuronal connections in the brain of the infant and young child are formed through experiences and strengthened through repetitions until predictable pathways of cognitive processing are established. Once these pathways are formed, it is as though they are hardwired and cannot be changed without much effort. Music and rhythm is essential to the developing brain as it helps to create and strengthen more neural connections that allow for auditory processing. The act of processing music stimuli elaborates these neural connections in the brain, influencing processing quality of auditory stimuli over the lifetime.

The biology of music

“Undeniably, there is a biology of music,” according to Harvard University Medical School neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo. He sees it as beyond question that there is specialization within the brain for the processing of music. Music is a biological part of life as surely as it is an aesthetic part.

Studies as far back as 1990 found that the brain responds to harmony. Using a PET scanner to monitor changes in neural activity, neuroscientists at McGill University discovered that the part of the brain activated by music is dependent on whether or not the music is pleasant or dissonant.

The brain grows in response to musical training in the way a muscle responds to exercise. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston discovered that male musicians have larger brains than men who have not had extensive musical training. The cerebellums, that part of the brain containing 70 percent of the total brain’s neurons, were 5 percent larger in expert male musicians.

Researchers have found evidence of the power of music to affect neural activity no matter where they looked in the brain, from primitive regions found in animals to more recently evolved areas thought to be strictly human such as the frontal lobes. Harmony, melody and rhythm invoke distinct patterns of brain activity.

This new research is beginning to help those involved in cognitive rehabilitation. Music is now used with patients with stroke, schizophrenia, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury among others.

Sources:

Anisha Chirmule, "The Influence of Music on Neurons," Serendip

Marsha L. Miller Ph.D., "Investigating the Neurobiology of Music: Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Modulation in the Hippocampus of Young Adult Mice" the HD Lighthouse

Robert Lee Hotz, "Music Shows Potential to Heal Damaged Brains" (www.neilslade.com)

Music is the language of the Brain

2008-08-27T03:56:00.000-07:00

'Perfect Pitch' in Humans Far More Prevalent than Expected from PhysOrg.com

Researchers at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have developed a unique test for perfect pitch, and have found surprising results.

[...]

Music Thought To Enhance Intelligence, Mental Health And Immune System

2008-07-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060622172738.htm

ScienceDaily (2006-06-22) -- New research examines how humans process music and its positive effects on our health and humanity.

Autistic children show outstanding musical ability

2008-07-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/040526070452.htm

ScienceDaily (2004-05-27) -- Specialist individual music lessons could hugely benefit children with autism, according to researchers Dr Pamela Heaton and Dr Francesca Happe at the University of London.

Music training enhances language skills

2008-07-08T22:28:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (2007-09-27) -- Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system's ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new study. Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain's alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.

Spread the word! Get a kinderjazz badge and help us get kids around the world involved in quallity music.

2008-07-08T19:47:00.001-07:00

Visit kinderjazz

Come and experience KINDERJAZZ live at the Sydney Opera House!

2008-07-07T03:40:00.000-07:00

Multi-tasking is bad for our health.

2008-07-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years.

In his book Crazybusy he calls multitasking a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously."

In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, "Attention Deficit Trait," which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is "purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live," writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. "Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points," Hallowell argues, and this challenge "can be controlled only by creatively engineering one's environment and one's emotional and physical health." Limiting multitasking is essential.

Let's face it, we all multi-task these days. Children especially, are able to talk on the telephone, watch tv and listen to music on their computers at the same time. Think about what we are really doing. I believe that we only multi-task when something is boring to us to make the time pass more quickly ie. reading a magazine when waiting at the doctor's or using a mobile while driving (Admit it.....we've all done it!) What we should be doing is focusing on one thing at a time to do this one thing well. Almost everyone in history who has accomplished anything of worth has been able to focus on one thing at a time.

When a child learns an instrument, it could be the one time in their modern lives where they really learn to focus on one thing at a time. This is invaluable. Studies show that multi-tasking scrambles our memory so whatever we have "saved" time on has been a waste of time in the long run.

Did you know that musician's brains are different to everyone else's brains? They are heavier and have more connections. I wonder if this is related to the lack of multi-tasking from a young age?

widget

2008-06-17T23:45:00.001-07:00

Boy With an Incredible Brain

2008-05-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

This just shows us that there is no limit to the brain. We know so little of our universe. Just like maths, music has a numerical connection.....something to think about.

widget

2008-05-16T00:46:00.001-07:00

Overprotecting our children has dire consequences.

