Effect Of Music Essay Research Paper Everyone

Effect Of Music Essay, Research Paper

Everyone knows the story of the Piped Piper of Hamelin. He had the ability to hypnotize people with his flute by playing the most enchanting music. But he’s just myth, right. No one has the power to charm people with music. Well, you’d be surprised. Throughout history, music has always been recognized for its calming and almost hypnotic effects on the human mind, and for its ability to rouse and inspire the spirit. Only recently has science uncovered the truth about music. Researchers have long suspected that music affects the brain in the most profound ways, and now they finally have evidence to back up that theory. Such an interesting topic definitely deserves further exploration. Come with me on this journey as we delve into the deep recesses of the human mind on the wings of a softly played flute note.

After a hard day at work and a difficult commute home, many people just want to settle down on their soft sofas and turn on a CD. As the music fills the room, they instantly begin to relax. Stress melts away as they are taken in by the beauty of the music. Sound familiar. Probably, since all of us at one time or another have used music as a medium for relaxation. But scientifically speaking, how exactly does music help us relax. That in itself is a question worth exploring, and scientists are really not sure how music relieves stress. However, they do know that our bodies will naturally attempt to synchronize with external sounds and rhythms. Using this as a guide, experts in relaxation music suggest that we feed our auditory senses with music between the tempos of 60 to 90 beats per minute, as this is the ideal heart rate for relaxation. However, music that is enjoyable to you is as important as any of the guides. If you do not enjoy the music, even a slow, ideally perfected tempo will not be able to calm you.

Music’s calming effects can extend to children as well, as directors at Young Imaginations have seen for themselves. Young Imaginations is a private arts agency that provides music programs for 30 California schools. Executive director Marianne Locke speaks of their findings: “When we play traditional Japanese and Chinese music or other slow pieces and pair them with movements, such as yoga and T’ai Chi, the children become calmer and more able to focus their attention.” (Cassidy 48) Following up on this observation, the organization is setting up an independent study to determine if children are calmer and perform better on certain learning tasks when exposed to slower and calmer pieces of music. In a separate and totally unrelated study, Harvard researcher Jerome Kagan reported a very interesting finding. “If you present an interesting visual stimulus to a baby, it becomes aroused and begins to move its arms and legs,” Kagan noted. “[However,] if you play some music that interests them, they do the opposite – they quiet down. There is a very different psychological reaction to sound.” (Knox A6)

Music’s affect on children have only recently been documented and published. Although the aforementioned calming effects of music have not been explained by scientists, they now know that the brains of infants are capable of extraordinary feats. New research shows that brain development is largely unfinished at birth and that the stimuli a child receives during the crucial part of their childhood will greatly affect how the brain grows and the connections the nerve-cell networks make. Music, especially classical music, when played at early stages of a child’s development will help open gateways of opportunity for advanced learning. This means that exposing your child to classical music before the age of three may help him become a better math and science student later in life.

Tests all over the world have confirmed that music has a strong relationship to multiple intelligences. First graders who were taught folk melodies for 7 months scored significantly better on reading tests than those who were not exposed to music. At the University of California-Irvine, brain researcher Gordon Shaw showed that preschoolers who were given piano and singing lessons for 8 months performed much better at completing mazes and piecing together puzzles than the other children. In a separate study, preschoolers who listened to classical music tended to score higher on IQ tests. The list goes on and on, and everyday new evidence arises that reinforces this belief.

What causes this dramatic improvement in reading, reasoning, and spatial skills. Experts in cognitive development, commonly referred to as “brain scientists”, believe that when children listen to music, they must order the notes in their brain to forming melodies. They think that tests in spatial reasoning, such as putting together a puzzle, require the same reasoning skills. And since music is so mathematically oriented (8 notes in an octave, 2 beats in a half-note, etc.), experts speculate that by listening to music, children are exercising the same part of the brain that handles mathematics, logic, and higher level reasoning. Dr. Frances H. Rauscher, PhD, a research psychologist at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine, agrees. “By exercising these brain patterns through music early in life,” she says, “[I] think it’s going to have an effect on your abstract reasoning throughout life.” (Learning 24) Thus, by exposing your ch