scholar benefits of aural training in music

#Scholar benefits of aural training in music skin#

'When I do my homework or I'm studying for something and I feel overwhelmed, I usually go to my violin, to start playing it,' Miranda says. Miranda is in her third year with Harmony Project. 'I feel like music really connects with education,' she says. She's one of the first students in the door at a recent Harmony Project re-enrollment event in the auditorium of a nearby elementary school. And it's hard to know if kids doing some other activity could have experienced similar benefits.īut 10th-grader Monica Miranda doesn't need proof that playing violin has helped her. It was small - roughly 50 kids, ranging in age from 6 to 9. That's also likely to make life easier at school, not just in music class but in math class, too - and everywhere else. (To hear an analogy of this, using an iconic Mister Rogers monologue - giving you some sense of what the brain of a child raised in poverty might hear - be sure to listen to the audio version of this story.) And many kids raised in poverty, Kraus says, simply have a harder time doing it individual sounds can seem 'blurry' to the brain. In addition to that 'neural noise,' as Kraus calls it, ability to process sound - like telling the difference between someone saying 'ba' and 'ga' - requires microsecond precision in the brain. So, in the absence of sound, what we saw is that there was just more random background activity, which you might think of as static.' These children often hear fewer words by age 5 than other kids do.Īnd that's a problem, Kraus says, because 'in the absence of stimulation, the nervous system.

In other research, Kraus had noticed something about the brains of kids who come from poverty, like many in the Harmony Project. They have three common denominators - pitch, timing and timbre - and the brain uses the same circuitry to make sense of them all. That's because the two aren't that different. Using some relatively new, expensive and complicated technology, Kraus can also break these brainwaves down into their component parts - to better understand how kids process not only music but speech, too. With scalp electrodes, Kraus and her team can both see and hear these brainwaves.

#Scholar benefits of aural training in music skin#

Whenever we take in new information - through our ears, eyes or skin - those neurons talk to each other by firing off electrical pulses. When a mutual acquaintance at the National Institutes of Health introduced her to Martin, Kraus jumped at the chance to explore Martin's hunch and to study the Harmony Project kids and their brains.īefore we get to what, exactly, Kraus' team did or how they did it, here's a quick primer on how the brain works: Still, Martin suspected there was something else, too - something about actually playing music - that was helping these kids.Įnter neurobiologist Nina Kraus, who runs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University.