2008-05-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

‘Childhood is too precious to be left to children and children are too precious to be left alone’

An edited extract from Under Pressure by Carol Honore (due for release this Friday) appeared in the Sun Herald’s Sunday Life magazine on the weekend. These articles always provide plenty of food for thought, and in my family, a lively discussion took place around the topic of the micromanagement of children. A section of the article appears below:

”To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”

Today, many children are too busy racing to violin practice to hold infinity in the palm of their hand. And that wildflower sounds a little scary – what if it has thorns, or the pollen triggers an allergic reaction? When adults hijack childhood, children miss out on the things that give texture and meaning to a human life – the small adventures, the secret journeys, the setbacks and mishaps, the glorious anarchy, the moments of solitude and even of boredom. The message sinks in very young that what matters most is not finding your own way but putting the right trophy on the mantelpiece, ticking the box instead of thinking outside it. As a result, modern childhood seems strangely bland, packed with action achievement and consumption, yet somehow empty and ersatz.

Deep down, most of us know that hyper-managing children is absurd. The trouble is that it is very easy to get caught up in the frenzy.

It is very easy to find yourself immersed in the pampering, monitoring and hot-housing in an effort to provide the best for your children – after all, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? However, the emerging data around the increases in childhood depression, self-harm, eating disorders and stress-induced illness, should ring some alarm bells and sound as a warning for all of us. Ask yourself, when was the last time your child climbed a tree? Or stayed in their pyjamas all day playing a game created through imaginative play? These are the magic moments of childhood that are not easily forgotten – go on, let go for a moment and allow the magic to happen. And if you are really wanting to fight back against the overprotection of your children, you might be interested in considering some of the ideas presented by Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School. Follow the link to the video where Mr Tulley explores five dangerous things you should let your kids do: five dangerous things

This has been taken from the MLC newsletter dated May 9th,2008....written by Mrs Diana Drummond (Head of School K-5).

Record straight to MP3 on AUDACITY

2008-02-16T02:30:00.000-08:00

I've just discovered a great tool for students and teachers alike. It's called AUCADITY. Basically, it records your voice or an instrument live and then converts it to an MP3 or audio file for you to post onto your website or send via email or burn onto CD. Whether it's lecture notes or vocabulary or lyrics or whatever you need to learn, record yourself and play it back in your MP3 player or your computer. Simple! And it's FREE!

Go to www.audacity.sourceforge.net

KINDERJAZZ perform on Australia Day

2008-01-24T01:04:00.000-08:00

Don't forget to get to a live performance of the fabulous KINDERJAZZ with great Australian musicians such as Brendan Clarke, Ray Alldridge, Mark Barnsley, Al Davey, Jason Morphett, Aykho Akhrif, Jamie Castrisos, Debra Dicembre, Tom McElvogue, Vanessa Patterson and Glenn Henrich.......we will be at GOUGH WHITLAM PARK, Undercliffe (just around the corner from Tempe Station) from 2-3pm on Jan 26th, 2008.

Lets face it, every moment of a live performance is a zen moment. If your children have never experienced this, they are missing out big time!

We also have some amazing shows lined up later on in the year at the Sydney Opera House..........thirty performances in all from Oct 22nd to Nov 2nd, 2008. Ring the SOH on 9250 7777 to book now as most of the tickets are sold already.

This is going to be the most amazing year for KINDERJAZZ. I'm trying my best to get them to Sesame Street in New York. Keep checking back for more details.......

TV for young people akin to child abuse.

2007-11-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

I am thrilled to read about Noni Hazelhurst, children's presenter of Playschool and veteran Australian actor. Let me quote from the source......

"We are suffering a cultural drought. I believe our children's imaginations are dying....and it scares the hell out of me." She says that feeding children an imbalanced diet of information, images and concepts overwhelmed their developing brains and caused their imaginations to atrophy.

The ambassador for Children's Week went on to say "in my view [this] consistutes nothing less than child abuse." "Why is it that we seem to be concerned about regulating the food available through tuckshops or advertised on TV, but unwilling or unable to tackle the lack of quality sustenance for their minds and spirits?" Speaking at the Screen Producers Association of Australia annual conference, Hazlehurst blamed many of the well documented problems affecting children on the media's increasing focus on commercial rather than creative values.
"Instead of celebrating the best of everything, the mainstream media fixate on the worst - the most violent, the most dysfunctional, the stupidist. Depression, anziety, addictions and personality disorders are now affecting teenagers, and even younger children, whereas not so long ago these afflictions were more likely to manifest in people in their 30's. Kids are suffering midflife crises in their teen years because they're being forced to cope with too much, too soon. We are failing our children on a grand scale."

"A cursory glance over the slate of features currently in production in Australia reveals an almost exclusive list of horror, murder, drugs, cannibalism and disaster." She said there had been only a few studies of television's longterm effects. "But the ones that have been done overwhelmingly say that what young children are watching is at best not helpful and at worst damaging."

Did you know it takes less brain cells to watch television that it does to sleep? Children's brains need to be used to grow properly. They need safe and appropriate content. They also need to have free time for imaginative play. Music is the easiest way to develop the imagination. In the long run, it's the best way for children to express themselves. It is so hard for adults to say what they mean but when they sing or play an instrument, they are expressing themselves without any barriers. Imagine just how much more important it is for children to express themselves. To be free to express the truth from their hearts. It's just so powerful.

I urge parents to get their children invovled in music as early as possible.

KINDERJAZZ has a new header

2007-10-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

I recently discovered elance.com where you can get work done by techies around the world that charge very reasonable rates for an excellent job. What a great idea! Providers bid for your work and you are free to choose who you want. As it's all so transparent, they don't get paid unless they deliver exactly what you want. I had a new header done within a few hours. Amazing! You can check it out at www.kinderjazz.com This is a site where you can purchase great kids music and sign up to a free newsletter to be updated with all the latest news on music and the brain. Basically, you can find out why you need to get your children into music NOW!

New KINDERJAZZ CD has arrived!

2007-09-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've just picked up "The One For Me" our 6th album and I must admit this is our best yet! It features the amazing range of the TUBA played by Brendan Lukin and CONGAS by Aykho Akhrif. You just have to listen to the timbre of this pairing to experience the joy of acoustic sound. It's pure heaven!

It is such an enormous privilege introducing children to great music. As my mentor Leonard Bernstein used to say..."What we perceive with our senses is called the finite world...all things that exist in our reality. What we discover with our heart and soul makes us perceive the infinite world, beyond our intelligence and imagination. Only music can take us there."

Our jazz singer, Debra Dicembre has said "Working with KINDERJAZZ is one of the great joys of my life. the music, the kids, the band - so much fun....we don't have to dumb it down...rather, recognise their (the kid's) maginificence and brilliance....."

Martin Highland (percussion teacher at Sydney Grammar, Fort Street High School and professional Sydney drummer) has said " In an era when many children could be forgiven for thinking that music is solely the product of MP3 players, computers and a myriad of other digital sources, it is refreshing to hear the latest CD from KINDERJAZZ , a group dedicated to presenting live music to younger children. KINDERJAZZ offers children the opportunity to hear quality jazz and latin based arrangements in a format that is both accessible and fun .......a great way for children to discover where music really comes from."

We'll be driving down to Canberra shortly to feature our new CD "The One For Me" at the Floriade Festival. It's free so if you can, come down to Commonwealth Park, Canberra on Oct 2nd, 2007 from 11am - 2pm for a musical feast the whole family will enjoy. If you can't make it, you can purchase a CD here. There is a 100% money back guarantee.

Is Knowledge everything?

2007-03-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a great view of what it takes. I keep coming across it again and again and thought I should share it with you......

If
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K is 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

andK-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E is 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E is 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

YOU NEED PASSION

2007-02-24T16:22:00.000-08:00

To do anything well be it music or not, one needs passion. You may not realise it but passion has equal parts love and hate. Without this you will never continue your focus with your chosen instrument. Genius is nothing but focus. All the great composers, artists, scientists......in fact everyone who has changed the world and made it a better place used their mind to focus on their one passion. Orwell and Wilbur Wright, inspite of the lack of support even from their own father, continued working on their idea that humans could fly. While the whole world thought they knew they couldn't, they kept falling daily until they made it and now of course we all take it for granted that humans can fly higher, faster and longer than any bird.

When we practice, we need to fall daily and fail daily until we learn something properly. It's the most natural way. We can not do this and keep going unless there is passion. Passion gives us focus. Talent and skill is nothing but habit. Ask anyone who has won an Olympic Gold Medal, or an international piano competition. So, are you prepared to keep practicing to form that habit, to download your skill into your brain, to install the programme completely so that your practice is automatic?

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC by Daniel J Levitin

2007-02-12T00:26:00.000-08:00

There was a very interesting review by David Messer in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald about a book by Daniel Levitin on Music and your brain. It's obviously written by someone obsessed with music and electronic communication in particular. I urge you to check out his website at www.psych.mcgill.ca/levitin/

Musicians and music educators have known for sometime that our brains are pre-wired musically and the most important musical instrument is our brains. I've ordered this book and I'll let you know my thoughts directly.

WARNING: Do not get your kids to practice until you read this...

2007-01-19T23:38:00.000-08:00

From past experience, I know that if you cannot practice well between lessons it is almost better not to practice at all. Most children need an assistant in the form of an adoring adult in order to practice. A regular practice schedule is the best for small children. They grow to expect practice every day at the same time. Practice then takes on the quality of inevitability. It becomes part of the routine. I tell my students "Every day you brush your teeth, every day you practice." One little boy proudly confessed that he never brushes his teeth!

Children also need to repeat what they already know. Repetition is the only way to learn something thoroughly. We forget that children learn gradually. They cannot produce perfection as they learn. Current thinking among physiologists such as Wilson is that we begin to learn to make complicated moves rather laboriously - working out the details step by step, making corrections when we observe our own mistakes, and consciously and deliberately establishing patterns of movements that eventually become less tentative and finally become smooth and secure. Dr Suzuki was famous for his saying " Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill!" It is up to parents to continually find ways of making practice a joy. I found games with my own children worked and we counted repetitions until we got to 10,000. Needless to say this did not work as they got older and once they understood how a passage should be played and then played it well, couldn't see the necessity for repetitions. Not every day, but most days, we managed to keep up the repetitions. Just think of walking and how many times a baby has to try and try again before they get it right and keep walking long after they get it right.

A good teacher will have the responsibility of establishing goals for the student's lessons and these goals need to be specific and well understood by both the student and the parent. Goals that are specific , and reasonably hard but attainable, will produce much better performance than too easy goals or a general goal to do one's best. I remember when my eldest daughter Stephanie was learning Minuet 2 by Bach and she had difficulty at age 4 getting her little fingers to play the arpeggio section to begin with. Even though the piece is a page long, I got her to only play the first seven notes, 100 times. I then asked her to close her eyes and while holding her violin to put her fingers in the correct positions on the fingerboard. We played a game guessing if her finger positions were individually correct before she checked them by playing singular notes. This helped with her confidence. I have to say, I tried the same method on my youngest daughter Imogen and twenty minutes into the practice on a hot January morning she flung both the violin and bow at me. I managed to catch it just in time. It took me several days to recover by which time I had learned not to push! What works with one doesn't always work with another.

I think as a parent you need to know your children before you start an instrument with them. They are all different and they deserve your love first and foremost. Maria Montessori says " The adult's idea that freedom consists in minimizing duties and obligations must be rejected. The foundation of education must be based on the following facts: That the joy of the child is in accomplishing things great for his age; that the real satisfaction of the child is to give maximum effort to the task at hand; that happiness consists in well directed activity of body and mind in the way of excellence; and that true freedom has, as its objective, service to society and to mankind consistent with the progress and happiness of the individual. Emerson says " The secret of education Lies in respecting the student" and Shakespeare said " Love comforteth like sunshine after rain."

When my son Miles was three, I decided to start him on piano. I held his elbow and his fingers and taught him how to play 'twinkle twinkle little star'. I thought that if I teach him in the correct way by guiding his fingers to play each note "perfectly", since he had never done it incorrectly, he will never learn how to play "badly". From what I had read in all the teaching manuals, it seemed inevitable that he would fall into the pattern that I had established. By the way, psychologists cal this "external manipulation of the passive learner". How wrong I was......after several weeks of "perfect" practice I let him give a mini-concert to his grand-parents at their house. Left to his own devices, he tried every "bad" method of using his fingers on the keys possible. I have since discovered that what I had engaged him in was "passive" practice and when he performed he proved how passive his learning had really been. The truth is you cannot teach a passive learner. According to Holding, 1965, " Knowledge of the correct response is incomplete if there is no opportunity to define it against the alternatives. We cannot be said to understand "red" if we have never identified other colors." This is why I constantly tell parents to take their children to live music events. This is why I started KINDERJAZZ. Children learn with all their senses and music needs to be in 3D. Children miss out on basic cognitive development without this experience.

Simon Tedeschi plays with KINDERJAZZ

2007-01-09T18:01:00.000-08:00

Kinderjazz performed for the exclusive Lord Mayor's Picnic in the Botanical Gardens for New Year's Eve, 2006. We lost our pianist a week before the date and so our sax player Glenn Henrich suggested we should contact Simon Tedeschi. I emailed him, introduced myself and asked if he would consider playing with a Big Band and he said "Yes!"

On the day he flew back to Sydney at 2:30pm and our sound check was 3:30pm.....talk about close! He was simply amazing! He didn't even have the courtesy of playing on a real piano........we were provided with a 61 key keyboard much to our horror. Inspite of this, Simon was as gracious as ever and played to perfection. The kids in the audience danced and yelled for more. A mother came back stage to ask Simon for his autograph as she was a Spicks & Specks fan.

The band consisted of George Washingmachine, Debra Dicembre, Glenn Henrich, Dale Barlow, Vanessa Patterson, Mike Kenny, Tom McElvogue, Andrew Heading, Nicole Murray-Prior, Craig Noughton and ofcourse Simon Tedeschi! A stellar cast I'm sure you'll agree. The audience yelled for more as we sang a special Happy Birthday arranged to a Latin beat while the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore cut a gigantic emerald green cake to celebrate the Sydney Harbour Bridge turning 75 years old. Both Simon and Dale came off the stage saying "That was F U N !" What an amazing moment it was for all of us.

KINDERJAZZ at Taronga Zoo's 90th Birthday Party!

2006-10-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

On Saturday October 7th, 2006 KINDERJAZZ The Big Swing Band For Little Kids had the priviledge of performing at Sydney's one and only Zoo for their 90th Birthday. It was awesome. Animals of all kinds were swinging to the groove....even the crocodiles. Yamaha Australia were kind enough to lend us some instruments for the kids to play and I have to say that most kids out-performed their parents' attempts at getting notes. We were also shown on TV playing a swinging version of Happy Birthday just for the occasion. The Zoo was packed to the brim with queues a mile long. We played for a total of 5 hours! What a gig!

The Best Way for your child to learn an instrument

2006-08-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how children learn to walk without attending 'walking' school, without anyone analysing their gait, the position of their heel to their toes etc.? Every child learns to walk, provided ofcourse that there is no physical disability, inspite of the lack of tuition. It is because they see everyone else doing it. They just seem to try it until they get it right and they invariably get it right. No parent tells them "Sorry, you've fallen over 5 times already......no more walking for you!.......you're just going to have to crawl for the rest of your life...." No one makes them compete for prizes with their walking. No one compares their walking unfavourably to other children older or younger. Yet, this is what we do to our children when they are learning an instrument. I have found that the best way for your child to learn an instrument is to be surrounded by people playing that instrument.......surrounded by good recordings of that instrument by players who have reached the highest standard on that instrument. In other words, we as parents need to provide the right environment in order for their 'talent' to grow. Did you know that Mozart's sister Maria Anna, nicknamed 'Nannerl' was every bit as gifted as her brother, but she simply lacked the opportunities given to Mozart who was four years younger and probably more marketable. Mozart, in fact, had no less than 1500 hours of music tuition before the age of 5 yrs. (how's that for hot housing!)
We need to expect our children to play to the highest standard. We need to know that they will get there.....just like we expect them to speak their language or walk, never entertaining the idea in our heads that they might not have the talent, they might want to give up, they might not like practicing. Just as we don't walk slowly so they can learn by watching us......we do not play music at half speed so they can pick it up quickly. They play with their brains through their ears.....not through their fingers. They need to hear it as it is meant to be played. A child's auditory system is fully functional at 20 weeks in utero, however they have to wait over seven months before their sight functions. Hearing is how we learn everything because sound is physical and penetrates our brains in a physical way. There is no time for the intellect to get involved as with sight. Just think of how subjective the response to a painting is......yet sound is heard exactly the same by every person. It goes into our subconscious instantly and is recorded there forever. Plato said "To be the right kind of person, we need to listen to the right kind of music"......something to think about in our visually rich 21st century.
So, what is the best way for your child to learn an instrument? I'd have to say the natural way. The magical way. The way they learn to talk in their own language, the way they learn to walk. And I'd like to say one more thing........what makes them fluent? Just think about the walking analogy.......when we learn to run, do we ever stop walking? When we learn to dance does our ability to run or walk diminish? Are your children playing pieces they learnt as beginners, are they playing scales and arpeggios, or do they forget these when they get onto "harder" pieces. They need to be constantly playing what they already know and adding on the new pieces as if adding onto their vocabulary.